Video Game Odds & Ends

Shanghai On Crak

This is the Sega Master System version of Shanghai. It has a feature where you can check out each individual tile. But it’s not without it’s translation issues.

What’s a “crak”? Well this tile is actually from the character set. Therefore you’d expect it to say “The 5th character”. At first I thought it was some kind of space issue coupled with bad translation. But that doesn’t exactly seem to be the case.

There’s enough room for “The white dragon” to fit in the box. But that’s not all.

Even “The chrysanthemum flower” fits. And hyphenating it isn’t a problem. So they could have easily fit “character” for the character tile set. Yet another example shows that it’s even more inconsistent.

This is from the bamboo tile set. Yet once again the tile name is truncated.

I’m thinking that they may have had to save space and culling some of the text was the solution. I’d like to see what the tiles descriptions say in Japanese. But this version of the game was only released in North America and Europe. The Famicom version is a bit different and doesn’t have the identify option. Plus the game is in English anyway despite not being released outside of Japan. I’m not sure about the PC Engine version. But looking at screens it doesn’t seem to have that option available either. However, as of this point I haven’t tried playing it myself. And with those options being in Japanese I can’t easily read them without a character cheat sheet. I really should try to rememorize the characters.

So how did they arrive at “crak”? I assume that the identify feature was added to help familiarize westerners with the mahjong tiles. It’s a really nice feature and I wish more versions of Shanghai had it. But “crak”? Really? Perhaps the people who wrote this feature weren’t very familiar with Japanese and mistranslated from a list. Maybe the game was prepared by Japanese developers from another version and they were not familiar enough with English. You’d think that “chara” would be a good abbreviation. It’s one character more than “crak” but makes more sense. If they really had a space issue they could knock off “The flower” from the flower tiles. But I didn’t write the script and this is all a bit crak’d up.

Bad jokes are bad and I should feel bad. o.o