-==============================================================================- UNINVITED SWEDISH TRANSLATION VERSION 1.0 -==============================================================================- 1. Introduction ------------ Sweden is a small country, population-wise. Unlike Germany, for instance, the market has generally been considered too small to justify translating video games to Swedish -- especially as expensive-to-manufacture ROM cartridges. Hence, most of our video games were in English in the 80's and 90's -- and today, for that matter. We'd usually get a Swedish manual and Swedish marketing copy on the back of the box, but all the in-game text would be in English. Many -- including myself -- are the 80's and 90's kids who attribute much of their English skills to playing text-heavy video games as kids. Occasionally, a game would be slated for release by Bergsala (the Swedish Nintendo distributor) that was text-heavy enough that a translation was considered indispensable. These games be counted on your ten fingers with a couple to spare. Maniac Mansion (NES), Sword of Hope (GB) and Shadowrun (SNES) were some of the chosen few, but most relevant for the purposes of this document: the first two of Kemco's NES adaptations of Icom Simulations' MacVenture games. Shadowgate and Deja Vu, with their cheesy, stilted translations, are treasured youth memories of many Swedes. However, we never got Uninvited, the third game in the NES series. Most likely, an important reason was that even the American version came out in 1991 -- rather late in the lifespan of the NES. PAL conversions and translations were usually very slow to happen in those days, so it's likely that a hypothetical Swedish version would not have come out until 1993, or possibly even '94 -- well into the age of SNES dominance, and thus probably too late to recoup the costs of such a relatively costly project. Uninvited was released in North America in June of 1991. Now, twenty-five years later, in June of 2016, with no financial or technical barriers to worry about, I've decided to right the wrongs and finally do what should have been done all these years ago... I present to you, for the first time in history: Uninvited in Swedish! 2. About the game -------------- Uninvited is a horror-themed point and click adventure game and the last game in Icom Simulations' MacVenture series to appear on the NES, not counting the cancelled Deja Vu 2 prototype. It takes place in a haunted mansion where you, as a nameless protagonist, find yourself looking for your lost sister (originally brother, until they changed that for the NES release) after crashing your car into a nearby tree. The Famicom version came out in Japan in 1989, the NES version in America in 1991. As was common then, some elements of the Japanese version were censored for the American release. For instance, the chalice in the chapel was originally a cross, there were a few pentagrams here and there, and there used to be a wine bottle on the floor in the dining room. Alcohol and religion are scary things. None of the changes affect the course of the game, and I have chosen, for the sake of authenticity, not to revert them, since certainly if there ever was a Swedish translation of this in 1992, it would have been even *less* permissive than the American version. As far as the quality of the game -- in my opinion, it seems kind of rushed, artificially padded, and is generally just not as good as Shadowgate. Still worthy of a playthrough, though. Perhaps its greatest strength, just like Shadowgate, is the unique, creepy atmosphere. Overall, it's a good but not great game. Certainly it would have been a minor schoolyard hit had it come out in Swedish in '91... 7/10. >>> SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS! <<< Uninvited differs somewhat from its predecessors in design. It is a very short game once you know what you're doing, and to compensate for this, it attempts to confuse you with massive amounts of useless and confusing items, locations and even spells. Yes, one spell is completely useless and does nothing of value -- at least to my knowledge, and I've seen the entirety of the script. Two more spells are not essential and the game can be completed without them. There are several rooms that have no useful purpose at all, and one locked door that will never, ever open. Out of 75 or so carriable inventory items, only about 17 (rough count) are necessary to complete the game, and there's usually scarce indication of what is good stuff and what is useless junk. Then again, all the items and mostly useless rooms are rather effective at establishing the haunted mansion as a real place, and not just a backdrop for your heroic adventures. Keep in mind when playing, though, that the usual adventure game modus operandi of looting everything that's not bolted to the ground will get you nowhere fast. >>> END OF SPOILERS <<< 3. About the translation --------------------- The translation, for the most part, attempts to be faithful to the original English text. Spells, riddles and rhymes have been rewritten to sound reasonable while keeping as much of the original intent as possible. Some of the more conspicious "bugs" have been fixed -- the original script arbitrarily switches between calling the chapel a "chapel" and a "church", and for some reason it refers to a snake as a cat at one point -- but some other weird idiosyncracies have been preserved. As a secondary goal, the translation attempts to somewhat capture the "cheesy" flavour of the Swedish Shadowgate and Deja Vu scripts. The intention is that the feel should be as if this was actually released in ~1992. There may even be one or two "easter egg" references to those games somewhere... 100% of the script, item and menu text in the game has been translated. The only untranslated text in the game is "THE END" at the end, and "LICENSED BY NINTENDO" etc. in the beginning -- this is intentional and in line with what would be expected of a Swedish translation from the 80's and 90's. There may still be obscure bugs. If you find any, please report them to me at einride@fastmail.se. The script dumping and insertion tools were written by myself in terrible and awful Python. I will be releasing them to romhacking.net for the benefit of the public as soon as I've cleaned them up and finished writing the accompanying technical documentation. The translation has been tested on real hardware as well as on FCEUX and runs with no issues. Please remember that although it's in Swedish, the game is based on the American ROM dump and is still NTSC. The IPS patch should be applied to a clean American Uninvited ROM dump with iNES header. (No-Intro name "Uninvited (USA).nes", CRC32: 8579FA86) 4. Seldomly asked questions ------------------------ Q: Why are inventory items in the definitive form ("BOKEN") instead of the more obvious indefinite ("BOK")? This was weird in Shadowgate and it's weird now! A: This has to do with the way the game inserts object names into generic messages like "ÖPPNAR [item]" --> "ÖPPNAR BOKEN". In English it would be "BOOK" in the inventory list, and the message would be "OPEN THE [item]" --> "OPEN THE BOOK". Assuming English, the game can always simply insert an object name after "THE" in this way and get a valid sentence. And here is the problem. Swedish lacks a definite article ("the") and instead forms definitive nouns by adding a suffix (-n or -t), the choice of which depends on knowing the gender of the word. The game has no concept of the grammatical gender of the nouns in the game, so there's going to be slightly broken-looking language however you choose to do it -- either you store everything in definite form (as we choose to do... Unless the definite form is more than 8 characters) and accept that it looks weird in the inventory list, or you store everything in the indefinite form and get a nice and tidy inventory list at the price of ungrammatical sentences every time you manipulate an object. Of course, if one knew 6502 assembly, one could patch the text printing routine to correct for this... But if the Shadowgate and Deja Vu translators didn't bother to do it, I'm not going to either. It's all part of the charm, or so I choose to see it. Q: Is there any cool, unused stuff in the script? A: As a matter of fact, there is! Most interestingly, the zombies in the labyrinth were supposed to talk more and reveal themselves as the undead versions of Lord Warlock, the antagonist from Shadowgate, and Ace Harding, the protagonist of Deja Vu. I have not found any way to trigger these lines so I assume they were taken out of the game for unknown reasons. Also, lines describing the censored wine bottle are left in the game (and have been translated, if you care to hack the item back...) Q: Why does "SLÅ" and "GÅ" appear as "SLÄ" and "GÄ" in Swedish NES Shadowgate? A: No idea. I've looked at the ROM while researching this translation, and there is no technical reason that I can discern for it. The tile for the letter "Ä" is in the game, and changing two bytes in the name tables fixes it. Q: Why is the readme for a Swedish translation in English? A: I'm more comfortable writing about technical stuff in English. Besides, the submission text to romhacking.net needs to be in English. This way I can just copy and paste. And anyway, most Swedes read English very well. Don't ya? 4. Version history --------------- 2016-04-04: * Development started 2016-04-26: BETA 1 * Beta 1 released to testers 2016-05-09: BETA 2 * Beta 2 released to testers 2016-06-01: 1.0 * Initial public release. 5. Acknowledgments --------------- Translation, graphics, documentation, dumping and reinsertion tools by: einride The initial information that enabled me to dump and translate this game came from user Disch on the romhacking.net forums. I am not the Swedish dude that posted in that thread and intended to translate the game -- I am another Swedish dude that independently had the same idea much later and stumbled over the thread while searching for information on the game's text encoding. Thanks! Beta testing/proofreading -- thanks: Thanius legris Johan