New Project: The Savage Empire SNES Translation
Kudos to Sergorn Dragon for reminding me about this exciting Ultima fan project, which is being worked on (in part) by none other than the Codex’s own Dungy (and his lovely wife as well)!
The Super Famicom port of Savage Empire, released in Japan in 1995, is regarded by many as the best version of the first Worlds of Ultima game, in no small part because it made use of the same engine as the Ultima 7 port for the same platform.
The main drawback to this port of the game is that it is only available in Japanese; a planned English version was cancelled for some reason. Thus, slashgravatar has teamed up with Dungy (and Mrs. Dungy) to translate the game into English.
This will not be an easy undertaking, as it involves modifying Famicom ROMs. Still, it promises to be a worthwhile effort! Naturally, a project entry has been set up for it, though at present there’s not much more than a basic description there. A few screenshots have been added to the project’s website, however, so at some point I will be sure to add those.
Best version? You sure? http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/SNES-Port_of_Savage_Empire
I confess some confusion. They mention the SNES here, and the Famicom on their about page. The project title concerns SNES. What is this project’s target?
Super Famicom is pretty much the same thing as SNES, I believe.
Yeah Super Famicon is the Japanese name of the Super NES. 😛
As for SE SNES being the better version, that’s obviously up to debate – the SNES version is an action-adventure game playing just like Ultima VII SNES. It seems good for what it is though.
It’d say it’s definitly the better *looking* version though – unlike U7 which felt like a downgrade in that respect, I’ve always felt SE SNES looked very good, and definitly an improvement over the original version. Music too. And it does seem to be more faithful to SE than UVII was.
Hmmm… http://ultima.wikia.com/wiki/SNES-Port_of_Savage_Empire