Arjak
Established Member
I am proud to announce my first ever attempt at a translation: J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues!
This FMV adventure game was the last entry in Riverhill Soft's J.B. Harold series of detective mystery video games, a series which started on Japanese home computers and would later see ports to consoles. J.B. has unfortunately had a very spotty release history in the west, with only a few games receiving western ports. The first game, Murder Club, would be released in the west for DOS and the TurboGrafx CD, and the Pioneer LaserActive would receive Blue Chicago Blues and an FMV remake of Manhattan Requiem. Besides some questionable ports to modern smartphones, that's the only exposure the series has received outside of Japan.
The Title Screen and all system menu options have been translated into English.
Blue Chicago Blues was originally released in 1994. While the live-action scenes were originally filmed in English, most versions of the game released in Japan would dub the scenes back into Japanese. The only versions to retain the English audio were the LaserActive and Windows ports. As of this time, the LaserActive has no working emulators and physical copies are extremely difficult (and pricy) to obtain. The Windows port requires effort to get running on a modern system.
A vicious murderer is on the loose in Chicago, and only YOU can catch them!
The purpose of this project is to make the game more accessible to a wider western audience by translating the game on a platform easier to emulate or get ahold of. Upon tracking down the elusive Windows version, I was happy to discover that all the English video clips were in an easy-to-read format, making it possible to convert them to work on the Sega Saturn version. In-game text is being translated from scratch.
Your partner for this case seems friendly enough, but can he be trusted?
As of this post, I am happy to announce that a demo patch is ready for release! This demo will translate the entirety of the prologue chapter, and will be available to download from this very website!
Can you solve the case? Stay tuned for the full version and find out!