Let's talk about the Too Much Tingle Pack (and why we're not translating it)

Due to some requests about them, I'd like to change pace a little and talk about two of the lesser known games in the Tingle spinoff series - the Too Much Tingle Pack and Tingle's Balloon Fight DS.

It's something that's been asked about quite a few times, in fact a couple of people have asked on this blog.

Are we also going to translate the Dekisugi Tingle Pack, better known in English as the Too Much Tingle Pack?

A brief history lesson here for those who haven't heard about this game.

Basically, back when Balloon Trip of Love was released, the Nintendo DSi was relatively new on the market. One of it's most touted features came in the form of the DSi Shop, an online store that you could download small games that were aptly titled "DSiWare". (If this sounds familiar, than you wouldn't be wrong - the DSi was Nintendo's first foray into digital gaming on its handheld systems, so it was essentially the precursor to the eShop.)
These games were usually very small and weren't usually as deep (or expensive) as retail games. Shortly before Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love was released, Nintendo and Vanpool released a small DSiWare on the Japanese DSi Shop called the Too Much Tingle Pack. This was meant to promote Balloon Trip of Love, and as such it wasn't a full game. If you're interested in learning more about the actual game, you can read this page.

Now, since this is such a small game, it would make perfect sense for us to translate and release it along with Balloon Trip of Love, right? I kind of agree; aside from one minigame that is very text heavy, the rest of the Pack is light on text. It also uses the same graphical engine as Balloon Trip of Love, so I would have no problems with the graphics.

So why not do it?

Well the answer lies in the way the ROM is coded itself. TWL games (games built for the DSi such as DSiWare and DSi Enhanced games) employ a special system within them that consists of "digest sector hashtables". That may sound like a mouthful of technical garble, but essentially they serve one purpose - to prevent any editing to the file system of the ROM. If even one byte is changed, the game will refuse to boot. Obviously this is a problem for a fan translation.
The only way to resolve this would be to patch these sector table checks out of the ROM - something that I have tried and failed several times to do. Until (and if) this problem is resolved, a fan translation for the Too Much Tingle Pack is impossible.

So there you have it :) . Sorry for such a negative post (I didn't mean for it to feel that way), but I figured you guys deserved to know why this won't be happening. I'll be discussing Tingle's Balloon Fight next time, which is a different situation :)


And of course I wouldn't leave without giving an update on the game we're actually translating. Honestly nothing notable has happened since last time. Progress has been somewhat steady, and I'd say we're still on track to at least meet that deadline that I gave a while back :)

Until next time!

*Oh yeah, I almost forgot. That title logo mockup was done by FShadow a while ago. Thanks to him for that!