Your ethnicity

[lord_cack]

I'm American.

 

[nodtveidt]

funny you mention this.  Years ago i bought a new Neutopia from TZD and it came with a french manual.

That's because they obtained a lot of stuff from NEC Canada, and manuals were translated to French. I got a few games from TZD back in the day with two manuals, one in English and one in French.

[AlexKidd]

Mad props Aaron. Had no idea we'd resolve that so quickly.

But yeah back to my root of the thread. I wanted to see if there were other Black/Afro-American Turbo gamers other than myself. All of them I know are either White, Asian and Hispanic.

Like I said, i'm Irish but my friend Corey is Black/Afro-American and he plays quite a bit of turbo. I played the turbo grafx for the first time at his house when we were kids(i only had an sms at the time). I don't think he ever got into the pc engine/import stuff but he still plays the regular turbo grafx with me.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Mostly German, with some Swedish.  My dad is 100% German, my mom is mostly German, with that dash of Swedish.  My wife is Italian & German.  Can't get away from these damn germs!

[Kaminari]

As for me, I'm French with Breton/Welsh origins (I grew up in Brittany, that big Celtic province in the West of France).

Ninja, I had a black friend a decade ago who was a paratrooper! When I met him during a video game convention, he was a hardcore NeoGeo fanboy, but it only took me a couple of Gate of Thunder and Spriggan sessions to convert him to the true faith

One thing I have always been curious about is the large fanbase of PCE fans in France. I mean the system was never even released out there, so what is it exactly that attracted them to importing a PC Engine? Rather odd, I'd say.

I think it was not only the PCE -- any (unofficially) imported system from Japan would find a (relatively) strong customer base. The PCE quickly got a cult status here because it was first advertised as the first 16-bit system, then as the best 8-bit system (go figure) that could nevertheless compete with the more powerful 16-bit machines from Sega and Nintendo (which of course got an official distribution, months later). Besides, the public was fond of coders who could do in software what everyone else was doing in hardware... that was the spirit of the time!

But the real "success" factor was that we actually had a distributor called Sodipeng (which was actually a Ubi Soft subsidiary). This was no official distribution but it was tolerated by NEC France. Every system and game we got came from Japan, just modified to be PAL compatible... The TurboGrafx was merely unknown to us back then! But somehow, it turned out to be a good thing since it allowed us to always keep in touch with the Japanese market until the very end.

[esteban]

But the real "success" factor was that we actually had a distributor called Sodipeng (which was actually a Ubi Soft subsidiary). This was no official distribution but it was tolerated by NEC France. Every system and game we got came from Japan, just modified to be PAL compatible... The TurboGrafx was merely unknown to us back then! But somehow, it turned out to be a good thing since it allowed us to always keep in touch with the Japanese market until the very end.

I bought a copy of L-Dis a few months ago from one of the chaps who used to be involved with Necstasy. I was happy to discover a french translation of the the game manual on a 1-page, double-sided photocopy.  It even used diagrams from the actual manual. Clearly it was homemade -- it looked like it was typed on a manual typewriter -- but that was its charm.

Did many imported games get this attention to detail? Do the ebay.fr auctions often include these translated sheets (I've never seen any, but then again, I don't often scour ebay.fr too often)?

[Ninja Spirit]

Man that reminded me during the Sega Saturn days when Electronics Botique here in the USA were selling Saturn imports, particularly anything from Konami, Capcom and SNK.

[Kaminari]

By law, games sold in France have to be translated, whatever their origin -- the manual at the very least. I think every PCE game imported here by Sodipeng ("Société de Distribution de la PC Engine", read: PC Engine Distribution Company) got its tiny recycled piece of sheet with some badly translated instructions on it, but most people never kept it for long... I know I used to throw them away ;P

In practice though, more than often the law is not applied -- especially true for early imports like Morrowind, which I bought here in English just when it was released (the only French tidbit on the box was a sticker with the ironic mention "soon available in fully translated French!"). And publishers would like us to believe that region-locking is a Good Thing for their business... ^^

[esteban]

By law, games sold in France have to be translated, whatever their origin -- the manual at the very least. I think every PCE game imported here by Sodipeng ("Société de Distribution de la PC Engine", read: PC Engine Distribution Company) got its tiny recycled piece of sheet with some badly translated instructions on it, but most people never kept it for long... I know I used to throw them away ;P

In practice though, more than often the law is not applied -- especially true for early imports like Morrowind, which I bought here in English just when it was released (the only French tidbit on the box was a sticker with the ironic mention "soon available in fully translated French!"). And publishers would like us to believe that region-locking is a Good Thing for their business... ^^

Ahhh, well even if the policy is not always followed, it's nice that there was at least a token effort to translate some of the PCE manuals.  Here in the States, the only resource was to ask the clerk who worked at the import store.  Usually, the clerks didn't have a clue because they had never played the games. But a few times I was lucky enough to talk to a clerk who actually played some of the PCE games I was interested in purchasing. This was done over the phone and rarely went beyond the most general discussions, however.

Thanks for the info on Sodipeng, by the way! Are you aware of any sites that present a nice, detailed history of the PCE in France (and/or Europe in general)?  The North American Turbo community is really clueless about the Euro / UK gaming scenes and any links (even if they are non-English language) would be a good starting point for my research.

[Keranu]

Thanks for th information, Kaminari :!:

[Black Tiger]

I remember seeing that piece of info about France's PCE scene.  
 
They sold PCE everywhere and the games included translated manuals.

funny you mention this.  Years ago i bought a new Neutopia from TZD and it came with a french manual.

Yeah, thats from a Canadian release. We got seperate English and French manuals. Which is better than what we usually get: gross "bilingual" mechanical mixes.

Every Masters Of The Universe package I ever bought as a kid was ruined by this garbage. Having bilingual cereal boxes also pissed me off as a kid.

I'd rather have an all French package than a multilingual one, although the modern trilingual stuff is way better now.

[Black Tiger]

I'm the smallest minority(the most minor) in the world. Blonde haired with blue eyes.

I don't have much of a cultural background other than my Mother's side is pretty much straight Swedish with my great grandparents coming across from Sweden.

I had a friend who's a big PCE/Turbo fan and is "black", but have lost touch with him(like most of my former online buddies).

[FM-77]

100% Swedish (white, blonde hair, blue eyes). Hitler's kind of people.  

[esteban]

100% Swedish (white, blonde hair, blue eyes). Hitler's kind of people.  

on that note, if you like horizontal shooters, check out Download 2!  

BACK ON TOPIC: So I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. A few years ago, some relatives from Switzerland were visiting the U.S. for the first time and visited my parents. Hilarity ensued.

1. After a really yummy dinner, my mom makes some popcorn and serves it. I guess we wanted something to snack on, but that was light. The Swiss folk are loving the popcorn. Totally intrigued by it, in fact. They keep asking, "What is this?" By the time we managed to explain that it was popped corn, they have eaten handfuls of the stuff.

"Corn?"
"Yeah, popped corn."
"Oh." Eating stops.
"Don't you want any more?"
"No, that's OK."

It turned out that they considered corn to be "pig's food" (as in, pig on a farm") and they never ate the stuff. What??? Anyway, they really were turned off to it, just by finding out it was corn.

I know, how could they be anti-corn?  I didn't think of it at the time, but if I were evil I would have given them snacks made from corn meal

So, I don't know if this anecdote is representative of any segement of Swiss culture or if it was simply a peculiarity of my relatives... and I'm sure there was more to the story, but we were in polite company and didn't press the issue.
-----------------

2. Same Swiss folks. Same visit. They whip out some photos. Now, my brothers and I really were involved in a different conversation... but after a few minutes we migrate to the other side of the room and ask for the pile of photos (since everyone else had seen them).

All is swell for the first batch. Then we hit the second batch. Pictures of a party for a newborn baby girl, who is dressed in a really nice, lacy, dress.

Tons of folks are at the party and peeking in on the little girl, who is sleeping in a bassinet. Just one odd thing: the baby's face is a disturbing gray-blue.

My brothers and I made a collective "GULP!"

It turned out that my cousin lost her baby girl, during or shortly after delivery. We were looking at photos of the baby's "Wake" (substitute appropriate term).

"Anyone want any more popcorn?" I asked. OK, I didn't say that.

[GUTS]

^^ Hah thats horrible, who carries around pictures of dead babies?