Coming soon-ish to a DS near you: a fan translation of Irozuki Tincle no Koi no Balloon Trip

Most Nintendo fans know about two of the Tingle games the company published for the DS a few years back.

The first, of course, was the Zelda-esque Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, which hit the streets of Japan in 2006 and Europe in 2007. The second, Tingle's Balloon Fight DS, also was a 2007 release, although it never left the Land of the Rising Sun. (If you'd like to see some snapshots of the latter title's case, cartridge and instruction manual, by the way, you can do so here, here, here and here.)

Well, Nintendo offered up a third DS game to Tingle fans two years after Tingle's Balloon Fight dropped. Its name: Irozuki Tincle no Koi no Balloon Trip, which apparently translates to Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love.

Unlike its predecessors, this title isn't an action RPG or a rehash of an arcade classic. Instead, it's a point-and-click adventure game.

As if that weren't appealing enough (I don't know about you, but I've long been attracted to point-and-click games), the story that envelopes the gameplay of Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love is based, at least in part, on The Wizard of Oz.

Combine all of the above with a rather glorious art style (see screenshot on the right) and you've got a game that looks to be right up my alley--if my understanding of Japanese were in a more advanced state than it currently is, I mean.

Thankfully, I probably won't have to wait another year or two to stumble my way through Balloon Trip of Love's oddball story. That's because an English fan translation of the Vanpool-developed game is rapidly approaching its finish line.

Unfortunately, no one really knows when the patch containing Balloon Trip of Love's English translation will be offered up to the masses. Considering the most recent update on its progress suggested the project was nearly 80-percent complete, though, I have to imagine a release by the end of this year is a possibility.

In the meantime, you can keep an eye on how things are going by checking out the translation team's blog at tingletranslation.blogspot.com. (Threads devoted to their efforts can be found at gbatemp.net and romhacking.net as well, if you're curious.) Something else to keep an eye on: my upcoming interview with the person heading up this ambitious project.

See also: my Tingle's Balloon Fight DS review

I'm finding myself surprisingly interested in Magician's Quest: Town of Magic (3DS)

Like a good number of North American gamers, I'm sure, I pretty much ignored Konami's Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times after it arrived on our shores in early 2009.

The main reason for my relative disinterest in this Vanpool-developed DS title: The word on the street at the time was that it was little more than an Animal Crossing ripoff.

Mind you, I don't have a problem with game-makers ripping off Animal Crossing; I'm just rarely interested in buying said clones.

All that said, I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't at least a smidge interested in Konami's fourth Magician's Quest title (two more were released for the DS in Japan), which is set to hit store shelves in the Land of the Rising Sun sometime next month.

As for what prompted this change of heart: I find this game's art style--a few examples of which can be seen in the screenshots above--pretty darn captivating (not to mention precious).

Unfortunately, the powers that be at Konami have yet to say if Magician’s Quest: Town of Magic (that's an English translation of the 3DS sequel's Japanese name, by the way) will be brought across the pond.

Should that happen at some point next year, I'll probably add it to my burgeoning 3DS game collection--assuming I'm not knee-deep in Animal Crossing: New Leaf at the time.

(Via siliconera.com)