Normally, the sudden release of a fan translation for a cult classic game would be a cause for celebration, but the launch of an English patch for Sega Saturn action-RPG Princess Crown has caused some ire in the community, as the original creators of the patch aren't pleased that somebody's taken up the torch in their apparent absence.

Princess Crown was originally released in 1997 by Atlus for Sega Saturn. It's a 2D, brawler-style action-RPG that stands out thanks to its gorgeous character sprites. Director George Kamitani would go on to found Vanillaware, which has carried the Princess Crown crown torch through the years in games like Odin Sphere and Dragon's Crown. Bits of its legacy even live on in the 2024 dark horse GOTY Unicorn Overlord.

Like many Saturn games, Princess Crown was never officially released in English. Two members of the romhacking community, CyberWarriorX and SamIAm, started work on a fan translation in 2012, posting an early build to a now-deleted GitHub page and providing sporadic updates to a Romhacking.net thread in the years that followed. Those updates eventually slowed to a trickle and while, as Time Extension notes, the creators insisted they were still working on the translation as recently as 2022, many assumed the project had either quietly been abandoned or would simply never see the light of day.

That's why it was such a surprise last week when another modder called eadmaster suddenly published a Princess Crown translation based on CyberWarrriorX and SamIAm's work to GitHub. It's a very early build and has quite a few flaws - it's got a fixed-width font that looks a bit awkward in places, it's missing many minor pieces of translation, and it hasn't been thoroughly bug tested. But it's the only English version of Princess Crown you're going to find out there. 

The original creators aren't happy to see their work brought back in this way, and following eadmaster's release have posted a proper update video on their project while criticizing the derivative work. 

"Last week, Eadmaster took the assets from that now-ancient GitHub project, made a few minor adjustments, and used them to release his own Princess Crown translation," CyberWarriorX writes in the description of the YouTube video above. "He did this without so much as giving us notice beforehand, much less asking permission. Strictly speaking, GitHub's licensing terms do allow him to do so. However, in practice, this kind of thing is widely considered to be disrespectful and poor etiquette in the game translation scene. As we had always made clear, the translation as it existed then was not ready to be seen. Furthermore, it is now wildly obsolete."

In an interview with Saturn fansite Sega Saturn, Shiro!, eadmaster confirms that he didn't contact the original team behind the patch. "Since they looked overwhelmed with requests in the past I didn’t try to contact them directly, I thought I would be just bothering them. So I’ve just posted some messages on these two forums announcing I was working on this."

A quick glance through the forum threads and social media chatter that have followed all this will tell you that the community's pretty divided on who to support in all this, The original patch was posted as an open-source project that anybody's free to continue the work on, but equally eadmaster's version of the patch doesn't exactly present the original work in the best light. It seems, more than anything, people are frustrated that it's taken this kind of drama to get any kind of update on the patch's progress.

"With this video, we aim to demonstrate our progress and show people that ours will be the translation worth playing," CyberWarriorX concludes in that YouTube description. "No, we aren't releasing a beta now, and no, we can't make promises about when we'll finish. What we can say is that Princess Crown deserves a high-quality translation, and that's what we intend to deliver. Going forward, we'll try to release more in the way of updates and previews. To fans of the game and everyone who has been waiting, we thank you for your patience. Believe us, we'd like us to get this thing finished, too."

These are the best Saturn games of all time. 

Bethesda Game Studios executive producer Todd Howard originally didn't like the idea of veteran voice actor Troy Baker starring in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but he came around to the idea after a "blind taste test."

Baker is best-known for playing Joel Miller in Naughty Dog's The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2, but he's also more generally one of the most prolific and well-known voice actors in the video game industry. He's now set to play the titular archaeologist in Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but originally, the boss of the whole production directly told him he wasn't the best choice for the role precisely because his voice is so ubiquitous.

"We felt for this project and the time period it was set in, we cast a pretty wide net," Howard told Rolling Stone. Bethesda reportedly auditioned hundreds of actors for the part and ultimately decided on Baker, but not without considerable protest from Howard.

Baker told Rolling Stone that when he first met Howard, it was for the role of Indiana Jones, and it was then that Howard straight-up told Baker he didn't want him to play the part. Howard gave his own account of the story to Rolling Stone, in which he told Baker, "I'll have you know, we did a blind taste test, and people chose you every time."

Although Howard is executive producing through Bethesda, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is in development at MachineGames, the studio best-known for the rebooted Wolfenstein franchise. Meanwhile, Lucasfilm Games is overseeing the project to ensure it stays true to the ethos built in the decades since the franchise made its debut in 1981 with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is due out on Xbox Series X/S and PC on December 9, with a PS5 release date expected in early 2025.

In the meantime, here are the best Xbox Series X games you can play today.

The curse of knowledge is finally over for all the World of Warcraft players waiting for Blizzard to release a mount that was first dug up by dataminers 11 years ago. The near-legendary electrified Stormcrow flying mount will finally be attainable in patch 11.0.7 next month.

Thanks to Wowhead's extensive archive, you can travel back in time and see the first mention of the mount in 2013 during the Mists of Pandaria expansion. It wasn't just a text entry; it was a full, midnight blue bird mount covered in lightning bolts. Players fully expected it to release within a patch or two like any other datamined mount, but years went by without even a mention of it by Blizzard.

There are whole forum threads of people speculating when it would finally show up in the game. Some thought it would be a promotional reward for playing Heroes of the Storm, while others expected it to be hidden behind some obscure puzzle.

One player even asked a customer service rep about it, which only further mythologized the mount's existence:

"Cool looking mount for sure, however we are not able to give out info on where it's from. As with many things in game we leave it to our players to find where things like this are from, if they are even in the game yet! Your fellow players on fansites can help, but we will not provide hints!"

Now, six expansions later, the Stormcrow mount, Thrayir, Eyes of the Siren, will finally leave the vault. It will be one of several cosmetic items you can get by killing the powerful new enemies in WoW: The War Within's new Siren Isle zone. The preview video has a brief shot of a player flying on it, which is technically the first time Blizzard has ever officially acknowledged it.

The test version of the patch is available on a Public Test Realm and will probably hit the live servers next month. Part of me almost hopes Thrayir mysteriously doesn't show up again, allowing the legend of the Stormcrow to live on for another 11 years.