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SNES Classic Edition possibly not sold in Quebec, Canada due to lack of translation

A

AtomicShroom

Member
Denis Talbot, a popular tech & gaming media public figure in Quebec, is reporting that one of his sources told him that the SNES Classic Edition will not be made available in the province due to the lack of French translation. Whether it's on legal bases or simply a case of Nintendo of fearing negative press and/or consumer backlash due to the lack of translations has not been specified.

I myself heard that retail locations in Quebec are excluded from the incoming/ongoing pre-order campaign.

Baffling, but at the same time I can't say I'm entirely surprised. Most of the games, contrary to the NES Classic, feature a lot of text, most of which is critical to enjoy even the most basic gameplay elements of a large amount of games in the collection. Save for Zelda LTTP, none of them received a localized French version in Quebec back in the day.

So Quebec GAF, you might want to be on the lookout for online pre-orders across Canada!
 
N

NinjaCoachZ

Member
I'm pretty sure this is official. Best Buy on their preorder page was saying that they wouldn't be shipping to Quebec. I don't live in Quebec myself but man is that bullshit.
 
B

BaconHat

Member
As of right now, all of the onlineCanadian retailers has excluded it from Quebec. Best Buy, EB Games.

The best hope at this point is pretty much Amazon, since the rest (like toysrus or TheSource) could pull the same trick as the others.
 
A

AuthenticM

Member
Yeah, it's a particular situation.

Back in '08, the Liberal government and the ESA signed a contract that stipulated that games sold in Québec would be available in French, if a French translation was available. If there wasn't, selling the game in English only was fine. This was great because a lot of games were translated in French in France, so now Québec would finally get these translations.

But in this particular case, we are dealing with roms. I guess it would have been too much work for Nintendo to reverse engineer the French PAL roms, copy the French translation, and put them in the NTSC roms. They couldn't just put the PAL roms in the console, as the games would run in slow-motion because of the whole PAL 50mhz thing.

Sad. I guess neither party could have foreseen this situation happening. :/

BY2K said:
Fuck la loi 101.
Click to expand...

It's not the Loi 101. It's the contract the ESA willfully signed with the Liberal government ten years ago.
 
A

AtomicShroom

Member
AuthenticM said:
But in this particular case, we are dealing with roms. I guess it would have been too much work for Nintendo to reverse engineer the French PAL roms, copy the French translation, and put them in the NTSC roms. They couldn't just put the PAL roms in the console, as the games would run in slow-motion because of the whole PAL 50mhz thing.

Sad.
Click to expand...

That is a lot more work than you can possibly imagine. Many changes were made to the SNES version of LTTP for the French localization. Larger textboxes, added characters on the name entry screen, etc. It's not just copy/pasting text.
 
A

AuthenticM

Member
Or I am mistaken and the simple issue is that Nintendo was too cheap to produce a bilingues PACKAGE for the product. In which case, man, fuck Nintendo, lol.

AtomicShroom said:
That is a lot more work than you can possibly imagine. Many changes were made to the SNES version of LTTP for the French localization. Larger textboxes, added characters on the name entry screen, etc. It's not just copy/pasting text.
Click to expand...

Oh I know. I was not being sarcastic.
 
G

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
Looks like whatever amount they ship here to Ottawa will be harder to get than usual because of the Gatineau shoppers crossing the provincial borders.
 
A

AtomicShroom

Member
AuthenticM said:
Or I am mistaken and the simple issue is that Nintendo was too cheap to produce a bilingues PACKAGE for the product. In which case, man, fuck Nintendo, lol.
Click to expand...

It's not just packaging. If a French version of a game exists elsewhere (and for many of those SNES games, they do), it's illegal to release it in English-only in Quebec.

NES Classic was different since the games were never translated to begin with.
 
O

Oneself

Member
AtomicShroom said:
It's not just packaging. If a French version of a game exists elsewhere (and for many of those SNES games, they do), it's illegal to release it in English-only in Quebec.

NES Classic was different since the games were never translated to begin with.
Click to expand...
True if the games were standalone. In this case, the SNES classic is one product / a new SKU. All it needs is a translated box with translated instructions in order to be displayed on store shelves.
 
B

BaconHat

Member
Ouais, à ce stade, Amazon est notre meilleur espoir.

Honestly, this is the first time that i've had this issue with a retailer other than Best Buy.

Oneself said:
True if the games were standalone. In this case, the SNES classic is one product / a new SKU. All it needs is a translated box with translated instructions in order to be displayed on store shelves.
Click to expand...

Strange they did not just reuse the text on the European boxes already in Spanish,English,French.
 
A

AuthenticM

Member
AtomicShroom said:
It's not just packaging. If a French version of a game exists elsewhere (and for many of those SNES games, they do), it's illegal to release it in English-only in Quebec.

NES Classic was different since the games were never translated to begin with.
Click to expand...

Yeah

It's also frustrating because I believe the contract only applies to products sold physically in stores. This is an assumption of mine because Nintendo has been selling English-only roms on the virtual console for ever, available to anyone with a Québec-based account.

It would have been great if there had been a clause in the contract that allowed for this particular exception.

Oh well. I preordered mine from Game.co.uk back in June, so I should be fine. But it does suck for those who could have succeeded in buying one here.

In any case, while this situation is enraging for some, I am real fucking glad that the ESA signed that contract. It's fantastic that we are now getting most games in French. I know for a fact that it increased game sales for certain people. I've got friends who buy story-heavy games now who would have otherwise not bought them had they been only in English. And I know parents who buy more games for their kids now because of their being available in French.
 
T

The Omega Man

Member
Our glorious french language has withstood another attack and has once again prevailed against this English terror, yes we get no snes mini but the french language gets to see another day! what a victorious day everyone rejoyce!!!
 
W

Wowfunhappy

Member
AuthenticM said:
But in this particular case, we are dealing with roms. I guess it would have been too much work for Nintendo to reverse engineer the French PAL roms, copy the French translation, and put them in the NTSC roms. They couldn't just put the PAL roms in the console, as the games would run in slow-motion because of the whole PAL 50mhz thing.
Click to expand...

Isn't it relatively easy to make 50hz roms run at 60hz in an emulator?

Off the top of my head, I know that if I run a 60hz PAL Rom in Higan while my display's refresh rate is set to 50hz, the game runs at 50hz (in slow motion). I'd imagine the same would happen the other way around.
 
C

chemgear

Neo Member
The Omega Man said:
Our glorious french language has withstood another attack and has once again prevailed against this English terror, yes we get no snes mini but the french language gets to see another day! what a victorious day everyone rejoyce!!!
Click to expand...

Haha, awesome. I can't believe that there are literal Language Police in Canada.
 
F

Fularu

Banned
BaconHat said:
Ouais, à ce stade, Amazon est notre meilleur espoir.

Honestly, this is the first time that i've had this issue with a retailer other than Best Buy.



Strange they did not just reuse the text on the European boxes already in Spanish,English,French.
Click to expand...
Box is already fully in French.

It's just (again) a missinterpretation of what needs to be done by various actors here.

Oh well
 
L

Lebon14

Member
BY2K said:
Fuck la loi 101.
Click to expand...

+1

Most people here in Quebec remembers these games... IN ENGLISH. It took until Wii and mid-DS to get games in French here. And, even then, for the DS, most games were still sold only in English.

Regardless, it's not like you'll be able to find one at MSRP anyway. And, you can still buy it online and have it shipped home and "la loi 101" can't stop that.

chemgear said:
Haha, awesome. I can't believe that there are literal Language Police in Canada.
Click to expand...

Yuuuuuuuuuup. And I even remember cases where businesses that didn't have a name in French would've been asked to rename to something French; even this personal business. Italian, English, Spanish, etc you name them, you can be "asked" to have your business rebranded. Fuck la loi 101.

Learn fucking English. We're in AT LEAST a bilingual world today.
 
M

Mael

Member
Wait a min?
the French version of the SNES classic is fully english version, no?
I mean they're not PAL games but NTSC, right?
 
D

Deleted member 126221

Unconfirmed Member
Lebon14 said:
+1

Most people here in Quebec remembers these games... IN ENGLISH. It took until Wii and mid-DS to get games in French here. And, even then, for the DS, most games were still sold only in English.

Regardless, it's not like you'll be able to find one at MSRP anyway. And, you can still buy it online and have it shipped home and "la loi 101" can't stop that.



Yuuuuuuuuuup. And I even remember cases where businesses that didn't have a name in French would've been asked to rename to something French; even this personal business. Italian, English, Spanish, etc you name them, you can be "asked" to have your business rebranded. Fuck la loi 101.

Learn fucking English. We're in AT LEAST a bilingual world today.
Click to expand...
Do you know how to read? You might have missed the post, so I'll quote it again right below.

And I know fucking English, thank you very much. How's your French?
AuthenticM said:
Yeah, it's a particular situation.

Back in '08, the Liberal government and the ESA signed a contract that stipulated that games sold in Québec would be available in French, if a French translation was available. If there wasn't, selling the game in English only was fine. This was great because a lot of games were translated in French in France, so now Québec would finally get these translations.

But in this particular case, we are dealing with roms. I guess it would have been too much work for Nintendo to reverse engineer the French PAL roms, copy the French translation, and put them in the NTSC roms. They couldn't just put the PAL roms in the console, as the games would run in slow-motion because of the whole PAL 50mhz thing.

Sad. I guess neither party could have foreseen this situation happening. :/



It's not the Loi 101. It's the contract the ESA willfully signed with the Liberal government ten years ago.
Click to expand...
 
A

AuthenticM

Member
Mael said:
Wait a min?
the French version of the SNES classic is fully english version, no?
I mean they're not PAL games but NTSC, right?
Click to expand...

Correct. And that is the issue. The contract between the ESA and the government of Québec (probably) doesn't distinguish between modern-made games and old ROM games. That's an issue, because you can't just pop a new translation into these ROMs, whereas you with games made today on fancy engines and printed on discs, you can take a translation from a version of the game of another territory (such as Europe) and put it in the north american release. As an example, with Fallout 3 released in 2008, the game was English-only in Canada. That's the version I played. In the beginning of '09, the contract between the ESA and Québec went into effect. So when Bethesda rereleased Fallout 3 as the game of the year edition in late '09, surprise! The game disc contained the French localization (as well as the English one). So that was really cool.

It's a giant bummer, because I am sure that when the contract was signed, had someone party to the negotiations had mentioned something on the matter, I'm sure they would have written a clause permitting the reissue of old games physically sans French translation despite a French translation having been made decades ago.

Like I said, yeah, it's maddening for some, but this is really a case of lawyers not being prescient enough. They couldn't have known that fucking Nintendo would rerelease old games in a physical form. They just couldn't have known.
 
The Main Event

The Main Event

Member
Oneself said:
The problem here is Nintendo...

Guys, just the box has to be translated/bilingual in order to be displayed on store shelves, they don't have to translate the games
Fuck la compagnie qui décide de ne pas imprimer une foutue boîte qui est déjà traduite en France quand toutes les autres cie le font.
Click to expand...

snes-classic.jpg


?

I see three languages on that box.
 
M

Mael

Member
AuthenticM said:
Correct. And that is the issue. The contract between the ESA and the government of Québec (probably) doesn't distinguish between modern-made games and old ROM games. That's an issue, because you can't just pop a new translation into these ROMs, whereas you with games made today on fancy engines and printed on discs, you can take a translation from a version of the game of another territory (such as Europe) and put it in the north american release.

It's a giant bummer, because I am sure that when the contract was signed, had someone party to the negotiations had mentioned something on the matter, I'm sure they would have written a clause permitting the reissue of old games physically sans French translation despite a French translation having been made decades ago.
Click to expand...

It's a bummer.
The thing is that if you look at the differences between PAL and NTSC, it's not even just text.
And if you look at how the games are made it begins to be cost prohibitive to do that, guess they could have included them in giveaway way to sell to quebec.
Heck in a perfect world you could switch between versions and it would get confusing quick but at least you wouldn't have this fucked up issue.

I mean take Secret of Mana for example, it's text heavy and there's logic tied to the text that means that you can't just replace the text in 1 spot of the game's ROM and call it a day. It's basically as bad as making another version of the game.

Good to know that the SNES mini ain't PAL though.
 
L

Lebon14

Member
gaboumafou said:
Do you know how to read? You might have missed the post, so I'll quote it again right below.

And I know fucking English, thank you very much. How's your French?
Click to expand...

J'ai lu l'OP câlisse, t'avais pas besoin de reply comme ça.
(I read the fucking OP, you didn't have toanswer like that)

And, in the OP, there was ABSOLUTELY nothing of what you quoted. Nothing.
 
E

evil monkey

Member
If it wasn't for this I would have had the terrible surprise of opening the product and finding out it wasn't available in exquisite Quebecois French. Thanks a lot Quebec for watching out for us!
 
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