Discovered some fun stuff in
Sine Mora and I"ve just got to share it!
(Disclaimer: if you're Hungarian, or are familiar with Hungarian culture, this will not be a great discovery and will be trivial, but if you're not, you're in for some fun!)
I bought Sine Mora about seven months ago and really enjoyed it.
And there were a few things I didn't quite understand. One was why, when you clear a stage and :time is stabilized", the 6:00 position in the clock that displays would be labeled with a "4", as in this screenshot:
And I couldn't figure out how to read the letters that look like Norse runes or
futhark which are all over the place in this game, particularly in the imperial capital of Tira.
(I didn't take this shot; it's much more detailed than I could get on my Vita, and is perfectly positioned for what we're about to do.)
Or maybe the runes devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. But if you read the letters as
futhark, they don't spell anything. If you read them as J. R. R. Tolkien's runes, they don't spell anything either. Some of them look like mirrored characters, but even that doesn't help.
But there's another system of rune-like characters which I had never heard of until I started poking around the internet: Hungarian
rovásirás runes. Supposedly it's a coincidence that their forms look so much like those of Northern Europe; they actually came in from Turkic languages in ancient times. They look like this:
These are the ones that are used all through this game. Not surprising, given that the producers are Hungarian!
Look at that picture of Tira again and you should see a big red fish on the left. Written on it,
from right to left in rovásirás, is "HAL", Hungarian for
fish! To the right of that, next to the red smiley face, is JATEK, which means "games". Over on the right, below the woman in pink, it says "SUPER MILLION HAIR", so I guess that's an ad for shampoo or hairspray or something.
Let's move and and see what else we can see:
There's the JATEK sign again, and next to it, with a logo that looks suspiciously like that of Coca-Cola, we see "SZODA". Hungarian
sz is pronounced like English
s, so it's soda they're advertising!
This one has three instances of the word BOGI in yellow; I can't figure out what that means, but the light blue sign at the top right reveals that that building is a BANK.
Here we can see an advertising sign that spells out BLACK KNIGHT SWORD... and it's an image from another Digital Reality game, with that name! Above that is a sign for CITY GRILL. Both of these are just English transliterated into rovásirás.
At the end of the stage, we're in front of BAR KUKON, and over to the left, written vertically, we see FERI, which is a nickname for the very common name Ferenc -- one of the producers!
The boss Papa Carlo has RABA written on its body. This is the name of an automotive company in Györ, but that could be coincidental. And what are those X's and lines on the front?
Well, it turns out that Hungarian
rovásirás has its own number system, which works just about the same way that Roman numerals do, but it's written from right to left like the letters are:
So that's a 36 or 37 (not sure if it's IIVXXX or IVXXX on Papa Carlo). And we can now see that the "IV" on the clock in the 6:00 position is not a mistake at all, but is in fact just written in the correct Hungarian direction. It's the XII at the top that's wrong! (Look very carefully next time you clear a stage and you might even be able to make out IIIIX, "9", in the 9:00 spot. It's hard to see, but it's there.)
There are a few more instances of this writing, some of it too small to see (I want to know what it says on those spiraling walls in Siriad, and on the killer
).
Now I'm fascinated by Hungarian runes and want to learn all about them. Seems that Hungarians are still using them. Check out this street sign!
I suppose every Hungarian fan of Sine Mora picked this up right away, but for those of us who were uninitiated, this is a great easter egg!
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