Posted March 09, 2019
Besides doing the same with more Sonic games, Burning Rangers etc. but there's plenty of threads elsewhere talking about that. Since Microsoft abandoned the rights to Blinx in 2015, one of Sonic's original creators worked on Blinx 1 and the developer, Artoon was a Japanese company themselves, Sega should save Blinx from oblivion, bring both his games to PC and even make sequels for all modern consoles and PC, both for GOG and for Steam.
If you don't know this series, it's basically the ancestor to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Timeshift's time gimmicks. You play as the titular cat, who works for a factory that produces time (apparently built by Solaris's three daughters according to the sequel) as part of its temporal debugging crew. The bad guys are space pirates (no relation to Metroid's ones) who steal time and sell it for profit.
More details in the videos below. The characters speak strange sounding gibberish in the first game but switch to real human languages (English, Japanese etc.) in the sequel. Blinx 2 can be thought of as "Sonic Forces with Halo 2 Arbiter missions and you can only play as the Avatar".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kx4ZzGuM2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjutjcy__o4
On the subject of Blinx 1's language, if anyone from the original Artoon team is reading this (likely not), especially if they worked on the voiced script, perhaps the language could be made more coherent, with less copied phrases* and made into a real, defictionalised language like Klingon was for Star Trek or the Standard Galactic Alphabet as a text version in Commander Keen. It could even have a text version too, either in the form of borrowed SGA characters (like how Japanese uses borrowed Chinese kanji), borrowed hieroglyphics (as cats are the most important religious animal in the Egypt) or even reusing the characters from the Itherstan language in Fran Bow.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1660839943
I'd speak it. I'd even tolerate the Blinx 1 language more if it reappeared in later games (or Blinx 1's hypothetical PC port) as a language option if it was done that way.
I'd also like full english translations of the Japanese Blinx 1 and 2 manuals and strategy guides, as they contain information about Blinx and his world that the english versions do not. If a PC port gets made, those should be the manuals and guides that actually come with the PC/modern console versions of the games, with the original "Time Factory Worker's safety guide" english manuals as an optional download only.
From TV tropes:
Owing to the game's lack of cinematics beyond a brief opening and ending, Blinx's personality doesn't show particularly strongly in the first game. The Japanese manual, however, has its entire latter half written and illustrated by Blinx himself, giving some insight to his feelings on different characters and other minor aspects of the universe. In a peculiar variety of No Export for You, the manual was entirely rewritten for other regions without any first person perspective from the protagonist.
Further exacerbating the issue of certain details being released only in Japan was the lack of in-game explanation for what the various areas of the game actually were and why the environment seemed so hostile. One of the Japanese strategy guides gives a brief description of what each area was like before the Tom Toms came in and screwed everything up (saying that the Mine of Precious Moments is the world's highest-altitude mine and the machinery strewn throughout Everwinter is actually for extracting oil, for example), and explains that strange hazards such as machinery operating on its own are the result of distortions in time warping the world itself.
*I swear the "fairii mana epi mo doc" line is used three times in the intro, once when Blinx describes the time factory's service, a second time by the operator on the monitors while Blinx is riding the world portal access conveyor belts, and a third time when Blinx explains his own job of cleaning up the crystals before they turn to monsters, without even mentioning time in the subtitles. (Ristam appears to be the "Tokeigo" (とけいご） word for time, for want of a better name for Blinx's language)
If you don't know this series, it's basically the ancestor to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Timeshift's time gimmicks. You play as the titular cat, who works for a factory that produces time (apparently built by Solaris's three daughters according to the sequel) as part of its temporal debugging crew. The bad guys are space pirates (no relation to Metroid's ones) who steal time and sell it for profit.
More details in the videos below. The characters speak strange sounding gibberish in the first game but switch to real human languages (English, Japanese etc.) in the sequel. Blinx 2 can be thought of as "Sonic Forces with Halo 2 Arbiter missions and you can only play as the Avatar".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kx4ZzGuM2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjutjcy__o4
On the subject of Blinx 1's language, if anyone from the original Artoon team is reading this (likely not), especially if they worked on the voiced script, perhaps the language could be made more coherent, with less copied phrases* and made into a real, defictionalised language like Klingon was for Star Trek or the Standard Galactic Alphabet as a text version in Commander Keen. It could even have a text version too, either in the form of borrowed SGA characters (like how Japanese uses borrowed Chinese kanji), borrowed hieroglyphics (as cats are the most important religious animal in the Egypt) or even reusing the characters from the Itherstan language in Fran Bow.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1660839943
I'd speak it. I'd even tolerate the Blinx 1 language more if it reappeared in later games (or Blinx 1's hypothetical PC port) as a language option if it was done that way.
I'd also like full english translations of the Japanese Blinx 1 and 2 manuals and strategy guides, as they contain information about Blinx and his world that the english versions do not. If a PC port gets made, those should be the manuals and guides that actually come with the PC/modern console versions of the games, with the original "Time Factory Worker's safety guide" english manuals as an optional download only.
From TV tropes:
Owing to the game's lack of cinematics beyond a brief opening and ending, Blinx's personality doesn't show particularly strongly in the first game. The Japanese manual, however, has its entire latter half written and illustrated by Blinx himself, giving some insight to his feelings on different characters and other minor aspects of the universe. In a peculiar variety of No Export for You, the manual was entirely rewritten for other regions without any first person perspective from the protagonist.
Further exacerbating the issue of certain details being released only in Japan was the lack of in-game explanation for what the various areas of the game actually were and why the environment seemed so hostile. One of the Japanese strategy guides gives a brief description of what each area was like before the Tom Toms came in and screwed everything up (saying that the Mine of Precious Moments is the world's highest-altitude mine and the machinery strewn throughout Everwinter is actually for extracting oil, for example), and explains that strange hazards such as machinery operating on its own are the result of distortions in time warping the world itself.
Post edited March 09, 2019 by darkredshift
