In One and One, Game|Life asks a member of the gaming industry two questions: one about gaming, and one about something completely random.
Tim O'Leary is one of Nintendo's top translation talents, whose most recent project is Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for the Nintendo DS. Chris caught up with him and asked about a different DS game.
Have you played any Professor Layton yet?
I haven't. We were talking about that earlier -- it's a game that I've been avoiding, because I want to play it fresh. I love the look of that game. That's a franchise that I wish I could have gotten in on. I'm a little jealous of [the people] who've gotten to localize it. It looks like such a fun game. I kind of avoided it to keep the experience fresh.
I did the same thing with Super Mario Galaxy. I translated one section of the game, but without context, because I didn't want to see it. And
I didn't play that game until Christmas, after Christmas when I got it home and set it up for the kids. If I don't have to see it, I don't want to until it's time to play.
You lived in Japan for eight years. When you were in Japan, what American food did you miss the most? Now that you're back, what Japanese food do you miss the most?
When I was there, for the first five years, it was tacos. There wasn't a Mexican place close to where I was at. I lived out by the Kansai International Airport. And near there, it's no longer there, but there was an import shop that had Australian clothing, and Los Angeles street fashion. And I went to this one place and looked in their freezer, and they had stacks of corn tortillas. And you could buy packs of 150 tortillas. And they had whole bricks of Tillamook cheese.
So I bought tortillas, and cheese, and then I ordered through this, the Foreign Food Buyers Club. They buy American products and then sell it in bulk, mail order only. So I bought Lipton onion soup mix and Lawry's taco seasoning or whatever. So I literally ate tacos like three times a week for a month, because I was so excited.
It was the same thing when I found root beer. Root beer, for those people who don't know, there's a Japanese medicine that tastes sort of root beery. So people drink root beer and they're like oh, God, no, it's like that medicine! So the first time I found root beer, at some import place in downtown Osaka, I bought two six-packs, and it was literally ten dollars for a six-pack of root beer.
But then I had a Thanksgiving day party, and a bunch of people were over my house, and this older guy went in my refrigerator and said, "Can I have one of these beers?" and I said, yeah, take a beer, go ahead. And I look over and he opens this root beer, and I'm like, slow-motion, nooooooooo. And he drinks, takes a drink, immediately makes the worst-looking face, and dumps it in the sink.
Coming back? Ramen. There's no good ramen here. At all. We found a couple places in Seattle that -- I won't name them, because they're just okay. Good ramen. Definitely. Nothing like going out for ramen with some gyoza and a nice big draft beer.
