2nd Gen Has anyone heard of, or played the Vida Translations Pokémon Silver as a kid?

I don't see early obscure fan translations like these being discussed widely, so I thought I'd make a post about it. I used to have a couple of multicarts for the GBC as a kid, and one of them contained the Vida Translations (or Vida Trans) Pokémon Silver, as well as the 'Pokemon World' Pokémon Gold.

I found some videos of them here:

Vida Translations Silver: youtu.be/eWBCNf4kGoY

Pokémon World Gold: youtu.be/xDtULLXDEfI

These early fan translations were based on the Japanese roms, and some features include Pokémon having only 5 characters in their names, and in the case of Vida Trans Silver, quite a number of garbage text in dialogue and menus.

In Vida Trans Silver, I remembered that the translators totally made up a lot of the stuff, and it was as if they didn't understand Japanese at all, and just came up with whatever sounded suitable for the occasion.

Some other points I remember:

- Oak and Elm mentioning Ash at the start (and by extent, Blue is called 'Gary', and Red, 'Ash' when you go to Kanto later)
- The girl living in one of the houses in New Bark Town calls Silver her brother.
- The free Shuckle in Cianwood City has garbage text in its name, which started with an 'X'.
- Whitney refuses to give you the badge at first because she thought you cheated, and as you try to leave, the girl who stops you tells you to talk to her again to convince her you didn't cheat. (However, Pokémon World Gold got it right - Whitney cries and forgets to give you the badge in that version.)
- If you try to use any Key Item where you shouldn't, it says 'No cycling allowed indoors' regardless of what item you used.
- Mareep's Pokédex entry says that it was so called because it sounds just like Mary, who had a little lamb.
- Pokémon which English names weren't revealed at that time were given their Japanese names. For instance, Unown was called 'ANNON'.
- Pokémon move names were shortened, too, like how Quick Attack was 'QUATTCK' or something.
- The girl in National Park gives you the Quick Claw because her Meowth is stubborn.

It seems like a lot of people do remember Vida Translations, just that they don't know it by name:

reddit.com/r/pokemon/comments/4u2twn/looking_through_my_old_cartridges_i_found_this

youtube.com/watch?v=kXrwBcwUDGE

forum.lowyat.net/topic/3460171/all

Man, how I wish I could talk to one of the translators from the Vida Translations team someday, and tell them all about how their work made my childhood, even if most the translation is just made-up stuff. They used to have a site, but it's been down since a long time ago.

I never knew about these, but this seems interesting! Admit they are kinda bad...but would be fun to play anyway.

I've not heard of these but the description reminds me of a series I once saw of a Vietnamese Crystal translated to English. What ended up resulting can hardly be considered English. It is absolutely hysterical!
Here, I managed to find it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF501757AB521

These Vida Translations improvisations sound sensible and fun. I would have much preferred if Whitney had accused us of cheating over her just being a whiny baby.

Lucifer said:

I've not heard of these but the description reminds me of a series I once saw of a Vietnamese Crystal translated to English. What ended up resulting can hardly be considered English. It is absolutely hysterical!
Here, I managed to find it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF501757AB521

These Vida Translations improvisations sound sensible and fun. I would have much preferred if Whitney had accused us of cheating over her just being a whiny baby.

Click to expand...

Wait, this is actually pretty interesting. I remember when I first played a Pokemon game, my dad had a CD and I remember seeing once a folder named Pokemon in it and he refused to show me what was inside it. One day my parents weren't home and I decided to get the CD without permission and I found a GBC emulator (I think?) named THC (if memory serves) (F2 would save and F4 would load I think, only one save slot) and a copy of Pokemon Yellow and a broken Gold/Silver ROM, almost sure it wasn't Crystal.

The emulator had a pretty nasty bug(?) where it would "forget and remember" save states, like it could hold more than one save state at a time but it switched them at random. The emulator came with my dad's save and when I started my own runs I'd overwrite it and somewhere along the run, mostly near Misty, the emulator would "forget" my save state and load my father's, and then I would start a new run and it would forget my new run and then decide to load my previous run, it was SO WEIRD. I remember SOMEHOW figuring out how to solve this problem by deleting the .sav file on the save states folder, I have no idea how I figured it out but that behavior was so weird.

Also the Gold/Silver ROM was very much broken, I didn't play a lot of it but the gameplay seemed fine, looked like normal gen 2 even though I didn't play much, but the text though was cursed beyond limits, ASCII symbols everywhere, I couldn't understand a thing and I think there where multiple languages in there, at least english and portuguese, but I'd have to REALLY trust my memory, the point is the text in that game was completely broken. I wonder where did he get that ROM from, something like that couldn't be just a corrupted file, right? The Vietnamese translation made me remember of this particular ROM, I find the starting screen asking for the hours very familiar to that old ROM but the texts on the Vietnamese are legible,a nd also it's Crystal, so it's not the same ROM. Would anyone know anything about this?