VICL-15027: Namco Game Sound Express VOL.13 NebulasRay

[Despatche]

Dumb title thing. The name of this game is definitely one word, but judging from the "overseas" flyer it is not like Deathsmiles or Dariusburst.

I know there's a billion Ridge Racers with a Nebulasray cameo, so do any of them use something that isn't just "NEBULASRAY" as usual?

[seanne]

How would one romanize 電脳演奏遊戯 "苦亜吐露"? Dennou Ensou Yuugi "????"?

[Gigablah]

苦亜吐露 can be romanized as "kuatoro". Not sure if it's supposed to be a foreign word like "quatro" / "quattro" or something.

[Despatche]

Hm, I wonder if that isn't simply the sound programmer in hiding? Too bad people have only heard the name from Ridge Racer; there's no ending on YouTube. Time for savescumming, I guess.

[Cedille]

Does anybody know what's the official capitalization of the title? Aside of Wikipedia, I can't find much going with NebulasRay.

[Phonograph]

http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/flye...o/21013602.jpg
don't know how "official" that can be (localization?)

[Despatche]

Yeah, that flyer is literally all I could find. Never mind that the game is super obscure, there's not a whole lot else you can go on, really; Japan tends to stick to allcaps. I just thought that hey, it's a Namco-produced flyer for the purposes of worldwide release, so why not?

Titles are hard. Titles are harder when 10 of them are being used at any given time.

[Despatche]

Well then. Still not sure, as that could just be Namco of 2013 (or whenever that model was made) going "whatever". Either way, this is when allcaps saves your ass, so I'm gonna go ahead and do that... see also: XMULTIPLY.

In other news, Slipstream is apparently pretty sweet. Yet another reason to get an iDevice, crappy touch controls be damned.

edit: For the record, even Pink Mappys say "EXBANIA".

[Despatche]

Edit rejected... no reason given? I'm not seeing the issue here... I mean, at the very least, there's better reason to have allcaps than to have it the way it is now.

[SimonJXZ]

I see a good reason to capitalize NebulasRay, since it's written that way on the front. The rest of it is just translated from Japanese, correct? I think that unless the capitalization is present that way somewhere on the album in English (like perhaps one of the spines on the back or something), you always default to title case when translating Japanese for an album title. We don't have very many scans of this, so it's hard to see if it's written in English anywhere, but that seems to be the routine. I wouldn't caps anything just to be somehow generic or safe, at any rate.

Of course, why the policy here is potentially different from translating track titles into caps for consistency purposes, I'm not quite sure. One could argue that, I suppose.

[Despatche]

Well, there's a "GAME SOUND EXPRESS" logo on the front, at least. Generally, the series is called "NAMCO GAME SOUND EXPRESS"; the full phrase is probably in the booklet somewhere, and it might even be on the case of one of the other entries.

I only say "generic" because this really is a common trend with older game albums and especially their tracklists (this is one of those exceptions), probably because of easy trademarking or whatever else. Here, it really doesn't help that the "VOL.XX" part is capitalized like it is; generally that all caps is treated as a kind of "equivalent" to Japanese for stylistic purposes, and this is kinda why I dislike normal caps for those situations... you'll see what I mean on a lot of albums, Ys VI is a great example.

[SimonJXZ]

I think it's less about one trend or another and more about a recognizable standard for writing English titles. Plenty of game music albums only capitalize the trademark, like FINAL FANTASY, while Original Soundtrack is in title case. Then there are albums like Culdcept which do the reverse. Some albums, like auto modellista, actually do all lowercase. Xenosaga title cases everything. CHRONO CROSS and CHRONO TRIGGER caps everything. And in one place or another, you can find the title written in Japanese on all of these albums. Through all this, I can't see an "equivalence" between Japanese and all caps.

VGM albums can write the title in English in a multitude of ways. There can be variations on the same album (like Another Mind; in one place it says Another Mind ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK, in another has all lowercase, and in another it has all caps). There can even be variations within a series of albums. So to choose one of those many ways to sort of default to because it's "what a lot of VGM albums do" seems odd when the most standard way of writing a title in English is to use English title case. This is for instances when the title was not written in English on the album, of course.

This is what makes sense to me, though.

[Mortavia]

I think that for this series it's typical to see both of the spines of the back/tray write the title in Japanese, so the English title is hard to come by. A couple discs don't include the series name at all (only the volume name, like RAVE RACER, etc). Oddly enough, on the couple of discs I've seen of this series that do have the full album name written on them, NAMCO GAME SOUND EXPRESS is capitalized, but vol. is lowercased. But GAME SOUND EXPRESS does seem to appear on the obi of many of the CDs in this series, maybe all of them, so possibly it's a good idea to capitalize the titles accordingly?

[Despatche]

for once i should have took notice of the heavy use of something. "Nebulasray" is clearly written on cars in ridge racer v at the least. i probably missed it from some earlier game.

i very much would prefer to capitalize, yes. i just leave it as is because there are so many albums and ugh

the "typical rules" of a language mean squat when you're dealing with a country that isn't "supposed" to know the language. the real standard here is that allcaps is spammed hardcore, because you see it a lot more than anything else; a few exceptions don't mean anything, because they're typically meant to be weird.

those "plenty" of albums (i'm sure i can find an album that doesn't for every album that does) probably do it to differentiate from the game's title and the other information in the album title. this could be especially important with games that have subtitles.

[Nisto]

In my opinion special cases really should be capitalized according to some rule(s). There are albums where the title is capitalized in two or more ways on the actual soundtrack covers. Examples that come to mind are Front Mission 3 (all lower-case + all upper-case) and Another Mind ("normal-case" + all upper-case and all lower-case) Personally I normalize the capitalization I use in tags or wherever else in such cases.

Am I the only one of this opinion?

[Despatche]

On second thought, I've decided that Ridge Racer is a bit too inconsistent (I thought there was a strict system for rendering multi-word game names but apparently not), and that even regardless of that going by a later work like Ridge Racer is an awful lot like what happened with ImageFight and X Multiply. Flyer wins.

fm3 is more than a special case, it's a case of the logo and the print being too vague for comfort. Another fantastic example is good old electrosphere. Either way, "normalizing" caps is always the wrong option, because there are no standards in this dark land and to force them is to lie. And let's not get started on the common issue of "ACECOMBAT3" vs the "ACE COMBAT3" printed right on the obi vs... whatever the actual game uses. Hm.

(Another Mind is not a very good example as the use of all caps and all lowercase (just special fonts) are clearly stylistic; the game's title was probably even trademarked as "Another Mind".)

[Please bear with me here, this stuff is a nightmare and people trying to "fix" things that aren't even theirs to touch only makes it all worse.]

[Despatche]

Just had a thought. Gun Bullet normally looks vague, but the soundtrack disc clearly has "GUN BULLET" on it. I wonder if this album's disc has something similar. Is anyone who owns this willing to scan that? Unfortunately, if it's written as one allcaps word there too, we're still stuck with "NebulasRay". Which is fine, it's not like I hate CamelCase or anything, just I hate having to depend on an export flyer of all things.

[namcokid47]

Necro, but this title definitely is mystifying on how it's supposed to be written as. I looked at some old gaming magazines that covered this game at the time, and none can really agree on how it's supposed to be called - Electronic Gaming Monthly mistakenly calls it "Nebulus Ray", as does Edge. I did manage to find two mentions of the game by Retro Gamer, both of which call it "NebulasRay", but they're rather recent and could just be going off of what Wikipedia called it.

I bought the album off of Yahoo! Auctions a few days ago, so when I get it I'll see if they call it "NebulasRay". For the time being, I think NebulasRay is fine. It doesn't change the way it's pronounced, and since Namco themselves called it NebulasRay on the European flyer, I think the current title should stay.