About Pocket MuuMuu (Rough Draft)
Pocket MuuMuu is a spinoff game to the beloved series, Jumping Flash. It's essentially the largest micro/minigame collection on the original PlayStation, and probably the "killer app" for owners of the PocketStation device. However, it was only ever released in Japan, February 4, 1999, a week after the Pocket Station was released. Unless you lived in Japan, you probably wouldn't have heard of this amazing pack of games.
Pocket MuuMuu could be described as a PocketStation museum tycoon game, it has a total of 101 apps and PocketStation player, you don't even need a PocketStation to enjoy them! Out of the 101 apps, 71 of them are LCD games, called Pocket Games, each with three challenges to complete. If you do have your own PocketStation, the apps are small enough to fit at least 3 to 4 of them to take with you on the go. Honestly that doesn't seem like much, but considering the PocketStation is the same size as a normal memory card and other compatible games take up almost the entire card... Not sure how they programmed the other compatible apps, but the Pocket MuuMuu team had the best method for space conservation
I often consider this game to be one of the best tycoon game on the Playstation. Pocket MuuMuu has the progression of a tycoon, doing stuff to eventually unlock more stuff, then using that stuff to unlock more stuff. You first start off with a handful of cash, and a single game. You could play the game and complete the 3 challenges given to you, or you could go explore the two areas of the game and shop for more Pocket Games. With each challenge you finish, it will grant you a star. The more stars you earn, the higher your rank will be. With each new rank, more Pocket Games will be purchasable.
Another thing you can do with cash, within the shopping area, there is a park upgrade shop where you can purchase upgrades for your very own theme park. This theme park has hidden unlockable prizes that are only unlockable with upgrades.
About did this project come about? (Rough Draft)
Back in 2020 during the pandemic, I discovered the website RetroAchievements.org, a community based site for giving retro games modern achievements and enabling users to earn them via emulators. I immediately got invested in this, being a lover of old video games, and eventually wanted to make my own achievements on the website. At the time, most of the popular games already had achievements, some of my old gaming memories had little to no love so I created achievements for them.
In June of 2022, I had a total of 18 sets created, some of them I remembered others I found while playing random unknown games and really enjoying them. Pocket MuuMuu was one of them. I believe I discovered it while reading a list of Playstation games and thinking "What the heck is Pocket MuuMuu?" Without looking at any information I started to play it. I practically fell in love with the game and wondered why no one talked about it. there was or is a full translation patch for this game, nor hardly any details about the game. I posted a few things on the community discord and started to look into the game's memory code and started working on the set.
I had previously translated and uploaded an almost entirely translated google spreadsheet for the PSP Rhythm game K-ON! Ho-kago Live!! about a year prior, so I originally didn't plan on doing the same type of thing for Pocket MuuMuu, but as I played and discovered more about the game I ended up brainstorming a better method than a simple spreadsheet. I always like to improve and create new ideas so this time I decided to create a PDF in a similar style to what they did for 2000's strategy guides. At first it wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be, I almost gave up and scrapped the whole idea for being too big of a project, yet I kept going and eventually finished all 101 Pocket Apps and released the PDF along with the achievement set.
The original release of the project was a big moment for myself, being able to construct and create a whole PDF translation by myself. Although most of the translations where assisted by computer translators, I made sure to use several sources and use logical formatting to keep most of it as readable as possible. I definitely have a strong interest in learning actual Japanese, i've been working on it, but this whole project really sparked my interest to do more translations and maybe eventually be part of a team of people. Since I have no prior knowledge of programing this was the next best thing in my opinion.
Once I learn more Japanese and feel more comfortable I want to revise all of my translation work on Pocket MuuMuu. I wouldn't call this a finished project just yet. It's close, but I believe theres a bunch more stuff to do with it, aside from translating it with a better Japanese knowledge.