"There´s been a lot of talk in recent days about Japanese game development having lost its edge in the face of the West´s forward momentum. Balderdash, we say! Partially because "balderdash" is a criminally underused term. But it also has a lot to do with the fact that plenty of folks are still importing their games. This is great for those of us with region-free consoles who can understand and read Japanese. Unfortunately that´s a rather small number, relatively speaking."

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That’s right, folks, it is time for the second ever Starmen.Net video contest; The Funky Monkey Dance Contest! The guidelines are simple, all you have to do is record a video of yourself doing either the Wess dance or the Salsa dance from MOTHER 3. Or, you can do both!"

"Today, 13 years after EarthBound hit the SNES, Fan Translation has released the English Patch for MOTHER 3, or Earthbound 2 in the States. To help us celebrate we asked Reid Young, co-founder of Starmen.Net and MOTHER 3 English Patch PR-Guru to answer a few questions. He galdly obliged and shared a few pics, scattered across this interview, off the translation process."

To compliment the recent English patch release the good people over at Starmen.net and Fangamer are coming out with a strategy guide handbook for the game.

They are currently taking preorders for the first printing. For preording you also get a minted Courage Badge Keychain and early access to the chapters.

The book weighs in at a hefty ~200 pages. The art team behind the handbook have also done clay models of the characters within the game and in a similar fashion to the Earthbound gui...

"After more than 13 years of waiting, the sequel to EarthBound is now in English! I hope fans of the series, new and old, will find MOTHER 3 to be just as unique and interesting as its predecessors. We tried our very best to make a worthy translation, and I think we came close to hitting that mark. With any luck, the translation will seem just as "strange, funny, and heartrending" as the original Japanese version.

MOTHER 3 is filled with secrets and rarities. Characters say new things after..."

"The patch will be out at the end of this week.

Testing’s pretty much over now. Some bugs did turn up over the last few days, but they were all minor and quickly remedied. Some really hard-to-spot typos were also found and fixed.

The program patchers are now nearly finished. There’ll be one for Macs, Windows, and Linux. We designed them to be extremely easy to use, since people had lots of trouble with the old menu patch. The Linux version was compiled under Ubuntu, I don’t know if it’ll..."

"We will be streaming a feed live on our website of us playing Mother 1,2,&3 from August 28 at 4pm till August 30 at 11 pm (55 hours straight!). We will feature chat along with video to create an interactive event. Our main goal will be to encourage phone calls to Nintendo of America (NOA) requesting Earthbound to be brought to the U.s in some way shape or form."