Sega Saturn’s most expensive oddity just became a whole lot more accessible. Delisoba Deluxe, the ultra-rare Japanese TV show tie-in racer that can fetch around $8,000 on the collector market, now has a full English fan translation patch courtesy of hacker and tinkerer ExxistanceDC. It is yet another quiet win for gaming preservation and accessibility, turning a game most people only knew from YouTube deep dives into something you can actually play and understand.
Originally developed by Cave and based on the “Delisoba Delivery” segment from the mid-’90s Japanese game show Tokyo Friend Park, Delisoba Deluxe puts you on a soba delivery bike racing through Japanese streets to reach headquarters as fast as possible. You dodge traffic, construction, and, in one of those only-in-’90s-Japan flourishes, a giant gorilla that hurls bananas at you. The Saturn port adds a time attack mode and even a track editor, which always felt tragically locked behind a language barrier and a microscopic print run.
That print run is why this thing became Saturn royalty in the first place. The game was never sold at retail; it was apparently only given to contestants or audience members who attended tapings of Tokyo Friend Park, which means physical copies are scarce and painfully expensive. The new patch cannot fix the collector pricing nonsense, but it does mean a clean, fully playable English version exists for people running original hardware, or emulators, instead of taking out a loan.
ExxistanceDC’s patch redraws the title screen, adds new English font tiles, and translates the options menu, pause menu, and the track editor sections. It is the kind of unglamorous, detail-heavy work that quietly keeps old hardware ecosystems alive long after the original rights holders have moved on.
For Saturn fans, it is another example of the community doing what the industry will not: rescuing weird, culturally specific curios from drifting into pure YouTube-clip legend. And for everyone else, it is a perfect excuse to boot a Saturn core and deliver some noodles under ridiculous time pressure
Source: GitHub via Time Extension
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