Friday 3 August 2012

Mortadelo & Filemon - The Crazy Weather Machine in English!

Mortadelo & Filemon and the Crazy-Weather Machine or Mortadelo y Filemon: La Maquina Meteoroloca, as is its Spanish name, is a rather obscure adventure game that was released in 2000 by Zeta Multimedia. It's the second of the series and the only one not developed by Alcachofa Soft. It's not a great adventure game and it's not very long either, but it's FUN! Especially if you have a soft spot for those characters and their crazy antics!

This English translation patch will convert the Spanish retail version of the game to an English one. Obviously the voices will remain in Spanish. I translated everything myself, so no machine translations here. Besides the subtitles, the main menu and interface was localized, the chapter intro animations replaced and subtitles were embedded to the various animations and cutscenes where there was no option for them.

Unfortunately the game doesn't run well (if at all) on newer machines. It can not even be installed correctly in Windows XP unless you set the compatibility mode for setup.exe to Windows 95/98. And even then, it displays various random palette transparency problems. So I would recommend using a virtual machine, like Virtual PC or Qemu, if you actually want to play it.

The other main issue with the game is its rarity. It's a pretty unknown game so it's very difficult to find it nowadays, especially outside Spain. It appears from time to time on ebay, but it needs patience and luck!

To install the patch simply unpack the archive and overwrite the files when asked.

You can download the English translation patch here.

I also wrote a walkthrough in English which you can download here.

Enjoy!