icycalm escribió:Or should I be writing "DonPachi"?
Why in the world should you? (And no, finding it in Wikipedia is not a valid reason, much less on Shmups Dot Com's forum or MAME).
No, I'd never trust MAME. The reason I bring this up is because on the cover of the PS port it's spelled "DonPachi" -- check it out. Good enough reason to adopt it?
Oh, I see, sorry... That's indeed the way it is "spelled" in the original logo, as I'm learning. But means nothing, if you ask me. Much like with "Bee Storm" and despite how odd may it sound, logos are never a good source for transliteration stuff. They take any kind of writing licence for artistic purposes, even if it opposes orthodox writing methods and common sense. We have a pretty close and edgy example I love with Esprade. I love it 'cause the interweb, you know, especially that formed up from the usual holier-than-you fanboys, persists on using something like "ESP Ra. De." since you can find that in the logo. The pile of shit that that implies from a linguistics point of view is so large I'd need a brand-new thread to explain it all, so I'll skip it and just say that something which (officially) is pronounced "esp-rade" can never be spelled "Esp Ra De", as anybody who just learned what a "word" is at school will know. It's that easy. Logos are, in many cases, made from writing licences which, for obvious reasons, aren't applicable out of them. At all.
"Camelcase" ("usage of capital letters in the middle of an [apparent] word") is, saving some very particular cases, just one more of those "writing licences for artistic/marketing purposes" which you need to construe, if you ask me. Usually, camelcase is just used to separate two different words, instead of the space (or the hyphen) between them. Could that be the case of "DonPachi"? It's possible, but one must be extremely careful with Japanese-to-romaji transliterations made by the Japanese authors themselves, you know. They just don't give a shit about correct romaji. Separating "donpachi" into "Don-Pachi" (once we agree we need to "construe" the logo spelling) is not incorrect at all (actually, is more "accurate" if we attend meaning), but is, say, less "orthodox", given the nature of the Japanese and its conception of words. Basically, the (constant) usage of kanji as "semantic groups" forms up "romaji" words. "Donpachi" has enough "entity" to be considered a single word, especially (and this is important) since "Do Donpachi" (etc.) does exist.
To sum it up, I'd use either "Donpachi", or "Don-Pachi", but _never_ "DonPachi".
So I guess for the Japanese title I should use "Do Dodonpachi II: Bee Storm".
Checking the title screen ( http://www.mameworld.net/maws/romset/ddp2 ) I'd say that that's not really the name for the Jap version.
