Forums > Game Talk > Best games never translated
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/19/2008 11:33 PM · Permalink · Report
Some time ago I was doing research into foreign-language (ie non-English) text adventure games to poll the denizens of the interactive fiction newsgroups regarding unknown international masterpieces never appreciated by the anglo world online (and its ESL friends, English having become the electronic lingua franca.) A handful did eventually jump the gap (the Spanish Olvido Mortal being translated by Nick Montfort into Dead Reckoning, as well as the earlier unofficial translation Shattered Memory) but there is a certain small known world of non-english text adventures (Spanish, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese) that have never jumped the gap and likely never will.
Then again, folks often felt this way about all sorts of Japan-exclusive console games, largely RPGs, and their fan communities have deviously figured ways of following their otaku predecessors in the anime community and re-subtitling the games with full translations. As time goes on, former Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland and Russia have been proving themselves burgeoning developers, likely with local-language releases we might never have a chance of finding intelligible.
And so I'm taking this thread as a chance to expand my original scope beyond strictly text adventures and inquire to our bafflingly international forum crew here which are the titans of your local gaming culture that never for whatever reason met the rest of the world through an English-translated version? (and, optionally, why? A game based around wordplay understandably would find translation problematic, though Asterix's publishers got around it 8)
(A devious secondary intention of the discussion is for fodder for a later proposal for further fan translation projects. But we have to have our master list of foreign-language canon before determining which t9n projects we want to tackle 8)
Opipeuter (17206) on 10/20/2008 1:22 AM · Permalink · Report
Somewhat related; are there games that have made entirely in dead languages? Attic Greek, Latin, Phoenician, Vedic Sanskrit?
Such things turn up every now and then in other media so what about games?
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/20/2008 6:31 AM · Permalink · Report
There are ports of Crowther and Woods' "Adventure" for barely-alive constructed languages like Esperanto and Lojban (no word on Klingon or Sindarin games however 8)
Opipeuter (17206) on 10/20/2008 7:40 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]There are ports of Crowther and Woods' "Adventure" for barely-alive constructed languages like Esperanto and Lojban (no word on Klingon or Sindarin games however 8) [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]
Oh you disappoint me sir. Knowing your reputation I was expecting you to offhandedly point me in the direction of a The Giant Sanskrit Phallus vs. Book Eight of the Nicomachean Ethics Text Adventure Pong M.U.D. Simulator.
;p
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/21/2008 3:15 AM · Permalink · Report
Sadly all I'm finding for these are DIY vocabulary games... which means the market is wide open for a product the likes of which you propose 8)
Indra was here (20755) on 10/20/2008 5:34 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]
And so I'm taking this thread as a chance to expand my original scope beyond strictly text adventures and inquire to our bafflingly international forum crew here which are the titans of your local gaming culture that never for whatever reason met the rest of the world through an English-translated version?
[/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]
I've met quite a few gamers that are even more hardcore than my standards. Language doesn't seem to be much of a problem to them...they'd play it regardless, even though they don't understand a word within the game. Now that's a dedicated gamer. Not to mention crazy. :p
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/20/2008 6:47 PM · Permalink · Report
What you're telling me is that the Indonesian game development scene is quite nascent? 8)
Indra was here (20755) on 10/20/2008 7:09 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]What you're telling me is that the Indonesian game development scene is quite nascent? 8) [/Q --end Pseudo_Intellectual wrote--]
Nascent? searches under bed for dictionary
Er...what Indonesian development scene? They'd highly get hijacked by their fellow country men. Damn pirates...! Er... :p
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/21/2008 3:16 AM · Permalink · Report
Er...what Indonesian development scene? They'd highly get hijacked by their fellow country men. Damn pirates...! Er... :p
Ehh, it didn't seem to stop Russia 8)
chirinea (47495) on 10/20/2008 7:16 PM · Permalink · Report
You can check some of mine and Macs' submissions. I sent most Tec Toy developed games to the site, while he sent some classic Brazilian text adventures. I'm constantly trying to add Brazilian games to the database, but our scene isn't THAT big too.
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/21/2008 3:30 AM · Permalink · Report
It was Iggy's mention of "Stugan (The Cabin) – the first Swedish text adventure which ran on a PDP-10 at Stockholm university" that put me back in mind of this subject... I suppose that due to anglo development of most of the earliest computers, we took on most of the gaming milestones first (well, us and Japan), but I know there are still solid works just trapped on the other side of a language barrier to me... plenty of which are just tantalizingly hinted at over at Adventureland. So maybe your home tongue doesn't offer a regional ADVENT or Zork.
(I know that the Spanish-language community has had enough activity and interest to result in groups like CAAD and publications like SPAC, paralleling SPAG and the english text game resurgence on newsgroups..) Someone submitted the Finnish "Näkemiin, Hongkong" -- did it emerge in total isolation? I'm totally intrigued by the adventure component of the German Software 2000 artventures ... but not so much as to be interested in taking up a new language entirely just to play them (somehow, Japanese exerts a stronger pull on gamers... likely due to a deeper back game catalogue 8)
Игги Друге (46653) on 10/21/2008 7:51 PM · Permalink · Report
There is a rather long tradition of German adventure games from the early eighties and forward.
I believe that there are very intricate reasons for the early dominance of America and Japan in games. For example, arcade games were regarded as a focal point for youth crime and could only be operated in certain parlours and subject to several laws in Sweden.
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 10/21/2008 7:59 PM · Permalink · Report
There is a rather long tradition of German adventure games from the early eighties and forward.
To the point where they've been virtually singlehandedly carrying the graphical adventure torch (commercially at least) for the past decade!
I believe that there are very intricate reasons for the early dominance of America and Japan in games. For example, arcade games were regarded as a focal point for youth crime and could only be operated in certain parlours and subject to several laws in Sweden.
There's a thesis in there for someone sufficiently bold or intrepid. My current bias is towards early Zorks and Rogues and hence the arcade scenes aren't of huge interest to me (though fo shizzle it was at the time! I could watch games on attract mode for hours), but I suppose it's all connected. But I doubt this site will be contributing anything towards arcade game scholarship before we... support arcade games (and mainframe ones, the fundamentals thrusting up everything that followed 8)
Kaminari (1081) on 10/21/2008 11:16 PM · Permalink · Report
Like most entertainment media, I think the French games had quite a hard time getting out of the territory. Not exactly sure why; although my idea is that, for the longest time, video games have never been considered a "serious" market over here (which ultimately led to the bankruptcy of historic actors like Exxos/Cryo, Silmarils, Loriciel, Delphine, Coktel, Titus...).
About text adventures, you won't find many of them in French for the simple fact that IF is definitely not adapted to the French syntax. Most attempts in the genre ended in disappointing games with nice graphics but very crude parsers -- I think one of the most "popular" commercial games was Les Portes du Temps from Legend Software (nothing to do with Bob Bates' Legend Entertainment).
Even today, there are very few independant IF produced by the French community. As great as the Inform devkit is, it doesn't get along very well with the French language. Anyway, I'd say one of our best independant authors is Jean-Benoit Ferrant. His adventures are much appreciated here, but I don't think they were ever translated into English.
Elliott Wu (40) on 11/17/2008 8:39 AM · Permalink · Report
One of my old favorites is actually not THAT unheard of: Romancing Saga 2 and the original Romancing Saga. (I reviewed RS2 and the remake) The remake is now known as Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song. Not exactly popular in the US. RS2, on the other hand, never got fully translated. (I think several translation groups are out there working on it, but progress has pretty much came to a screeching halt in the past couple years.)
As for Chinese title games?
There are a ton of RPGs that I played in my youth which I still look for to this very day. Unfortunately, listing their names won't do you any good as it will just come out as gibberish. That and I can't type Chinese on this computer so...
Foxhack (32100) on 11/17/2008 9:40 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Elliott Wu wrote--]One of my old favorites is actually not THAT unheard of: Romancing Saga 2 and the original Romancing Saga. (I reviewed RS2 and the remake) The remake is now known as Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song. Not exactly popular in the US. RS2, on the other hand, never got fully translated. (I think several translation groups are out there working on it, but progress has pretty much came to a screeching halt in the past couple years.)[/Q --end Elliott Wu wrote--]
There's a bit of an in-joke between the translation groups... Romancing Saga has a curse attached to it. Any group who ends up working on it simply vanishes after a while.
Of course, things CAN change. whistles innocently
Elliott Wu (40) on 11/18/2008 1:55 AM · edited · Permalink · Report
Well, I know that Aeon Genesis is pretty much all but dead. But supposedly there is another group Gilhide which has made a lot more progress. Of course, Gilhide hasn't managed to get around to translating any of the in-game scripts yet. But everything else is pretty much done.
From what I heard though, SaGa games code is so hideously messed up that translating it is a huge under taking.
Foxhack (32100) on 11/18/2008 2:08 AM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Elliott Wu wrote--]Well, I know that Aeon Genesis is pretty much all but dead. But supposedly there is another group Gilhide which has made a lot more progress. Of course, Gilhide hasn't managed to get around to translating any of the in-game scripts yet. But everything else is pretty much done.
From what I heard though, SaGa games code is so hideously messed up that translating it is a huge under taking. [/Q --end Elliott Wu wrote--]I take it you haven't visited AGTP lately?
You should.
Elliott Wu (40) on 11/18/2008 3:46 AM · Permalink · Report
err... when I say "dead" I mean the RS2 translation efforts, not the site itself. Yeah, I should have clarified.