The Grand Gaming Project

[Gleaves]

The Grand Gaming Project

Play Chinese video games, practice your Chinese.

With inspiration from its TV and Comic brethren, this is the Grand Gaming Project. Video games can be a fun and interactive way to practice Chinese.

• What is this? Basically, a collection of threads about games. More importantly, though, a call to everyone out there to share your Chinese gaming info and experiences. Video Games will probably be the focus, but board games or card games are just as welcome.
  
• Why? Chinese practice. Fun.
  
• When? No set schedule.
  
• How? In this main thread, share with us what you are playing, make some recommendations, share some info, or ask some questions. If you have a game that you really like (and has some value for studying Chinese), post a new thread about it and make it an entry in the project.
  

Gaming Projects

Gaming Project 1: 雨血之死镇 (Rainblood: Town of Death) (PC)

An RPG from China about a mysterious sworsdman and an unexplained plague (Simplified).

Gaming Project 2: 古剑奇谭 (PC/Simplified)

A full blown RPG from China with voice acting

Gaming Project 3: TBD... Project 2: 古剑奇谭 (PC/Simplified)

Other threads on games

Chinese Video Games? - Good bit of info here, have a look.

Chinese RPGs

Dungeons and Dragons

MMORPGs

Video Games in China - Especially MMO

Game for learning Symbols/Vocabulary

三国杀 and other party games

Places to find games in Chinese

Verycd.com - Good for games and patches for all systems.

Taobao - Great for finding hard copies of older games.

ChinaAVG - A group that 汉化s adventure (point and click) games

万宇 and tgbus - Good selection of GBA/NDS/SNES/PSP games.

Yesasia and Play-Asia - To buy newer games

AppPicker - Search for games available on iphone.

Chinese Paladin Forum - Forum dedicated to the 仙劍奇俠傳 Chinese RPG series, including downloads

Google a game’s name plus 中文版 or 汉化.

List of Video Games in Chinese

This is a (very, very rough at the moment) spreadsheet of games available in Chinese. Contributions are very much welcome. As of now, anyone should be able to edit/add info. If that gets to be a bit of a mess, I'll have to figure out some other way to let people offer updates. If this info already exists somewhere, let me know. I'm totally open to ideas on how to better manage this. (Also, thanks to Feihong for a bunch of good GBA info).

Have you used games to learn Chinese? What are you playing now? Do tell.

[Morrisons]

Any Cantonese specific or Taiwanese (traditional characters) suggestions would be welcomed also.

[Gleaves]

One fun game in both Simp and Trad is Cave Story (洞窟物語), see a blog post from Yersi here. If you like old school Metroid/Castlevania, then you'll most likely get a kick out of Cave Story. I'm still making my way through, so I'll post some thoughts when I finish up. It's a free game (although I think a version has recently released on Wii).

One convenient thing about hunting for games in traditional is that it is easier to buy actual traditional versions. See yesasia.

[feihong]

I've been slowly working my way through Sloane and McHale's Mysterious Story. It comes from the same company that made the Professor Layton games (though the Sloane and McHale games have never been commercially released outside of Japan). The gameplay is simple: you are presented with a situation puzzle, and you get to ask questions until you feel you have figured out the answer. To prove that you know the answer, you undertake a short multiple-choice quiz. If you get all the quiz questions right, you move on the next puzzle. The only wrinkle to this is how you ask questions. Since the Nintendo DS does not know how to parse human language, you construct questions by clicking on keywords in the interface, and the computer gives an answer of yes, no, or irrelevant. It is pretty intuitive, although annoying to go through so many steps to ask a question, and of course the computer often doesn't let you ask the exact question that's in your head.

Is it fun? Well, it's almost more like an electronic riddle book than an actual game. It might be fun to take turns asking questions with another person, and see who can get the answer first. But I can't imagine playing this for long stretches of time by myself. I usually only complete one or two puzzles before putting it down to do something else.

Is it educational? Yes, very. The entire game is text-based. You will do a bunch of reading, and then take what is essentially a reading comprehension test to complete each level.

What is the level of difficulty? I think a 12-year old Chinese kid could play this game without many problems. There are some rare characters used, but the stories are so short that it won't take you too long to look up all the words.

Character set: Simplified

System requirements: You need a Nintendo DS with a flashcart.

Gameplay video: http://nds.tgbus.com/news/jcsp/200905/20090518093947.shtml

I should mention that there's also a sequel.

UPDATE: I finally finished this game. In total there were 80 riddles, which is a fair amount of content. It took me a few months to get through all of them.

[Gleaves]

I had seen this Sloane and McHale game before, but couldn't wrap my head around what it was acutally about. That's pretty interesting.

[feihong]

I recently downloaded a free game called trainchinese Chinese Writer for iPhone/iPad.

The screenshot pretty much says it all. It's not very fun, but it's OK for wasting a little bit of time here and there. It should be noted that not all characters are available, to get all of them you have to make an in-app purchase. The app focuses on collections of HSK characters, so I'm fairly certain that only simplified characters are available.

[Takeshi]

Wow, I looked at one of those sites and I am surprised to see how many Chinese translated games they have for PSP.

But I was just wondering if anyone knows any originally Chinese language games for PSP. (I just got a PSP the other day, so I'm excited to play PSP games.) Preferably RPGs that are good, but I am open to anything that is fairly text based. (If it is just Chinese in the menus then it doesn't matter.) I'd prefer traditional characters, but I don't really mind simplified.

At worst I might look into some of the translated stuff just to practise, but I'd rather play them in their original language.

[Gleaves]

Takeshi - I'm not that familiar with what companies from China/Taiwan are producing for the PSP. I suspect there is not a ton of good stuff, so you might be better off with a translated RPG.

The 三国志 strategy series comes from China (actually this series is also from Japan, my bad), but I've never played them so I am not sure what they are like. Here's 三国志5 and 三国志6 on verycd. Here's a quick 繁体 search. I don't have a PSP, so I don't have any specific recommendations, but please share if you find some decent games.

[Gleaves]

Played some Sloan and McHale's. It's hard to imagine a game that would rely more on reading comprehension, so it seems perfect for learning. I'll probably play it in chunks here and there.

I also played some Sacred Odyssey for the iphone. It's basically an action RPG Zelda clone, but seems like decent fun and there is a fair amount of dialogue. I turned off the English voice acting (which wasn't that great) so that I had to rely on the Chinese text. $7, but you can try it for free.

Also for the iphone, I see that Final Fantasy 1, 2 and 3 are all available in Chinese. They are $8, $8, and $16, respectively. I haven't tried them out, but hopefully this type of official Chinese support will continue to get added for other games.

Finally, somewhat random, but for Halo fans out there I ran across this 60 minute recap of the trilogy in Chinese. Evidently, the Halo games are dubbed into Chinese (which is pretty rare, still).

[feihong]

Wow, that's a great find! I didn't realize there were so many non-educational games in the App Store that have an official Chinese translation.

I found a website called AppPicker that allows you to search the App Store by language. As of this writing, my search for Chinese games yielded about 1800 results. If you sort your search by Rank then you can see the most popular games first (i.e. the ones people are actually downloading).

I noticed quite a few Gameloft games have Chinese translations.

[Takeshi]

I'm pretty sure 三國志 is Japanese-original; it says it's made by Koei, and the TW version site has screenshots of the Japanese version which is pretty odd.

Ahh, yea, I figured as much, but I thought no harm in asking. The thing is, I'd rather play Japanese games in Japanese. (Games are what I use to practise Japanese; if I stop playing games in Japanese I'll probably forget Japanese XD) If anyone does hear anything about Chinese PSP games do tell me though.

I guess I'll look into 仙劍奇俠傳 or something after exams. I'll let you know how that goes.

[feihong]

The screenshots are probably in Japanese because the game was fan-translated. The only way to play such games is to change the firmware on your PSP so that you can play games downloaded from the internet.

[Gleaves]

I think you might be right about 三國志 being Japanese. For some reason I thought a Chinese company or sub-division worked on that series, but I guess not.

Native Chinese RPGs on the PC (like 仙剑奇侠传, 古剑奇谭, 轩辕剑外传) are on my to-do, but haven't played any of them yet. So I'd be interested to hear how that goes. I did very much enjoy 雨血, which I think is the only native Chinese video game I've played thus far.

[feihong]

Not really a game, but I stumbled upon an iOS storybook app called 理发为什么. The story is rather simple but the app can read the words to you in Chinese (as well as a number of other languages). Other stories are available via in-app purchase.

[Gleaves]

I decided to give a full-fledged native Chinese RPG a try, so I've started playing 古剑奇谭. So far, it seems similar to your typical Japanese RPG. I'm only about four hours in, but I am a big fan thus far. The best part of the game is that it has a ton of dialog, all with full Mandarin voice acting. You can download the game from the company's website and then buy an activation key with paypal for $10. If I stick with it, I'll do a big post with more thoughts/details.

[feihong]

I played a bit of 迷字陵, which is a word-search game for iOS. Basically, you're presented with a grid of characters and you drag across them with your fingers to form words. If the word you formed is valid, you gain points, and if it's not valid, you lose points. The game supports both simplified and traditional characters. Each rounds lasts two minutes (I think), and at the end of the round you can review all of the words that you did (or did not) form.

Personally I didn't find this game to be very fun (I don't enjoy similar games in English), but the presentation is very nice, and it's free.

[Takeshi]

Haha, I'm glad I influenced you Gleaves.

(Having said that, I actually haven't tried it yet. >_<)

Some searching and it seems to be that a Chinese game for the PSP: http://1000shadow.blog127.fc2.com/blog-entry-562.html

That's all I can find though; not sure if I'm really into Mahjong though. (The review sounds like it is favourable to me, but I only really skimmed it and I don't really know Chinese.)

[Gleaves]

I've become increasingly interested in Chinese RPGs, so I have been reading up on them lately. One of the most interesting ones I've come across is 金庸群俠傳 (Heroes of Jin Yong) from 1996. You play as a present-day ordinary guy that is sent back in time to the days of Jin Yong's novels. You have to search around the map to find all of Jin Yong's novels by meeting (and I assume often fighting) the famous characters from all the books. Here's a

. I've made it an unofficial long-term goal (the kind I often set and forget about) to read enough Jin Yong to play and enjoy this game. It is a long road ahead. Looking at the picture of all the characters, I only recognize one. 一步一个脚印.

[murrayjames]

Lately I've been playing Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap（萨尔达传说：神奇小帽）for Gameboy Advance. It's great for vocab and at the right level for me. A good game too. I rip sentences from the game and make flashcards with 'em. Have a couple hundred so far. Downloaded from VeryCD.

What I really want to play is 仙剑奇侠传. I have the Win 95 version and tried it last week. Holy moly is the Chinese advanced! Haha. Maybe next year :-D

[Gleaves]

That's good work, Murray. I've never really played through a Zelda game, so I would like to do so in Chinese when the mood strikes. When you say rip sentences, are you able to open up the ROM for the text or are are you transcribing them yourself?

In case others are not aware, you can play GBA games on your computer with the help of a emulator like VBA. They are quite a few GBA games available in Chinese (work in progress list here).

仙剑奇侠传 is high up on my list, as well. I'll be playing 古剑奇谭 for a while (and will probably get up a full post on it soon), but after that I might tackle 仙剑奇侠传 or one of the 轩辕剑外传 games.