Localisation of games into Chinese seems to have turned a corner (inc. game recommendations)

[StChris]

@roddy I don't think they would dare if they were based on the mainland. That said, I think whenever a Taiwanese person criticises anything on the mainland, there's always this suspicion of them secretly supporting 台独, so maybe you have a point.

 

According to this article, there may also be a hidden newspaper featuring a blurred photo of the young Xi with a headline saying he has been sentenced to prison. It's also apparently being taken down in mainland China. They're going to lose so much money because of this.

[agewisdom]

1 hour ago, StChris said:

Now at just 39% positive and it has dropped like a stone in the sales charts. Damn! There's a lot of discussion of outrage culture in Western countries (particularly the US), and it's easy to forget that China has its own outrage-provoking topics

 

Sad for the developers. Not sure what was going in their minds when they included that in. Maybe they thought the repercussions wouldn't be as serious. Then again, being in Taiwan, I think they should know better.

[大块头]

Perhaps they could add some sort of minigame to make it more palatable on the mainland.

[StChris]

It's not just on the PC where Chinese developers are making a splash. Sony has its own "China Hero Project" where it is helping Chinese companies make games for their PS4 platform. They recently released details of 7 new games:

 

Quote

Evotinction - A third-person "hack and stealth" game

RAN: Lost Islands - An old-time survival experience that makes use of melee weapons and guns of the past

Convallaria - An online-based PvPvE set in some beautiful locations

AI-Limit - A third-person action RPG

F.I.S.T - A 2D Metroidvania from the perspective of a rabbit with a mechanical arm

In Nightmare - An isometric horror experience that explores growing pain and self-salvation

ANNO: Mutantionem - A pixel art 2D action RPG with cyberpunk elements

 

You can find links to the trailers of each game here. ANNO: Mutantionem looks the most interesting to me, but then I am a sucker for cyberpunk settings and old-school pixel art.

[Leirosa]

Unheard / 疑案追声

 

 

This game has a very interesting concept in that it's a mystery game based almost completely around listening. In each case you have two goals: through listening only, correctly identify the identity of all the speakers involved in the situation, and correctly answer the questions it poses to you. You move around listening to the various conversations and such occuring as the situation progresses, trying to use what you hear to figure out the whole story.

 

As it's by a Chinese dev studio, it has very high quality Chinese voice acting with a variety of accents and characterization, and, as almost everything is based on listening it makes it a very fun way to practice listening comprehension. There's no transcript and the conversations don't have any subtitles, so it's not going to be very good for learning new words, but it's a very neat way to test yourself and try to solve the puzzle it sets out. You can playback the audio as many times as you like, as well as skip the time forward or backward as much as needed. Things which were hard to understand for me the first time I listened to it became much more clear on repeated listening, especially after listening to the other related dialogues and gaining more information.

 

It also has an English localization and full English voice acting that you can fall back on if you get completely stuck (which could happen if you misunderstand or completely don't understand a critical line- this was an issue for me in the 2nd level). It's not a long game (with 5 levels only) and won't have much replay value unless you want to use it as listening practice, so I would suggest not to brute force it and take your time to figure out things slowly.

 

It's available on Steam, and if you want to get an idea for what the language level is like, see if you can find a Chinese stream of it.

 

 

 

[roddy]

That sounds like a really interesting one, thanks for the post!

[StChris]

@Leirosa thanks for the review. Sounds like an interesting game. I'll add it to the index.

[roddy]

This driving game looks intriguing. Not sure how much actual language there would be and if there's any speech audio, but the settings look great. Not out for a couple of months. 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/995840/Road_to_Guangdong__StoryBased_Indie_Road_Trip_Car_Driving_Game/

[StChris]

While I'm not a huge fan of the art style, it looks like it could be an interesting game. Looking at the trailer and pictures, it seems to be more focused on talking to people rather than driving, so it could be a useful learning tool. I might check it out when it releases next month.

[StChris]

While I've always been linking to Steam for these games, new, rival PC storefronts have been emerging recently. The most famous is Epic Games Store (from the creators of Fortnite), which has caused plenty of consternation among gamers by bunging money to developers to get games released exclusively on their store. Despite Tencent already owning 40% of Epic, they released their own online PC games store earlier this week. Being run by a Chinese company, that store might be a good one to browse for Chinese games in the future.

[Tomsima]

@StChris That last link looks great, gonna go and explore. How do you find out about this kind of stuff, I'd like to stay on top of games developments in China but have yet to find a good single source of news and info on this yet, do you have any recommendations?

[StChris]

@TomsimaI normally keep up to date with gaming news via the NeoGAF forums (not specific to China, but normally someone will post whenever there is any Chinese gaming news too).

 

While I haven't used them much myself, I understand that these two Chinese language gaming forums are pretty popular:

https://bbs.nga.cn/

http://www.a9vg.com/

 

Youtube is also a good source of news and reviews. We've come a long way since the 90s, when the only chance to see gaming on TV was to wait for crappy Gamesmaster once a week on Channel 4. These are my two favourite Chinese channels:

 

攻壳Gamker唯一官方频道

老孙聊游戏

 

These two channels are actually my most challenging listening practice at the moment (even more difficult than the news). I guess that part of my vocab is a little weak.

[Tomsima]

Ah thats fantastic, thanks. yeah i remember specifically getting up in the morning to watch the crash bandicoot competitions they had on gamesmaster - back in the day!

[Tomsima]

just a heads up: civ6 is 67% off today (today only I think). I just went ahead and bought it in Chinese, really excited to have a go at this once exams are finished in two weeks. I'll post an update on what its like trying to play in Chinese, the text does look incredibly small....

[imron]

1 hour ago, Tomsima said:

really excited to have a go at this once exams are finished in two weeks

Definitely do not start playing it before you have finished your exams.

[StChris]

22 hours ago, Tomsima said:

I'll post an update on what its like trying to play in Chinese, the text does look incredibly small...

 

At least it's simplified characters. I really struggle trying to make out all those tiny traditional characters in Civ 5 (the strokes just become a mess at a certain point). If you have time to do a review then I'll happily add it to the index.

 

21 hours ago, imron said:

Definitely do not start playing it before you have finished your exams.

 

Very sage advice. I had the misfortune of discovering Civ 2 in the summer of my GCSE exams. I did well enough in the end, but it definitely knocked a whole grade off each subject.Be strong @Tomsima

[StChris]

PUBG Shut Down In China, Replaced By Near-Identical Patriotic Alternative

 

Apparently, Tencent was struggling to obtain a licence for the game, and so were unable to monetise its 70 million daily users. In response, they have taken it down and replaced it with a new game called "Game for Peace" (yes, really!), made by the same developers as PUBG. It seems to be pretty much the same, but has had a "socialist values" make-over, including:

- more patriotism (""pays tribute to the blue sky warriors that guard our country's airspace")

- removal of all blood (even the previous "green" blood) and death animations (replaced with the shot person waving goodbye)

- Top 5 players (squads) are now all considered winners of the game. When there are only 5 players (squads) left in a game, a pop-up will ask the player to choose to quit as top 5 or compete for the first place. A birthday cake will appear on the ground for the first place, and a helicopter will come to evacuate the survivors.

 

New "death animation:

 

[Tomsima]

Now that im done with exams, I've been enjoying Civ 6 for the last few days. Its a great game (first time playing civ for me, so everythings new). Really amazed at how deep the game is, and how the mechanics are so well thought out. That being said, this form of game is pretty useless as a Chinese learning tool. The goal of the game is not to make you read or listen, but to think out your tactics. All the simple repetitive stuff is irrelevant whether its in English/Chinese/whatever language, as your brain has already memorised the action/meaning behind whatever youre choosing to do. The more complex stuff is just bogged down in tiny text (even with 200% text boost, but thats almost certainly because im using a surface with high DPI screen), and i just ended up skimming through with squinted eyes most of the time. Even when you take the time to read every little thing, the localisation is very unnatural (cant really blame them, the original language is pretty game-specific). With things like 'Eureka' translated into 尤里卡時刻, the majority of potentially useful vocab is in the end pretty detrimental in any attempt to improve one's Chinese.

All in all, civ 6, great game, not a great learning tool!

[StChris]

More good news on the localisation front. The much anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 has been confirmed to have full Chinese localisation (trad/simp and audio). The Polish developer, CD Projeck Red, is most well known for their Witcher series of games. I kind of wanted to try The Witcher 3, but it looks like one of those massive open world games that takes 100+ hours to complete. Unfortunately I don't really have that much time to play these days (although I make an exception for the excellent Yakuza series). The Witcher 3 does have Chinese subtitles and UI, but no audio. I did consider playing with the Polish audio and Chinese subtitles, but never got round to it.

 

For anyone interested, here's a Youku trailer of the game. It looks like it has a very large story element to the game, so hopefully it will be useful from a studying standpoint.

[ZhangKaiRong]

Yeah, Cyberpunk will be good - CDProjekt is well-known for immersive games. I still remember that during my nearly 2-month long ride with completing The Witcher 3 I could hardly concentrate on anything else. It's good that they realized the market demand for Chinese dub. Their competitive trading card game, Gwent is very popular with Chinese players, I often get three / four Chinese players in a row when I'm playing in ranked mode.

 

Which Yakuza are you currently playing? I saw that there is a sale ongoing, including the Chinese version of Kiwami 2 on play-asia, I'm tempted to buy it and play again, even though I finished and platinumed the English version.

 

Also, I just noted that Judgement / Judge Eyes has also been out in Chinese since December.