That's what you get for updating a blogpost about one of the best games of 2008¹⁾ – the blog plugin hickups and suddenly the post in question is on top again. Sorry for that Will have to take a look soonish into what caused this… Update: Fixed the symptom, will hunt for the cause later…

But while I'm already at writing something here… I'm a bloody curious girl, and I'd love to know who's actually reading what I write here. So, if you – yes, you! – are a more or less regular reader of this blog, you'd make me very happy if you'd just leave me a short comment²⁾ to this post (and maybe even tell me who you are and how you found this site). Thanks in advance

Dear Gaming Industry,

Some days ago I bought myself a copy of Burnout Paradise for our new PlayStation3. Awesome game, really. But once again you managed to screw it up with a horrible german dubbing. If you don't know what I mean by this, I dare you to try to listen to the introductory voice-over without cringing or turning into a hysterical giggling mess.

Horrible, isn't it? And it even gets worse.

Ah, the wonderful world of german dubbing in video games. Yes, this isn't the first time a game has been ruined by horrible accentuation, monotonous talking, want-to-be-hip denglish or wrong emotional engagement. You see, it actually is a standard problem with games being translated to german: most of the voice acting simply sounds like your employees just pulled some random people off the streets, stuffed them into a lousy sound studio and gave them some sheets with dialog to babble into the mic, leaving out any hints as to HOW to do this of course.

If you now ask yourself why this is a problem, I'm tempted to doubt your competence in terms of what makes a good game a good game. But just for clarification: Sound, including the background score, the sound effects and especially the voice acting, is an important part of the atmosphere in a game (you might be surprised, but fancy graphics indeed is not everything). Take this example from Half-Life 2.

I don't know about you, but I simply can't help but to giggle uncontrollably at that voices, and that is probably not exactly the reaction intended by you for this scene, right? I didn't think so. Thankfully, most game studios seem to get it right these days with the original version, just listen in to Mass Effect or Bioshock. But as soon as dubbing is involved, it all goes to hell very quickly. You can see this especially in Germany, were most games are dubbed, and badly. Additionally throw in EA as the publisher, and you can get the most horrible experience out of it.

How can you solve this problem, you ask? An easy first step would be to stop that paternalism of yours regarding the language I can buy my games in depending on where I live. Just have the common decency to include the english¹⁾ and the original (e.g. japanese) dub of a game on the disc as well, or at least provide it as additional downloadable content. We live in times of broadband internet and enormous amounts of disc space, so the logistics of pulling this off should really be a no-brainer, irregardless of whether we are talking console or PC here. And please make sure any included subtitles are optional if you don't dub the game, because the quality of the (german) subtitles is equally questionable.

In the meantime, I did order a second copy of Burnout Paradise in the UK and am trying hard to ignore the stupid babbling of Miss “DJ Atomica” in my german version until it arrives. As soon as it does, the german disc will be sold again, I can assure you of that. It would be great if there was a near future where I could save myself that hassle.

Kind regards,

~ foosel

PS: Oh, one more thing… while you are at it, could you maybe also talk to your buddies over in the movie industry? Because, honestly, the same is true for dubbing of movies and tv shows²⁾. The situation there isn't that bad though as with video games thankfully, because DVDs are already at the point where they contain the original sound track as well. But still… I can haz quality assurance plz?

I don't know about you, but I find something about the following dialog a bit unhelpful:

It has happened several times now that I accidentally clicked “Continue” simply because I saw that red cancel sign and some part of my brain thought it meant “Stop Script” before the written language parser in some other region of my wetware could intervene.

Is it just me, or is this really as unintuitive as I think it is?

It doesn't happen often that I preorder a game. When demod told me about this soon-to-be-released physics-based puzzle-indiegame based on the freeware tech-demo thingy "Tower of Goo" called "World of Goo" though I immediately fell in love and preordered it for a mere $20. That was back in mid-August and I almost forgot about it again until I got the download link from 2D Boy via email on October 8th. Since then, I've been hooked, and for a reason.

World of Goo not only did win both the Design Innovation Award and the Technical Excellence Award at the 11th Independent Games Festival, it has also been getting awesome reviews left and right. And it deserves all that: It is intelligent, addictive, has wonderful lovely graphics, an awesome soundtrack and is damn cute! So, what do you do in World of Goo? You control small little gooey creatures called “gooballs” of 8 or so different types (with different abilities) that you lead to freedom (or rather a pipe at each level's exit). To do this, you attach them to each other to form structures suitable for reaching high up or over chasms or to achieve whatever else the level designer intended. There are 5 chapters in the game, with each chapter divided into several unique levels which make you really use your brain. The following trailer gives you a hint at what fun all this can be

The game currently is available on Windows and the North-American WiiWare channel. In Europe it will be available in retail from early 2009 onward both as boxed Windows and standard retail-only Wii title with some additional content compared to the already released North-American version. 2D Boy has also promised to release versions for both the Mac and Linux (in that order), which will be available to anyone who already bought the windows version as well. And – a major plus in my book – World of Goo has absolutely no DRM.

I can definitely recommend buying this to everyone, you'll get hooked instantly. And for me, it's for sure one of the best games of 2008¹⁾.

Edit: I just came across a level named “Alice and Bob and the Third Party” … fellow geeks, rejoice

Edit 2: Just saw that there's now also a demo available.

Edit 3, Nov 13th 2008: Release plans on european Wiis changed: the game is now actually coming as a WiiWare title here as well.