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Topic: My little brothers playing UQM... (Read 3073 times)
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MasterNinja
Frungy champion
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Posts: 80
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Hi there,
I installed UQM on the computer of my 10-year-old brothers (they're twins), so they could play Super Melee! against each other. They knew about the campagin game, because they watched me playing it, but I told them, that you really need to understand english if you want to win the game.
But after all they are trying it anyway. They have little to no knowledge of the english language, although they have some (primitive) english lesson at school. They know "yes", "no" and some other keywords.
But they seem to somehow figure out, which dialog options are "friendly" and which are not, also what the aliens say. (Perhaps they "scan" the phrases for keywords or something like that). They also note down Coordinates and Starsystems, which are mentioned to check out, what this would be.
So after all they are doing pretty well, made alliances, gathering ressources... Very interesting was, as they told me, that they had pretty much trouble dealing with the Orz and had to load Saves multiple times, because they somehow pissed them off.Seems as if their "distinguish good and bad"-method does not work for the Orz  ...
Sometimes they ask me, what someone meant with a particular statement and I will try to give them the info without spoiling to much.
Do you think, one could solve the game with little to no knowledge of english, apart from key terms like "yes, no, peace, war, kill, die, homeworld" ? I think the greatest problem would be completing the game within the time limit, because you have to figure out lots of things by try-and-error...
I remember that when I first attempted to play StarControl II my english wasn't very good at all, although I still could understand, say at least 60% of the dialoques. But I didn't get it very far, because I somehow messed the game up, because I tried to "hack" something for supermelee and did not make backput copies... and I didn't have the original to reinstall it...
Other things which don't have to do with the language at all, but perhaps which a child-like behaviour (  ), which I found quite interesting is, that they did some things rather... strange... They told me about battles against Umgah Drones quite early in the game - and at that time they hadn't encountered the Vux at all... I asked them, what they were doing "up there" and their repsonse was "mining!" 
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^Nytro^
Zebranky food
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BiG BeEf DiNnEr.
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that's really interesting and it reminded me that I too didn't know english well at all when I played SC2 for the first time, and you can actually say I was in the same position as your brothers as my older brother was the one to introduce me to the game.
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Tiberian
*Smell* controller
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Back in the days when I played for the first time, I didn't know much English either, but I had a walk-through from an ancient Finnish gaming magazine. I remember having memorized pretty much the whole game without really understanding it. I do remember having the same problem with the Orz. This really is an excellent game to learn English with.
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Vee-R
*Many bubbles*
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Star Control 2 helped me learn English. Then again, I suppose I did have more of a background than "yes, no, peace, war, kill, die, homeworld".
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"Space cannot be measured. It cannot be angered, it cannot be placated. It cannot be summed up. Space is there.
"Space is not large and it is not small. It does not live and it does not die. It does not offer truth and neither does it lie.
"Space is a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact."
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Volka
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What is your native language MasterNinja?
If you really want to help your little brothers, then you could translate the game to your language
When I first played UQM I could read english very well, and as other have said, it's rather easy to understand dialogs. However, I often found in trouble with word expressions and those kind of things, though mostly are intuitive so I could handle it.
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FIZ
Guest
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this seems strange. it seems like everyone here is from finland or something... I'm from the U.S., so it was very easy to understand,(duh, it's in engilish!) but your story is pretty funny, i think EVERYONE has trouble with the orz. (me too)
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guesst
Enlightened
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Ancient Shofixti Warrior
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... which could have something to do with the difficulty in proving to Atari that a new StarControl game is feasable, business wise. Nothing against finland or our non-english brethern, but if a game has to be translated the stakes are raised. If they have to spend money on development AND translation for a potential flop, fuget-a-bout-it. They'd rather produce something sure fire.
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Novus
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Fot or not?
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Translating small amounts of text from one language to another similar one (e.g. another European language) is quite an easy process. Therefore, practically every major game seems to be translated into French, German and Spanish (and English if the original is non-English, of course), although, for example, speech may still be in the original language (but subtitled).
However, translating into, for example, all 20 official languages of the EU would probably be quite a large drain on resources especially if the game contains a lot of speech that is rerecorded in all 20 languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean account for large parts of the gaming market, but translating into these languages may require extra work in text handling code.
In Finland, at least (I believe this also applies to the rest of Northern Europe), the game-playing population is pretty much assumed to be able to understand written English (except for young children) and get the gist of messages in spoken English. This makes translating games, especially those intended for a young adult or late teenage audience, unnecessary and therefore a bad business decision. In particular, rerecording or dubbing speech is considered undesirable (I shudder at the mental image of Los Santos street gangs speaking badly dubbed Turku dialect (West Coast, right?) with a fake Russian accent (standing in for a Latin American accent)). The fact that UQM has a (good) Finnish translation (text only, naturally) can be interpreted as an indication of the strength of Finnish UQM fandom.
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Kizor.
Guest
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Text-heavy games have definitely done a great deal to help my grasp of English, and while I doubt the boys' ability to actually complete the game (considering that it has a time limit and that they'd have to piece together the plot and the goals in addition to figuring out how not to make the aliens attack) it should do them both good.
On the other hand, they may not yet have enough basis in the language to figure out that many words. After all, new words' meanings have to be understood from context.
On the third hand, kids their age doing something they like learn like little devils.
I guess all I can definitely say is that their parents should not be in the room when they discover the Syreen.
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