Character creation screen
I finally got a chance to play Fallout 2 today. In Chinese the game is known by either 輻射2 in the mainland or 異塵余生2 in Taiwan. Since I didn't have time to start a "real" playthrough, I hacked my char and went around to a few places on the world map to get a feel of what this version's like. Thankfully, the game makes taking screenshots a breeze, so I've included a whole bunch of them.
First thing I noticed was that the Chinese version, like the German one (which I've also played, for the same purpose), is heavily censored. The death animations are neutered even with Bloody Mess tagged, and all the real naughty language is "bleeped". However, children are included and killable.
The worst language is censored with bleeps
Second thing that stood out was that even though my version said "繁體版" on it, and the menu artwork was in traditional Chinese, everything else was in simplified. No idea how that happened.
Language-wise, I'd say this is about as intermediate a game as you'll find. Take a look at the character creation screen at the beginning of the post; if you have to look up a lot of the skill, perk or trait names this game should be just about right for you. Hopefully the other screenshots I've included should give you some indicators of what the level is like. As with the other Black Isle games, the voice-overs aren't dubbed.
Even with the censorship, some colorful language is still present
Fallout 2 is notable in that it can be played in a lot of different ways, and is finishable with almost all possible character combinations. One of the more infamous features of the game is that you can play a "stupid character", which is activated whenever your character's Intelligence score is 3 or below. What this means is that your char can only communicate in grunts and the most basic sentences, often making for some funny interaction with NPCs:
However, if you make a stupid character and talk to Torr, the village idiot in Klamath (the first town you come to after leaving your village), you'll find out he and you can actually communicate quite well with each other!
You can find this game on VeryCD, and since it's only one disc it makes for a much faster download than the BG games or Planescape. Great for an intermediate learner who wants to expand his/her vocabulary in erm.. new directions.
Note: after fiddling around with the HTML I finally got the image links working.
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A great review of one of my favourite games! If your interested for future blogs you might consider reviewing the Quest for Glory series, some very old Action/RPG hybrids from Sierra back in the day. I've found the chinese name 英雄傳奇, so I'm assuming there are chinese editions but I haven't had any luck finding them yet.
ReplyDeleteThey may have given it a Chinese title for marketing purposes but released it in English. AFAIK this was the case with most computer games before 1993, when the first 漢化 editions started appearing. For example, all the Eye of the Beholder games were released in Taiwan but only the third game was translated into Chinese.
ReplyDeleteThis page has more info on the classic Sierra games, as well as a lot of other interesting articles on classic PC gaming in Taiwan.
Ah, may well be the case. The reason I brought it up was because the first two games had an awesome text parser system so if you wanted to ask a character about something you had to actually type in "Ask about the bandits" and so on. I remember basically learning to type by playing those games, it occurred to me that if there really was a Chinese version a similar process could occur there too. Seems most likely it wasn't translated though.
ReplyDeleteI miss the old SNES Fallout :( Hmm I wonder if they ever did a Chinese version...
ReplyDelete