We all know that there are tons of games taking place in foreign countries / continents, usually involving Germans / Arabs / the Japanese / Vietcong / Russians.
And since 99% of you dont speak arabic, allow me to tell you that usually, the voice acting and the writing are so horribly done and so wrong.. What made me create this thread is that we're in 2010, and arabs have been the boogy man of the universe for 10 years, and they've been featured in games and movies ALOT lately, yet the devs cant seem to get it right! (Watch the new Red Faction trailer at 0:20, theres arabic writing, and its incorrect.. the arabic letters should be connected together)
** Now im not saying that the Arabic language/culture should be appreciated or any of that shit, personally i despise my language and culture, but what im saying is that it doesnt make sense that these devs are still unable to find real arabs who know how to speak and write the damn language in the games ! **
Did i ruin it for you just now? telling you that whenever you played a shooter or adventure games featuring arabs (either as enemies or allies) or whenever you've seen weird arabic writings on the wall in the Iraqi alleys in MW2, it was done badly and inaccurately ? WELL IM GLAD :p
The only games that had almost perfect arabic voice acting that i know of, are Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell: Conviction. 1+ for Ubisoft !
P.S, i dont speak german/russian/etc.. so im not sure that those are done well in the games, but i have a feeling that they're done perfectly in games. atleast in the last 5 years.. is that not the case? enlighten me, foreigners of the world.
Oh and by the way, the same thing happens in movies and TV... while the Korean couple in Lost were actually Korean and spoke the language properly, and the russian dude was russian and so on.. the SAYID actor was a fucking brit, and he spoke the language oh so hideously in the flashbacks.
" Is it incorrect when someone yells "GRENADAAAA!" in Call Of Duty? "
It's been a while since i played CoD, but arent the ones shouting "grenada" russian ? if they're arabs, then yes we dont call it a Grenada.. its called "qonbola" which you might've heard in Battlefield 2
@Axxol said:
" Hahaha... I doubt they care if it's accurate. "
if you mean "care out of respect", ofcourse they shouldnt give a fuck. but they should care in a "we want our game to be as realistic and accurate as possible" way
i know its a proper arabic, many people who speak arabic have different dialects, so even if you know arabic, you might not understand the proper arabic or whatever
" Is it incorrect when someone yells "GRENADAAAA!" in Call Of Duty? "
It's been a while since i played CoD, but arent the ones shouting "grenada" russian ? if they're arabs, then yes we dont call it a Grenada.. its called "qonbola" which you might've heard in Battlefield 2
@Axxol said:
" Hahaha... I doubt they care if it's accurate. "
if you mean "care out of respect", ofcourse they shouldnt give a fuck. but they should care in a "we want our game to be as realistic and accurate as possible" way "
Lol. You're really worked up about this, aren't you?
P.S, i dont speak german/russian/etc.. so im not sure that those are done well in the games, but i have a feeling that they're done perfectly in games. atleast in the last 5 years.. is that not the case?
I don't speak Arabic and I also have a feeling it done great in games. Their main is to make it believable for the audience, not make it accurate, and their main audience is not people who speak arabic.
As for the Russian, it is done ok in most games, some have it bad.
I'm learning Arabic at the moment... Just wanted to put that out there...you know....Not that I have any clue what you're talking about, but it would be nice if the dialects people spoke in games reflected the real life counterparts. Take the children of the corn in Heavy Rain. That wasn't right either...can break the whole 'immersion' thing people are so hopped up about these days.
@Ahmad_Metallic: I agree. The problem is that "enemies" must always--or at least most of the time--be an ideologically charged stereotype of the people they supposedly represent. That is to say, they must be immediately recognizable as enemies meaning that they must fill a specific cultural conception of what the enemy should look like and sound like. Make them too realistic (a part of which is undoubtedly the voice acting), you run the risk of humanizing the opponent. An opponent with a truly human face--that is to say, a recognizable and relatable face--is harder to kill; even in a virtual world like that of a video game. A bad guy must be a bad guy. In film, often the most compelling war stories, I think, are those in which the foe becomes someone you can relate to on some level (think, for example, about Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, or Letters from Iwo Jima).
" If you despise your language and culture then why do you care if the language is spelled properly or not. "
the video game industry aspires to be as realistic and accurate and perfect in every way and in all aspects, right ?
@kermoosh said:
" i know its a proper arabic, many people who speak arabic have different dialects, so even if you know arabic, you might not understand the proper arabic or whatever "
thats a good point, but incorrect arabic is incorrect.
@HandsomeDead said:
" Do Arabs even play video games? "
just...... just Fifa 10..... and some Vice City ..... *cries*
lol you think devs actually do meaningful research instead of just ripping off the last war movie they saw, switching on bloom lighting, and calling it a day
13% of CIA employees don't speak a foreign language. I don't care if the games I play aren't completely accurate as long as they say their lines with an angry tone. I speak Spanish and Resident Evil 4 had me rolling.
" That wasn't right either...can break the whole 'immersion' thing people are so hopped up about these days. "
EXACTLY! everyone is on about Immersion all the time, so there you go. why let the bad foreign voice acting and writing slip ??
@RVonE: that made so much sense.. i enjoyed reading that.
@Jimbo said:
" Close enough is good enough.
"
ONLY Trey Parker and Matt Stone are allowed to mess the language up, cuz they only make shit funnier ^_^
@actionTACO said:
" lol you think devs actually do meaningful research instead of just ripping off the last war movie they saw, switching on bloom lighting, and calling it a day "
like Jazz said above: everyone is on about Immersion and Realism in games. the gaming industry has been aspiring to be as accurate and immerse as possible in the last few years.
developers must not know how to speak then. it could be different dialects, like accents that people have. i know italian guy at work that doesn't understand italian that my boss speaks. pretty funny that he doesn't know english either.
"Al-American! Khparat, kill the infidel!" Ubisoft gets it right (I think) because Canada is much more culturally diverse than pretty much anywhere on the planet.
Being from Denmark, I rarely get to experience my mother tongue in video games. In World in Conflict however, there is a support unit (jeep) for the NATO faction which has a Danish driver with the most hilariously outrageous Copenhagen accent. His Danish is perfect, and (not?) surprisingly World in Conflict is another Ubisoft game.
Yes we do, and a lot actually. But because piracy is ultra rampant I suspect that the industry feels that it's the opposite.
@Ahmed: It does rub me off the wrong way some times, and some times it's hilarious. But then I realized that I've been taking different languages in games at face-values as being accurate. Then I found out that That's not always the case,and it didn't make much of a difference to me. So I know why it feels indifferent to them whether a language of a people that "probably don't even have PCs" is wrong.
" while the Korean couple inLost were actually Korean and spoke the language properly, and the russian dude was russian and so on.. the SAYID actor was a fucking brit, and he spoke the language oh so hideously in the flashbacks. "
The husband is American, and according to a Korean friend his Korean is not good.
But then i wouldn't get to hear SCHIZAR GRENATEN! everytime i shoot a german dude. (There's no way thats accurate.)
And why don't you like your culture, its a hell of alot more interesting than being Italian and Irish like me, all i have to show for it is an inability to tan. Although Im sure you have good reasons for not loving it., its just that from an outside perspective, such feelings are kinda strange.
Nah, this is a problem that happens with most languages in both movies and videogames. While spanish is so-so and german is usually good, whevener characters speak any other language other than english, chances are, it's going to be poorly spoken. I for one am brazilian and I'm yet to see good brazilian portuguese around videogames - not to mention when they are depicting a brazilian character and he speaks bloody spanish lol.
I wish devs would hire people who would actually know how to speak whichever language they want to have on the game, rather than doing some lame ass research on the net and -apparently - using the google translator.
Like you said Ubisoft really does pull through in that aspect. Hell they even give you that multicultural/multiple view/beliefs/best friends disclaimer before the game starts in AC. So you at least know they're authentic.
Besides most Americans barely get English right, why should we care about other languages?
Maybe they don't feel like it's a priority or they are indifferent to it and doesn't want to research it properly or nobody will notice. I don't know tbh, just speculating.
@Ahmad_Metallic: Nah, you didn't ruin it for me. You pretty much just confirmed what I already knew, which is that a lot of developers are lazy and are willing to cut-corners as long as they think people won't notice. It's frustrating. I'm glad there's a number of people still doing things the way they should, though. Say what you want about Assassin's Creed's gameplay, but at least they go all-out when they try to establish some historical setting.
I know how you feel mate. Sometimes listening to Chinese people speak Cantonese in Deus Ex when you're Hong Kong is a bit jarring. It's kinda funny though. But I've yet to hear at least one decent Chinese accent and with a few games set in Shanghai, it ought to be interesting.
@Ahmad_Metallic: I think it's because developers just don't care enough to spent money and time on research. The majority of the people playing these games will be in North America who have no connection with the Arab world or will be Europeans who have no connection with the Arab world. Considering this, these players just don't know any better, and it doesn't bother them.
I appreciate what you're saying though. Uncharted 2 opens in Cyprus (or on a Greek island, I think) and there's a placard in the background with some Greek writing on it. I can now inform y'all that what Naughty Dog did was essentially take random letters from the Greek alphabet and stick them together to form what they hoped would be legitimate words, because as far as I can tell what they've got in that cutscene is entirely meaningless gibberish. If misuse of the Greek language and culture was so prevalent it would irk me off too.
" I know how you feel mate. Sometimes listening to Chinese people speak Cantonese in Deus Ex when you're Hong Kong is a bit jarring. It's kinda funny though. But I've yet to hear at least one decent Chinese accent and with a few games set in Shanghai, it ought to be interesting. "
you.. speak chinese ?
@wolf_blitzer85 said:
" Like you said Ubisoft really does pull through in that aspect. Hell they even give you that multicultural/multiple view/beliefs/best friends disclaimer before the game starts in AC. So you at least know they're authentic "
yeah man! the Iraqi soldiers conversing during the flashback simply dropped my jaw! it was flawless it was on a loop though :P
" When making a game, everyone on the team has a list of approximately 8,000 things that they have to do every day before the game ships. Making sure the foreign language is 1000% authentic is near the bottom. It's the sad reality of game development in North America... sorry bro. "
Well for games that are really only going to sell in places that don't speak Arabic very much as long as it sounds kinda arabic then it's fine with me and most of the consumers. When everyone just has an accent it's really bad though.
" I know how you feel mate. Sometimes listening to Chinese people speak Cantonese in Deus Ex when you're Hong Kong is a bit jarring. It's kinda funny though. But I've yet to hear at least one decent Chinese accent and with a few games set in Shanghai, it ought to be interesting. "
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