The Force is unleashed!

Finally the time is here: the force unleashed has been released! And to my surprise the german version also included the original English version. The voice-acting is great just like the video sequences. Overall, the presentation is very good - even though we've seen more detailed character models in games like Soulcalibur 4 or Mass Effect. Nevertheless, it looks great.
First off, I wanna say I really enjoyed playing the game. Ok, it's rather short. I finished the game in like 8 hours. But I was very entertained and I even didn't mind restarting again and finishing it at a higher difficulty setting. Ok, I had to restart, but I'll come to that soon.

The game has many good features. The graphics are great just like the sound. The levels are fun too most of the time and using the force gets to be alot of fun. The story is interesting aswell, tying together the end of Episode 3 and the beginning of Episode 4. The gameplay is fun and quite intuitive. The camera sucks at times but I'm used to worse and it doesnt bother me much. Most of the time it's fine once you got used to it.

There are some issues with this game that annoyed me:

glitches (or even bugs):

• if you change your lightsaber and your outfit at the same time, one of the changes won't get activated.
• when doing sith lightsaber combos, the glow of the lightsaber gets messed up until you swing it again. This was in the demo already and I'm alittle disappointed it didn't get fixed.
• holocrons might be missing for some reason. That actually happened to me and I ended up having to restart the game again since I wanted the achievement for collecting all holocrons. My friend has the PS3 version and he experienced another known bug that forced him to restart aswell. He also had the game crash once and so did I. I would expect alittle more quality from a final release version.

Gameplay issues:

• the apprentice might be strong, but if he's knocked down he tends to lay around way too long. So long that you usually get hit one or two more times before you get back up and can control yourself again. Sone enemies even juggle you during that downtime. After some playtime you know how to use the force to stabilize yourself when hit, but it's still quite annoying.
• targetting with force powers sometimes seems harder than it should be. Especially the force lift sometimes seems to target everything but the one piece of junk you actually wanted to grab. This couldve been implemented alittle smarter I think.

Nevertheless, it's a great game and fun to play. I finished it twice now and replayed many levels multiple times and it never got boring so far. I was actually surprised how well it all went when I tried the 3rd difficulty setting. I could really see that I did improve ever since finishing it the first time. It gets more tactical and you have to use your surrounding to get things done without too much trouble. But still, there's alot of freedom on how to do things and beat enemies. That alone makes you feel quite free. And it has replay-value for me, since it's simply fun running through some levels and - probably after lowering the difficulty-setting a bit - beating the shit out of the enemies with the force...

Top Gear

I'm by far no car-enthusiast. Well, I'm a guy and thus cars do have some fascination of course but I never been interested too much in cars - I don't even own one. Never have.

That doesn't mean however that I don't like the Formula one or similar events. And if I get to drive, I like driving fast and sportive. And even though I'm not too much into very realistic driving-games, I like the action-packed ones - as long as they are fast and give you a nice impression of speed, like the "Burnout"-series or the recently released "Grid".

So a while ago, a friend sent me a link to online-streams of a british tv-show called "Top Gear". And I loved it! I also remembered another friend mentioning stuff from that show too. I love the way the show is designed. The moderator-trio with their teasing is very entertaining and funny - and it doesn't matter to me how much of it is staged or not.

And what's surely not staged is the guys' genuine love for what they are doing - you can't fake that, not for 11 seasons - and the honesty they show when testing cars or taking sides in discussions. It's the kind of attitude you easily are missing these days in many aspects of (work-)life. Sometimes I wish people would simply say what they mean and really think, no matter if it's "politically correct" or not.

The problems with translations

We germans localize and translate almost everything. Above all movies, of course. But also games. Both things have a drawback for me: I prefer the original language versions, well, if those are in english that is. But also Animes and Japanese games I prefer watching in the original version, with either german or english subtitles then.

I am by far not an enemy of my german native language, but I keep noticing that alot of translations these days must've been done by ppl who are not really into the background of the shows/movies/games/etc that they are translating. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to translate "Dungeons and Dragons" literally word by word? Such things are inexcusable!

Another example: The recent Batman movie. Joker holds Rachael outside the window with one hand and Batman says "Let her go!", with Joker replying "bad choice of words". Well, I've honestly never seen the original language version yet, but when I saw the dubbed version of that scene I immediately knew that that was the wordplay they originally did. And what did the german Batman say? "Lass sie frei!". "Let her free?" WTF is that? "Lass sie los!" Would've fit perfectly, even lipsync, and all that with preserving the word-play...

Ohwell, the good thing is that nowadays, you get DVDs and Blurays that have the english language track on them and thus give you a choice. And you get two languages instead of one. Very nice indeed!

With games however, you don't always have that choice. And what's even worse: It's really hard to find out what kinds of choices you will have prior to when the game is released. But that is usually one of my biggest questions before I decide on buying a game: "Will it be localized? How is the german translation? The voiceacting? Will I be able to switch to the original-language? Is it included on the german/european disc?". Or for JRPGs: "Will the original japanese language still be available?" - I don't really care if german or english subtitles then.

Those facts normally influence where I'll order a game. Here or in the UK. I prefer ordering stuff in Germany, but sometimes I simply can't. Worst example: Burnout Revenge / Paradise. The demos supported multiple languages, chosen by the one you set on your console. But the full game released in Germany didn't feature the english language anymore, but instead french and another one that I forgot. So when I inserted the game and my console was set to english, the game thought "ohwell, I don't have english available, so I guess I'll start up with the next best language close to that one: french". Yep, so I had to play the game in german - which sucked for Burnout - and for that I even had to change the language of my console! Well, I learned from that incident and when Burnout Paradise was coming out, I checked messageboards online first and ended up buying the UK version... perfect!

Mass Effect was another example. One of my most highgly expected games ever and it got pretty clear that they will make a german-only release for Germany of course, since the amount of voice-acting simply wouldn't allow putting more than one language on that disc. That was fine too. I knew about it beforehand, and even though the german version was actually quite good, I still ended up getting it from the UK again. And I was happy.

But not that the Force will be unleashed very soon, I am still trying to figure out if the german version will be featuring the english voiceacting or not. The german voices suck compared to the original english ones (Darth Vader!). Quite a long time ago already, I preordered the UK version. But of course I'd prefer buying the game here in Germany - also since I'll probably have it a day or two earlier than having it ship to here from the UK. But I can't cancel my order unless I'm absolutely sure I'll get english voiceacting when I buy the game here.

So , to sum up my rant: I love german, and I think it's quite nice that we get localized version of games and movies. I'm not that egoistic to demand that we should stop translating everything. I know many many ppl here are really glad we get almost everything localized. But all I am asking for is a simple way to find out which language / subtitle tracks a game will feature when it comes out. And that - preferrable - before it comes out! But I find it quite hard to get that information. If at all, you don't usually get it from the official distributor, but from other user in messageboards or from websites specialized in games.