IF Comp is Almost Over

[got_quiet]

Been trying to finish up Blood of Zeus season 2, but it's so slow! And, well, it's bad. It's super bad. I can't defend it in any way. But I'm watching it in Japanese and calling it study. I tried putting on the Japanese subtitles in addition to the dub, but ... it's a completely different translation!!!! So while I could technically do both the sub and the dub I can't actually read along without effort.

I completely forgot about IF comp this year. I usually play at least 5 games so I can judge, but I've been so busy this year the whole thing completely slipped my mind. So I was reminded only a couple days ago and tried to play some games really fast (but still carefully) to get my votes in.

The first game in my personal queue was Awakened Deeply. It s a space parser game where you're going around a space ship solving puzzles. It was extremely basic. You find one thing in a room and that thing solves the puzzle in another room, rinse and repeat. There were a couple of places where some vocabulary got me stuck, and for some reason I have a terrible relationship with the "leave" verb in parser games. I always try to "leave [noun]" which almost always throws an error, and never try just "leave" until I'm at my wits end, at which point I remember to try just "leave" and finally manage to exit whatever thing I've been put in. I hate that verb. There was also one puzzle that I simply didn't understand.  That was the last puzzle of the game too, and the only one that really required more than picking up a thing that had the answer on it. So I wasn't particularly impressed with this one.

The second game was just on the edge of right up my alley but also just too esoteric for me to really be able to grab onto it. It's called Verses. I don't know what the plot was even though I played it through, but it involves "analysis" which involves interacting with Romanian poetry and getting lost in translation, but also there's mutants and dystopia and lots of viscera and shit, and someone dies. It felt interesting but just a half step away from meaning anything for me. I think the fact that you change the language by clicking on it, including translating poetry from Romanian to English, which removes the original language, which makes it feel very hard to read the original closely. I'm not grading this one until I've played my five games, because it's so hard for me to place.

 

Comments

[tropicsbear]

I tried putting on the Japanese subtitles in addition to the dub, but ... it's a completely different translation!!!!

This is the worst. Are you watching on Netflix? A coworker says that based on her experience (she knows Korean), their translations are weird. Some of the Filipino−English translations are also off, based on some stuff I've watched.

[got_quiet]

(late reply sorry!)

Yup, I'm watching on Netflix. I'm not surprised that it's a company wide issue. I was watching Mob Psycho in Netflix too and the English subs made some strange choices in comparison to the Japanese. They were so not what was being said at times that it was distracting.