Dialogue-rich Computer Games in Second Languages?

[rdearman]

Oh, I forgot some.

You might want to try some old DOS "Abandonware" games. This are old dos games that have been abandoned by the owner, or the company has gone bust, etc. You can often find translated versions. For example I played a French version of Monkey Island.
http://www.abandonwaredos.com/
http://www.abandonia.com/

You'll probably need DOS Box or some other emulator for this. Or a virtual machine with freeDOS.

[Spoonary]

@Spoonary
Ahhh...Animal Crossing...I quickly lost count of the hours and days I spent digging for acorns and fishing for sunfish in the early hours of the morning. I wonder how far new versions of the game have come since those early DS days?

I played a lot of Wild World back in the day. New Leaf has a new mechanic in that you are the mayor of the town (no more Tortimer, I'm afraid) and so (among other things) you can gather money from residents to build things like bridges, street lamps and benches in the town. Other novelties include the possibility of changing how the outside of your house looks (that is, more than just the roof) and the ability to swim and dive to collect underwater creatures. There is also a re-appearance of Kapp'n's island from the original Gamecube game, which required an attached GBA to access. Although I didn't play AC: Let's go into the City/City Folk on the Wii, as I understand it each town had a place with lots of different shops, instead of just Tom Nook's and the Abel Sisters', and that's back in AC:NL. In short, there have been just enough changes to make the game feel fresh, while still maintaining that same old Animal Crossing charm.

[Shouko]

Oh yes, I agree – Animal Crossing is great!

Fantasy Life is a very similar game, and I think that it's also a great tool for learning languages. Basically, you're not living in a little village like in AC but in a cute fantasy world where you can either do some quests, continue with the story line or just level your character. You have a number of different classes to choose from so it's never boring (at least not for me, hah! ). There's actually a lot of reading material, especially in the beginning and when a new story chapter starts, and there are a lot of items you can get, such as fruits, pieces of furniture and so on – a fun way to learn new vocabulary.

[Serpent]

@Serpent
I imagine Criminal Case is super addictive, and it's great to see it's available in so many languages too (especially Turkish and Indonesian) Is it all text-based?

Text as opposed to audio? Yes.
It's basically a visual game with crime scenes, laboratory, forensic kit etc. At the crime scenes you find objects, listed in the language you chose. When you first explore a scene, some objects are considered clues and you examine them with a forensic kit and/or take to the laboratory. You also speak with suspects and eventually arrest one. There's quite a lot of dialogue involved, apart from when you come back to the crime scenes to earn stars (then the only L2 is for single word* physical objects... the kind of vocab that I used to struggle with!)
*compounds also count, of course. sunglasses, computer chair, whatever.

[garyb]

Criminal Case sounds fun, I should give it a try sometime. I played Monkey Island in French a while ago and enjoyed it.

I've not done any serious gaming since I was a teenager, but I imagine that some more modern games with a lot of dialogue would be great for language learning. Lots of input, like with films and TV, but more interactive and immersive. I remember playing through one of the Metal Gear Solid games on PS2 and it had tons of dialogue and a captivating story, so something like that would be a good choice. If I ever get back into gaming again, I'll do it in foreign languages .

[kyukumber]

It's only available in Japanese and English and doesn't have voice acting but I should, no, I must mention Hatoful Boyfriend. It's available on PS4 and PS Vita as well. You can check out Let's Plays of the game/visual novel on YouTube and see what it's like before you make a purchase (like this one andthis one, or this one). It gets 68/100 on metacritic. IGN gave it 8 out of 10 but it's IGN so let's just ignore that. Hardcore Gamer rated it 1.5/5. I can't give my personal rating because I've never played it myself. I don't play video games much anymore but I enjoy watching other people do, with commentary. Well, there's an idea. I could watch a Let's Play of something I'm already familiar with in a foreign language. Could work. But I digress...

I'm going to quote a few STEAM reviews:

10/10 Spent 2 hours seducing a pigeon. Was murdered in my sleep.

Ate my classmate for Christmas dinner, slept in a hobo cave and got decapitated and put in a jar.
10/10 GOTY

If you do decide to get it, though, keep your expectations low. And who knows? You might actually enjoy it.

[Doitsujin]

@Teango: The Longest Journey is available in English, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Russian and Swedish. It's an extremely dialogue-rich game. There are also two equally dialogue-rich sequels, which have been localized into most of these languages.
Note that not all localized versions are available on Steam and other websites.

Here's a short excerpt from the localized German version:


The Broken Sword adventure game series has been localized into German as Baphomets Fluch.
There's even a free fan-made German-only game: Baphomets Fluch 2.5 that you could check out, if you have a Windows machine.

[steyyan]

I suggest the Mass Effect games since the dialogues are a central aspect of the games. However, as far as I know, the games are only available in English, French and German.

Personally, I prefer "let's play" videos because most video games have large sections without any dialogue, but LPers often speak continuously when there are no dialogue. Also, most of them read text dialogue aloud. Also, you can just rewind the video if you didn't get something.

[emk]

The old Broken Sword titles (1 & 2) have been available in a mobile version for a while now. The 5th iteration came out 1-2 years or so back. They come with the big languages (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian if I remember correctly).

Wow, what a great suggestion! Broken Sword has tons of audio, for almost every action in the game, and the French dialog is generally clear, idiomatic, and amusingly acted. Highly recommended:

Some notes for Android users:

1. Avoid Broken Sword 1. Recent versions have disabled the support for non-English audio, and even though the sound packs are still available for download, I couldn't find any way to get them working following any of the available instructions. Proceed with extreme caution, and be prepared to waste $5 on a lovely game with English-only audio.
2. Broken Sword II allows French audio to be installed with a single click. Highly recommended.
3. Explicitly save your game every "scene" or two. It tries to restore after you die, but if you click the wrong button, say goodbye to all your progress. It's safer to actually save.

What's cool about these games is that almost everything is narrated, including lots of simple physical actions. There is one drawback: I haven't found any way to repeat audio. This is no problem for advanced students, but it might be a bit rough on beginners. Also nice: If you get stuck at any point, the game can provide you with hints on how to get unstuck.

This is a really great find by daegga. Thank you!

I love Criminal Case. Millions of people play that in L1.

Very interesting!

This reminds me a somewhat similar genre of games, which includes games like Clockwork Tales and Abyss. These games do not generally have much audio! But they feature beautiful images, and lots of little puzzles, many of which involve finding a long list of named household objects somewhere in an image. I've seen occasional translation errors in these games, but overall, they're a reasonable source of vocabulary practice for things like "frying pan" and "cane" and "lamp" and "salt shaker" and hundreds of other concrete nouns.

[daegga]

Some notes for Android users:

Avoid Broken Sword 1. Recent versions have disabled the support for non-English audio

Sad news, it's the best one by a long shot. Have you tried to replace the English speech_e.dat directly?
But you can also buy the localized version:
German
French
Italian (very cheap!)
Spanish

I haven't tested these though.