Half Life 2, and localization

In my previous post, I mentioned buying legal copy of Half Life 2, out of frustration of pirated software experience.

Well, it turns out to be too much of a rush. The game was a localized version for Mainland China. I'd noticed the box tittle being in chinese, but I'd expected it to be the same game with Chinese subtitle. Afterall, localization can be very expensive.

Upon poping the disc in, I was slap with the first of a series of problems: Encoding. Take a look at the screenshot below, you'll notice that all five options (presumably for installation, registration, etc) are wrongly encoded. My system was setup mainly as an English XP environment, and handling traditional chinese encoding was all I 'd configured it to do.


I can't say if this sort of things would happen on the Mac OS X world, but experience told me that my ibook handled traditional and simplified chinese applications just fine.

(Ok, it turns out that Half life 2 isn't written as an unicode program. Given that fact, I'm inclined to believe that even OSX is powerless in the situation. This also led me to believe that most of the OSX software, even third party applications, are good citizen in the sense that they are unicode compatible, following OSX programming guideline)

Anyways, I set the "language for non-unicode programs" setting to Chinese (PRC)", and everything's good to go.Well, installation went on. 6 CD installation amounts to around half an hour of waiting. This is then followed by Valve's online registration, decrypting the game, etc. an hour later, I got to try playing the game.

And I couldn't. My graphics card isn't supported. According to this, On the box it does clearly state that the game will not support GeForce4 MX cards. I searched all over the box and couldn't find such notice. Ah, maybe that part didn't make it through the localization.

So now I'm stuck with a $20USD game that I'd been wanting to play, sitting on my desk, staring back at me.

Very interesting note, while I'm going through the box for that hardware compatibility warning, I found the following warnings:

• ??????????????? (must connect to internet to run)
  
• ???????????? (please do not imitate the action of the in-game characters)
  
• ??????????? (underage users must play under supervision, WTF?)
  
• ?????????????? (limited to be sold within borders of China PRC)
  
• ?????????, ????, ???? (This product contains copy-protection marker)

So, points 2 and 3, they aren't taking any chances in telling you they're not responsible if you do something stupid right? And if you look at the first screenshot (and know chinese), it says pretty much the same thing: Addictive gaming can be bad for health. I guess they learn from the counter-strike people?

Sigh. I can't wait for the new Intel Mac G5. I'm sure major game studios are going to start making games for both Windows and Mac when it comes.