Wednesday 31 August 2011

Kaptain Brawe - Voice Over Patch

I hate the digital distribution of games. I hate it even more than I hate piracy. I've never bought a digital copy on-line and I think I'll never will. But there are so many great games nowadays only released as digital downloads. One of them is Kaptain Brawe by Cateia Games. I waited for a retail release, sent a couple of emails asking for release date and when I lost all hope I just removed it from my to-buy list and forgot about it.

But a couple of months ago while browsing the German amazon.de site for any great adventures I might have missed I saw that a retail version of the game was listed. Granted it had double the price of the digital copy but to me that meant that I can finally buy it.

I really thought that the game would be in English. I knew that it didn't have voice over and that it had a very small size so I thought that there would be no reason to remove the English text. But I was wrong. The game was completely localized BUT, on the other hand, the German version had a full voice over, and a great one!

So I thought that the best way to play this adventure game would be with the German voice over the original English text and with that in mind I created a small patch. But it's not really a patch. You don't have to execute anything. You just replace some files from the patch on the original installed directory of the German version. So, yes, this is a patch that replaces the German text in the German version with the original English text. And when I say text I mean all text, including any writing that is part of the background pictures.

For the background pictures, I used the original files from the English version. But for the text I had to create new ones because the game engine uses a different line for every character, so while in the English there was only one line saying for example “This is a cup”, in the German there 2-3 lines with different timeout depending on the voice over of the character.

I used the text delay from the German version in most occasions. In German language, in general, you use many more words which themselves usually have many more letters than the English ones and if you take into consideration the fact that the German translator took some great liberties with the translation you can understand why the timings are not 100% perfect. But it's way better than the super-slow text in the original English version.

You can buy the German retail release on the German Amazon online store.

So this is the patch. Download and enjoy.


1 comment:

  1. I dont want to argue with u, just to point out a different perspective - i like digital distribution and i hope i dont ever have to deal with boxes, papers and disc anymore. :) I do hate drm systems what disturb gaming (i had problems with Starforce, ubisoft internet connections etc etc) so i like most gog.com.

    Speaking of Kaptain Brawe - it was great game and i guess i'm one of those few who actually wasnt against no-voice concept. For me it acctually created different atmosphere. :)

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