hey all,

I stumbled across something excellent the other day and wanted to share it with you all.

Any of you that have ever played Valve games are probably already familiar with this service, but Steam is a content distribution system for video games produced by Valve, the makers of the Half-Life series and Left4Dead, among others. In my efforts to immerse myself in japanese as much as possible, i had set the User Interface language in the steam application itself, and as a result, the games that i have been playing via Steam (Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 Dead 2) are now also showing japanese text for all in-game text.

I was really impressed with this and happy that i have some games to play that won't break my immersion environment. I constantly find myself stopping to try to read some of the text, especially between-game loading screen messages, so it's definitely worth switching over if you're looking for a little play time to your japanese learning.

Have fun everybody

Wow, nice trick! Left4Dead2 even has the captions in Japanese! I had no idea it had any Japanese support at all, because it wasn't listed as a supported language in the games options.

I just found another neat trick. Using the tool GCFscrape, you can access the subtitle text files that are used in the games.
For Left4Dead2, open the file pak01_dir.vpk using this tool, then browse to the "resources" folder, and you will see a file called subtitles_japanese.txt. It contains full japanese text for the game alongside the english text!

Redownloading my copy of Half-Life 2 now. Previously it had an issue with the 62-bit version of Windows, but now they changed it so I don't think I will have the same problem. At least this time I can play it in Japanese, though. I don't want to go through Ravenholm again. D:

wow zarxrax, that's really cool! I had thought about transcribing some of the sentences and whatnot, but pulling the data out of the files is most excellent!

since i have the game installed, i went ahead and pulled the resource files out for a later date when i start doing SRS sentences. For those that do not have the game or just want to save a few steps, here are some of the files:

left 4 dead 2 game text: http://www.mediafire.com/?lwdbyzyizmk
left 4 dead 2 subtitles: http://www.mediafire.com/?m3q2cdmtti2

here is a sample of what the subtitle file text looks like. The "fields" are tab-separated, so it would probably be no big feat to import it into excel, clear out the trash, and import the result into some sort of SRS

"Producer_ReviveFriendLoud01" "<clr:168,71,96>ロシェル: ほらほら、立って!"
"[english]Producer_ReviveFriendLoud01" "<clr:168,71,96>Rochelle: Come on, come on, GET YOUR ASS UP!"
"Producer_ReviveFriendLoud02" "<clr:168,71,96>ロシェル: 早く立って!"
"[english]Producer_ReviveFriendLoud02" "<clr:168,71,96>Rochelle: Get up, NOW!"
"Producer_ReviveFriendLoud03" "<clr:168,71,96>ロシェル: そろそろ行かなきゃ。行くわよ!"
"[english]Producer_ReviveFriendLoud03" "<clr:168,71,96>Rochelle: Look, we have to get going, come on."
"Producer_ReviveFriendLoud04" "<clr:168,71,96>ロシェル: 私があなたを運べるわけがないでしょ!早く立って!"
"[english]Producer_ReviveFriendLoud04" "<clr:168,71,96>Rochelle: Hell if I am carrying you, GET UP!"

I've done this for a while, but have found that while playing a game such as TF2 or L4D, the game's immersion tends to override the language's immersion (so to speak) and I end up ignoring most of the text. Plus, when I'm really into a game and gunning down suckers, I tend to focus on audio queues ("SPY'S SAPPIN' MAH SENTRY!") rather than visual, text queues - although it's sorta cool hearing "It's a spy!" and seeing "スパイだ！" for instance.

Definitely can't hurt, at any rate, especially if you frequently play said games with friends and don't want to be a dick and blow them off for the sake of maintaining your immaculate, sacred immersion environment.