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 Once upon a time, beset by lay-offs, Raven Software made the very last original game in its history, before being locked forever in the Call of Duty mines by Activision. It's a bit of a miracle that Singularity exists, and that it runs as well as it does, and that it plays OK. Its quality of Russian captions is entirely predictable though. So, let's go on a trip though a tale about being stuck in a stupid time loop, made by a team about to suffer the same fate.             
SelenicMartian fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Nov 18, 2022 16:09
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| # ? May 7, 2024 22:32 |
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Please help my browser is infected with this game now.
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Nov 18, 2022 16:53
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One day I'm going to learn Russian so I can properly groan at the style of typography they have chosen.
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Nov 18, 2022 18:03
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The word in front of Tim looks like it's the result of putting 'Frank' into an auto-translator.
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Nov 18, 2022 19:58
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This game looks neat and I'm enjoying the translations, but it does highlight how weird it is that they're mixing Russian and English on the same signs. Do other games do this and I've just never noticed?
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Nov 18, 2022 22:10
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Why advise people to lay down? In a fire, smoke and heat will rise, so staying low allows for the possibility of more air that won't instantly sear your lungs.
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Nov 19, 2022 05:31
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The "Smoking Blows Here" sign is perfection. "Help me, for the love of god" (or, I guess, "Помогите, ради бога") is, surprisingly, a thing a Soviet person, even a scientist, would be entirely likely to say, especially in the 50s. Soviet culture did not produce any new emphatic exclamations to replace the religion-based appeals, and the profanity language does not lend itself very well to begging. On the other hand, the constant "Russian" in announcements is really annoying. They wouldn't be talking about "Mother Russia", making "every Russian proud" and promising best "Russian" education. Soviet education, come on guys, keep your setting straight. And speaking of, it's either called "Katorga-12" and you send your unwanted politicals into death mines here, or it's a closed science city where you voluntarily move with your entire family because the pay and the amenities are crazy good. If the writers really needed to have it both ways, you could have a gulag on the north end of the island, with death mines, and an unsettlingly nice and clean closed science city in the south, with schools, parks and fancy apartments. For extra Bioshock-ness, even. Side note: "katorga" is a very Imperial Russia thing. You got sent to a "katorga" when you were a terrorist who plotted against the tsar, you went to "lagerya" when you made a dumb joke about Stalin.
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Nov 19, 2022 21:33
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I love mistranslation translation tour! Though I will not be following the challenge issued in your video description. And while I'm no voice actor I can't help but think they went with how they pronounce Katorga because even after hearing the correct pronunciation it takes quite an effort to make my mouth form those sounds in that order and I'm pretty sure I'm still doing it very wrong.
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Nov 22, 2022 02:50
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SIGSEGV posted:One day I'm going to learn Russian so I can properly groan at the style of typography they have chosen. I доит sее тне ряоблем? Sеемs реяfeстлу яеадавле то ме
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Nov 24, 2022 08:56
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SIGSEGV posted:One day I'm going to learn Russian so I can properly groan at the style of typography they have chosen. I recommend at the very least learning to read cyrillic so you can read phonetically some of the poo poo that was meant for a latin-reading audience because it is often unintentionally very funny
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Nov 24, 2022 09:46
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We meet our first enemies, not counting the Russian grammar.
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Nov 25, 2022 15:08
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Well, that school was certainly a thing. But I vaguely remember the pistol being useful after some upgrades, but at the start, yeah, it's not that great.
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Nov 25, 2022 15:55
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Yeah, funny to introduce it as a powerful but slow weapon and the first thing you run into takes multiple shots unless you happen to head-shot it. Save that description for the magnum-equivalent.
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Nov 26, 2022 01:02
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I can't really fathom the amount of not giving a poo poo to not hire someone, or a few people, that knows Russian pretty well to oversee the Russian text in your game set in Soviet Russia.
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Nov 26, 2022 02:43
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I know its video games but people shouting cries for help into a tape recorder because... someone will hear it and come for them? is always kind of funny.
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Nov 28, 2022 00:05
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Space Kablooey posted:I can't really fathom the amount of not giving a poo poo to not hire someone, or a few people, that knows Russian pretty well to oversee the Russian text in your game set in Soviet Russia. It happens all the time, in all languages towards all languages. I consider myself happy when the names are patterned after existing people on wikipedia because there's nothing that works quite as well to set the tone than to have some character's name be a slur in the language in which it is meant to be. Kibayasu posted:I know its video games but people shouting cries for help into a tape recorder because... someone will hear it and come for them? is always kind of funny. Audiologs are a mistake, I think the only good one is that one left by Karras in Thief 2.
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Nov 28, 2022 01:29
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SIGSEGV posted:It happens all the time, in all languages towards all languages. I consider myself happy when the names are patterned after existing people on wikipedia because there's nothing that works quite as well to set the tone than to have some character's name be a slur in the language in which it is meant to be. Yeah I realize that. It's especially egregious when the foreign language is in the entire game, however. Hell I was surprised and delighted when the original MW2 got Rio pretty right, and that was just a relatively small section.
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Nov 28, 2022 16:28
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That was a very long time ago and my memory is not so good but that was right before they did a bit of Pakistan with every sign in the wrong language, right?
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Nov 28, 2022 16:41
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I think they had a small bit in Pakistan in MW3 so yeah, very likely.
Space Kablooey fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 17:11
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 I enjoy the implication that they're censoring letters by manually retyping them with a dash in place of every redacted character to preserve the spacing of the original, for some reason.
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Nov 29, 2022 04:46
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After two tutorials on weapon upgrades I think weapon upgrades might be important?
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Dec 2, 2022 15:10
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In that it didn't explain anything, I guess that reveal was kinda similar to Darkseed 2.
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Dec 3, 2022 00:07
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I was surprised how often children can get their hands on typewriters and reel-to-reel recorders in the 1950's Soviet Union, but this is no doubt historically accurate.
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Dec 3, 2022 00:55
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I am a firm believer that good audiologs must be left for a specific listener, and unless there's a VERY good, unique reason, "private notes for only the recorder, which just happened to be discovered" doesn't cut it. When they're properly treated as a found medium, with adequate context (like how written notes are much more prone but not guaranteed to receive), they have a better chance to make the desired impact - otherwise, they're just funneling non-crucial worldbuilding and/or foreshadowing at the player, and the best one can hope for is some decent voice acting to sell it, or otherwise for the speech volume to fade with distance from the object.
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Dec 3, 2022 08:15
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Private notes for the recorder, strewn left and right all over the game world. Why is this log in a random dead end office? Who knows
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Dec 3, 2022 09:29
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I'm reminded of one of the Audio Logs from Bioshock, about the testing of Subject Delta and how it was placed in the relevant lab, with the after effects of the events of the log plainly visible. It was part of the environmental storytelling that didn't break SOD at all.
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Dec 3, 2022 17:48
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Alright, I'm wrong, good audiologs are the Karras message in Thief 2 and also the FEAR 1 phone messages.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:40
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I am greatly enjoying your narration, but the mouse sensitivity with no smoothing seems designed to make me motion sick actually watching the videos. I'm glad I'm not the one who has to play it like that.
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Dec 3, 2022 23:02
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I wasn't expecting "Alpha Protocol" to be the answer to "What game did research into what Russia should look like" but actually I guess that shouldn't surprise me. Anyways for a short Singularity story I apparently never read the part of the weapons locker text that says you can switch weapons at them. So I did this next part with only the Centurion.
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Dec 4, 2022 08:05
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im saint germain posted:otherwise for the speech volume to fade with distance from the object. Nah, this sucks. The prime advantage of audio logs over written notes is you get to actually play the game while listening to them, instead of being stuck standing in a room.
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Dec 4, 2022 17:40
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Man, this game owned. Even had a kind of neat multiplayer mode.
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Dec 5, 2022 01:22
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Unreal_One posted:Nah, this sucks. The prime advantage of audio logs over written notes is you get to actually play the game while listening to them, instead of being stuck standing in a room. That's the reason I prefaced that bit with "otherwise" - it sucks when you want to listen to them while getting on with your day, but when you're stuck hearing painful writing/voice acting and there's no escape...
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Dec 7, 2022 04:31
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Sometimes you think you're making assets for a school level, but…
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Dec 9, 2022 15:31
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I have to admit, the game does a lot with a simple mechanic like the basic function of the TMD. Opens and closes new pathways, provides a backup weapon at close range, and acts as a puzzle interaction device. It could be handled worse.
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Dec 9, 2022 17:10
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Gravity gun? Check.
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Dec 16, 2022 15:06
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Im starting to get the feeling that E99 poisoning is even worse than the lead poisoning that boomers got from drinking leaded milk and sniffing leaded gas. It's the only coherent explanation for the bad Russian
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Dec 17, 2022 16:27
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Barisov is no Dr. Darling but he's got a decent film presence.Slaan posted:Im starting to get the feeling that E99 poisoning is even worse than the lead poisoning that boomers got from drinking leaded milk and sniffing leaded gas. It's the only coherent explanation for the bad Russian Well it would have to be, E99 turns you into a single minded simpleton ready to rage as anything unfamil-waaaaait a second.
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Dec 18, 2022 09:46
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I wonder how hard it would be to dig up old Soviet propaganda videos and compare them to the stuff in Singularity - having not seen any before, it feels like this game is just biting as much Bioshock as the devs could get in there, but I suppose it's possible that these videos are closer to accurate than they seem to the uninformed.
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Dec 20, 2022 18:56
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H h h sovnoohb ofjwheoeiog! 
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Dec 23, 2022 17:27
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I remember Gorky 17 because when I played the demo I had no idea what turn based combat was I so completely lost when combat started. “Random word” is at least almost certainly a deliberate joke, especially if it’s on a crate duplicated throughout the whole game. And I actually completely forgot the next boss happens so early in the game.
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Dec 24, 2022 07:33
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