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I discovered over the weekend while playing Portal on a friend’s orange box that it has closed captions AND subtitles, and the handheld controller vibrates during certain events, such as firing the gun or impacting.
Previously:
Subtitles needed in video games
Glad to hear. I’m really looking forward to Portal but was skeptical as it received very positive reviews for excellent narration and satire/humor tone while you play and I definitely don’t want to miss that. I’ll pick up the game in couple of days.
I believe the other games in the Orange Box package – Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 episode 1, Half-Life 2 episode 2, and Team Fortress 2, all also have closed captioning and subtitles. (As you know, Kathryn, I’m hard of hearing, so I typically turn on subtitles when I can.) The Half-Life 2 series is a seminal game series that introduced many new storytelling innovations and technologies. Highly recommended.
There are many additional visual cues beyond subtitles & closed captioned. For instance, in Team Fortress 2, when you get damaged, a section of the screen lights up in the direction you were damaged from, and the shape of the lights indicates the nature of the damage.
However, deafies might have trouble playing Team Fortress 2, simply because it’s a multiplayer team game, and a lot of the player-to-player communication is conducted via microphones.
I seem to remember that BioShock was also very deaf-friendly. It too is a seminal game. It seems to be winning many 2007 “game of the year” awards.
The game’s developer, Valve, does a very good job with closed caption and subtitle options. I use them, even though my hearing is fine, just because there’s often so much going on in the games and I get distracted by background sounds when listening to speech.
One thing, though: the subtitles aren’t always perfect. For Portal in particular, the turret gun robots generally say much more… adorable things than the captions report. (For instance, they’ll say “There you are!” and it’ll be captioned as “Target acquired.”) It seems that the subtitles are based on the game’s script, and although the voice acting rarely deviates from the script, there are a few discrepancies. I am guessing this is due to the time-sensitive nature of game development; they probably just don’t have the time to double-check every line before the game needs to be shipped.
Oh, and on the topic of BioShock, it is indeed a fantastic game with subtitle options… but the timing on the subtitles is all over the place. They work fine for short lines, but for longer speeches they hurry by much faster than the scene actually plays out. This is particularly noticeable in a very early scene, where one random doomed fellow’s “death gurgle” is reported long before he’s even attacked. Also, the (admittedly short) video intro and endings to the game don’t have subtitles, though it’s easy to tell what’s going on. There aren’t any closed captions, either.
Still an amazing game, though.
All the games in the Orange Box support Subtitles/Close Captioning. Just in actual gameplay, Team Fortress 2 doesn’t use it. (It does use it for the Developer Commentary though).
I do hope you make a blog post about how crappy X-box Live is toward Deaf users. As one, and playing Team Fortress 2 on XBL without voice because I CAN’T HEAR where it REQUIRES you to communicate, it’s frustrating.
It’s great to hear most of the games I wanted are subtitled/captioned. Rather disappointed when I turned on TF2′s subs to find it doesn’t do it at all.
I agree with kevspace, I had some trouble in TF2 because of the microphone communication. Sometime other times, I don’t really have a problem IF there are fewer players and less shouting.