Hey! What's the view on collecting games that are in a different language to your native tongue? For example, I've bought SNES games in the past like Terranigma, Secrets of Mana etc from other European countries but the text has been in the native language for that country, but the upside has been, I get a PAL version of the games to add to my collection and 'show them off' so to speak. I did this again today with Mario Party 1 & 2 for N64, the PAL UK / AUS copies are stupid money even unboxed but I managed to snag them from Spain for £35 for the pair although the text is Spanish. Being a collector this isn't 'cheating' is it? It's still a PAL copy that stays in my collection and I'll play a ROM if I really need to play the game, I just enjoy owning games rather than just playing the ROM.
There are no rules to collecting. I have a lot of Japanese games, either to play them early or because they never got a proper western release. I don't think any less of them in my collection.
I have a few games in Polish, German and French, well the packaging/manuals are but the games are English, also Japanese games. all fine to me, i cant read Japanese though lol. I dont see a problem with it, as long as you can play them it's all gravy, unless certain regions have different content etc like some games are censored for specific regions eg Australia
I know some of the guys here don't see the point of 'collecting' stuff that in theory you wouldn't be able to play, but I've always been one of those pleasure of ownership types. I love to be able to say I own that rather than I've played that which is all I could claim via emulation only. I'm glad I'm not the only one though I find European versions far cheaper versus just UK PAL versions for some reason.
I have a lot of Japanese games. Most of them are arcade-style, so the language isn't an issue. Some of them have menu options in katakana, which I can read. And then there's things where it's asking you if you want to save, and the options are "hai" or "iie", so I choose hai. I couldn't play an RPG or any kind of text-heavy game in Japanese, but for the games I currently own, it's fine. Some of them even have English in them, which is nice.
Plus, they're good fun ways to learn / brush up on a language! Naturally not as good as actually speaking or even watching TV I reckon but still good enough for maintenance. (I didn't always take this view though. When I was a youngster I remember being livid when I picked up Max Payne in Normandy and found out absolutely EVERYTHING, dialogue included, had been localised. The way the game's intro works kept us hoping for what seemed like the longest minute ever)
Very common for Brasil, since almost all the games are in english. An "official" game here is an NTSC-US game with a box and manual in portuguese. Of course there were exceptions. Even the N64 got a couple of portuguese text games back in the day. This past generation (Xbox 360/Wii) there were more portuguese games. The PC was covered since the nineties, but for consoles this was rare stuff.
