::A Geek in Korea::

Speech contest season is upon Korea once again, which means my wife has request after request to translate speeches for students. This is part of her responsibilty at her school. Her boss, due to pressure from the student’s mothers, expects her to help these students cheat on their speech contests. This means I get called in to help with the grammar and translation of the final products. While we supply the English text, in most cases, the students aren’t responsible for most of the writing of the Korean either.

Today’s speech was a book report done by a girl in elementary school. It might have actually been written by the girl as well. It was a book report about what happens to garbage after it has been thrown away. The girl talks about how garbage bins get stressed as people throw garbage into them. She says that garbage cans must be sad when they are full. She says that garbage cans must really love the garbage truck, because it takes the garbage away. She called garbage trucks, "The savior of all garbage cans".

When you translate something, you can easily manipulate the content to sound better or worse. While you want to remain neutral, you can change tone, intent, and meaning significantly as you go. We try to remain as literal and honest about our translation as we can. We know that calling garbage trucks "saviors" is an odd thing to say, but it’s what she wrote. We aren’t going to change what she said to put it into our own more adult voice. Keeping the original "voice" for such speeches can be rather difficult, because when a parent has written the entire speech to begin with, it often muddles the translation. They tend to use words no children would know, and trying to write simple sentences for them to memorize in English would be difficult. When politics or some sort of agenda gets involved, it’s often very frustrating to translate without feeling like a complete tool.

The worst thing about the entire speech contest season is the fact that all the students are forced to memorize everything we write. We try to keep the sentences simple, but when parents write long speeches, the students often have several pages to memorize. We don’t make listening tapes for the kids anymore, as it is too much of a bother and is beyond what is required for her school. Most of the students can’t speak English well at all, so they need to practice for weeks before the contest.

I think it’s a terrible method to force people to speak English, and I honestly think it causes much more stress than should be allowed on very young students. I’ve had six and seven year old students trying to memorize entire pages of English dialog. It’s a waste of time, as 90% of all the speech is memorized phonetically without any meaning at all. Hopefully the speeches we have to do this year will be at least as entertaining as this one was.

As previously mentioned, I have now have A Nintendo DS capable of going online. I’ve now played three of my four online games over WiFi and I’ve gotten different experiences out of each one.

Tetris DS:
This is my main online game experience. I’ve played a more than 70 games online. The games have all been smooth, easy to set up, and fast. I’ve never had any problems with people quitting in the middle of the game, and because the options are so limited, there really isn’t a way for people to spoil my fun. My only issue at the moment is the ranking system. I’m not ranked that high, as I started out losing basically every other game to much better players. Once my ranking fell, I got into some better matches with some people a little closer to my skill level.

 As I slowly rise my ranking back up, beating people ranked much lower than me, I’ll occasionally get matched with someone with several hundred wins who promptly kicks my ass. Depending on the ranking difference, people with lower rankings stand to gain by playing with upper level people, because a win grants more ranking points. I haven’t beaten anyone with a ranking substantially over my own, but I’ve won series of games against lower players that hardly budged my score.

I play the simple "two players, no items" rules. These are the easiest games to find. When I try to play four player games, I usually have to wait a minute or two for players to join, and more often than not, someone will drop, forcing the game search to resume again. This is the only time when you can play with more than one other player, so perhaps this is just something you must be willing to accept. The few games I’ve played in this mode were good, but tend to end quickly if you get a bad item thrown your way.

Metroid Prime: Hunters
Metroid Prime is my FPS game of choice at the moment. I never really got into the whole multiplayer FPS scene when I was in the United States, as I was too busy playing my Gameboy or Playstation. My aiming, sniping, and camping skills are weak. While I’ve been working through the rather tedious single player campaign (BACKTRACKING! REPETITIVE BOSSES! BOO!)

I have gotten online a few times to play this over WiFi as well. It’s basically a twitch based shooter, like any other FPS, with characters that have different bonuses and advantages. I can’ t win a game for the life of me, but of course everyone in the United States that bought a Nintendo DS early had gotten a demo of the game that let them practice their skills. I’m almost a year behind in my aiming skills, so I shouldn’t feel bad.

This game feels much more robust. Tons of options. Tons of levels. Lots of depth between the characters. The alternative forms for the characters, and their special abilities add a lot of the fun for this game. Nearly everyone plays simple deathmatch rules, which are okay. Some of the characters and level combinations can be cheap. People pick things that favor their character to get an edge. I don’t have any friends enabled, so I don’t get to use voice chat. Adding friends is much easier than Tetris and Animal Crossing. Anyone you play can potentially be added as a rival, then moved to friend, which would let you add them as a chat partner.

It certainly isn’t a true Metroid game, more like a Quake total conversion, but it’s surprising that the Nintendo DS can pull off smooth, polished FPS without a problem. While this isn’t my favorite game online, it certainly is the most impressive.

Animal Crossing: Wild World
This is the first WiFi game I bought, but i hadn’t been able to play it online until today. The premise of the online game is that you are inviting people over to your town. There is even a bonus for getting people to connect to your town and buying an item in your store. You get a new upgraded store with the ability to change your characters hair! Sadly, my store had just closed, so I wasn’t able to get anyone in my store for the upgrade.

The online friend system is a little cumbersome for this game. You need to add your friend, and they have to add you. Then you must open your gate to let them into your village. This is to prevent random people into your town and messing things up. Finding people to play with when you live on a different continent with 12+ time difference can be difficult. Since the game is time based, you can’t access some items or activities depending on the time it is when people join. Also, the villagers stay in their houses, and some random visitors disappear if you invite people to your town.

I did invite someone over, and they helped me pull weeds in my long neglected town. As payment, I allowed them to raid my overloaded fruit trees and take whatever they needed back to their town.  I’ll also get viral content from Nintendo as well as other people’s towns if I visit them, or have them come to my village. This is pretty cool, but it takes a lot of work finding people to play with. Adding codes and logging on to find people is a little tough without outside help to organize when people will be online.

I have yet to play Mario Kart DS online. This is mainly because I’ve heard of problems with the online system of keeping people honest. People tend to disconnect when they are about to lose. They don’t get charged for a lose due to the way the game was set up, which was later improved on for Tetris DS. No thanks.

I’ve extremely satisfied with my Wi-Fi dongle, and I’m simply waiting for the announcement of the Nintendo DS lite in the United States for a few of my friends to cave in. Then I’ll be getting even more online experience with people. Should be getting better as time goes on too, as people discover the system and the games. More online games are on the way, and I can’t wait.