A game that has been thoroughly translated will not give the user the impression that all that was done was a hasty translation of the box and the manual to ship the game around the world. It will place the customer in a familiar environment where all their attention will be devoted to solving puzzles, eradicating the earth-conquering aliens, winning the World Cup or discovering the largest treasure on the planet, and not to fathoming out how they are supposed to land their ship without crashing on a space station or why they are shooting the green giant octopuses in the first place. Some will argue that in this age of European expansion, young people should come into contact with foreign language as often as possible. They might even go so far as to say that computer games, by virtue of the undeniable fascination they exert on young people, are the ideal vehicle for linguistic development. And they would surely have a point here.
Computers are indeed wondrous tools which, used properly, can produce spectacular results.
But one has to realise that games which contain a large amount of English are unlikely to teach a language in the way that, say, a subtitled film would. That argument therefore becomes invalid. Many parents, determined that their offspring should acquire a degree of competence in what is felt to be the international language, are well aware of the fact. Language teaching is quite different from throwing beginners in at the deep end without any guidance. As for game reviewers in countries where English is a foreign language, the one fact they often lament, apart from the ever-increasing hardware configuration required these days to play most games, is that some games are not thoroughly translated into their own language.