All your base are belong to us

Rant mode on
The title of this post may sound funny, but with my almost religious habit of downloading casual games daily from Bigfishgames.com. I have noticed a small, but noticeable trend and, that is spelling errors in the most obvious of places which are reminiscent of the title of this blog post.

Now, I am no grammar nazi and am definitely not formally educated in the field of linguistics, but spelling errors and poor usage of English just irks me. I would fully understand the usage of colloquialism to bring out the full flavor of the game environment and design, but poor usage of English is just plain sloppy.

The latest example came from a casual game where the word "puzzle" was displayed as "pazzle" on my screen and that was in the help screen which is a very important screen for casual games, no less.

Anyway, it is imperative that all game text should be translated by people who have a good grasp of the language itself, or are native speakers of that language itself. When there is a need to localize the text for our casual game for countries such as France, I would definitely hire a French native speaker to translate the text for me. Thank god that I have friends residing in France and other European countries who are willing to do this small favor for me.

But if they are not available, paying for a good translator is the very least that I can do to ensure a certain level of quality. After all, quality in a game is not just confined to the stability of the code and the fun factor of the game itself.
Rant mode off