What it REALLY means to be a French Nerd!

All right, time to be serious, honest and brave. Everyone knows it, everyone fears it (may it be of terror or disgust) but nobody, except the french fans, knows what it really means to grow up as a french canadian video game nerd. Well, allow me to demonstrate through the eyes of a frenchy eyes of my childhood
(imagine we go back in time).

First of all, if your father shows you Pac-Man or Mario when you're barely 4 years old (1991), you are screwed. You are. Sure, by themselves you will not have that much problems, but then you will be interested in games with stories AND TEXTS in them like Zelda, Metroid, Faxanadu or whatever. You will not be able to understand ANYTHING! Yet you will hang to them no matter what. You do not really know why or how. Oh, at that time, stuff like Nintendo Power didn't exist for us. Poor poor Quebec nerds raging at their little RPGs...

The result of this is that you would become good at games like Megaman, or any action-oriented games (at least this is the case for kids my age, but I am ready to bet some older people could kick ass in video games too!). Reason being you can COMPLETE THESE GAMES by usually going in one direction and it's not like Megaman is hard to understand. Kick ass, kick more ass, beat the game. Same with any kind of scrolling shooters or platformers...Contra anyone? Now you know why I kick scores in these games.

I may be talking about video games, but what about movies or books, or music for that matter? What about Saturday morning shows, do we even have those? Well, surprisingly enough, movies and books were nearly all translated. Even the bad ones. And if you think "Super Mario Bros. the Movie" is bad, try it in french. You will cry. But for the good movies there is no difference really. Even the voice dubbing is really good.(Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Terminator, every Disney movies in existence and Princess Mononoke....God this one is gorgeous in french. There is a lot more of course, but no point making a list). Same for books and television shows. We had our share of harry Potter, Eragon, Twilight (yeah yeah DX), Sherlock Holmes, and a lot more (again, no point in making a list, they are all there).
As for cartoons...Duck tales, inspector gadget, TMNT, Transformers, X-men, Spiderman, Bugs Bunny and all his friends...AGAIN, no point in making a list. I will add that some of the animes we had, older or not, were really good. Inuyasha, pokemon, digimon (yeah yeah), Sailor Moon (I am not kidding, it was actually awesome AND not annoying)...those are the ones I remember.

However...there is, of course, the "bad ones" plaguing our minds. Things that are awesome in english (and/or japanese) and simply ruined by horrible french actors (sometimes, they're not even from Quebec. It is horrendous :S). Here is a few: Dragonball (Jesus), Hokuto No Ken (oh god WHY?!??!), most of the Arnold movies (except the really good ones like Terminator and Predator), every kung-fu movies in existence (please forgive me Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, we are not worthy!), Power Rangers...I will never forget DX

So really, the difference between Quebec and the rest of the world is pretty much a crappier government and a horrendous frenchy Dragon Ball. No matter, we had Transformers to teach us life lessons.

Back to video games. My question is "Why did the video game industry left us to rot like that?" Well, I can sort of answer myself. When I was younger I was one of the only ones who ever loved video games. Oh, there was other nerds already and the gaming industry was really working, but in the really young "french" kids department, not that much (and that is important. The market boomed with Nintendo stuff but it doesn't mean we kids understood it).  Console gaming was exclusively in english at that time, and no official support from magazines or anything else existed (except in english of course DX). There was television shows about it, but guess what. English. Good luck playing RPGs (expect if you bought games from France or something like that. I must say that some shops had games in french, but they were rare to find. That is how I got myself a copy of "Zelda: A Link To The Past" translated. Lucky find!).
When the N64 and the PS1 launched, Internet was there for most of the people. That means help for pretty much every games you couldn't understand. However by that point I was already starting to read in english and understood enough to progress by myself. I re-discovered older games I couldn't play before and became a REAL nerd. Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger are good examples.
To note, this is where I noticed people around my age CARING at all about gaming stuff. SuperSmash Bros. and Final Fantasy 7 were gigantic hits in Quebec. From my perspective (at least where I lived, you can give some feedback on that even if you're not french), this is when it really exploded. WANNABE SEPHIROTHS EVERYWHERE!!!

For PC gaming, that was another story. Most of the games (and applications) were available in a lot of languages, french included. This is how I discovered Diablo, Red Alert, Star Craft and my always beloved X-Com: UFO Defense, my favorite game of all time (and all of those at a young age. Diablo is so badass when you're younger than 12!). All of these games were available in french and me and my cousin Sam really got hooked on all of them.

Later in the history of gaming in french, voice acting happened. Oh boy. Games with actors were often subtitled in french, at the beginning at least, but as time went on they were fully translated (even Gigantic RPG games like Final Fantasy, Mass Effect and etc.). At that point my english understanding (reading and listening) was really good for my age, and I am sure it is the case for most of the french gamers in here. However I must say that **most** of the translated games are really good (in french at least). We're lucky to have great voice actors. As for Super Mario Galaxy....oh well, at least the characters ain't talking out loud (I know Mario never talks...but just imagine he does :D).

Anyway, this was a short fragment of my mind. Felt like talking about this. I hope you enjoyed this really random post (despite every comments concerning me being a french nerd) and feel free to add anything you want in the comment section!