You have a good point on how this game plays on some of the right wing paranoia of the mid/late 90s. I was still in college then, so I was a bit oblivious to some of that, personally. I just found it a fun game to run around in and different from most other first person shooters of the era.

I’ve actually never played Deus Ex with the sound on — it wouldn’t do me any good anyway — so I can’t say whether or not all of the dialogue is also voiced. It probably is a bit cheaper than hiring voice talent, particularly if you design it well — as I recall, the captioning boxes in Deus Ex are very similar to the text pop-ups on the datacubes and books, so they were probably able to re-use a fair bit of code for it.

HL2, by contrast, uses full-up captioning — every bit of dialogue and every sound effect is fully captioned. This is also the case for all of Valve’s HL2-engined games such as Team Fortress 2 (though it doesn’t have much to caption, really) and Left 4 Dead. It’s remarkably similar to closed captioning on TV, in fact. I suspect this may partly have been Valve atoning for their sins in the original Half Life, which was a huge disappointment for me on account of being dialogue-driven and having no captioning whatsoever.

Unfortunately, captioning in games is still very hit-or-miss. Some do, some don’t, some only do a half-arsed job of it. I haven’t played a ton of recent games so I can’t think of a newer no-captions example offhand. I’ve already cited the example of HL2 for a good one (and it’s so good that I sent Valve a very effusive email telling them so).

A good example of a partial captions job would by Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. The little bits and pieces of dialogue — such as interrogating someone — are not captioned, but your radio communications with the guy at your base are. This is actually very unfortunate because I’m told those interrogations are some of the most amusing parts of the game. (You should, incidentally, review one of those two next…)

BioShock (which I haven’t played personally, but have seen some footage of) also did a nice job in that regard, and even managed to integrate the captioning in a way that didn’t seem out of place with the UI.

On the whole, I’d say accessibility is improving for single player games, which I think is great. The increasing prevalence of voice comms for multiplayer games is a bit frustrating, though.

I do have to say that many of the specific elements of the plot have a rather quaint feel to them. The emphasis on the UN and FEMA, the Men in Black, and the black helicopters are all lifted straight from the right-wing militia mythos that was fairly prevalent in the mid-to-late 90’s, and the NSF appears to be a futuristic version of those same militias. It all has an almost nostalgic feel now.

You make an interesting point about the game’s accessibility; I hadn’t known that about the captioning. I think of games as being primarily a visual medium, and I would assume (perhaps wrongly) that adding captioning to a game is cheaper and less time-consuming than recording voice acting for the entire game.

Has good-quality captioning become more common since Half Life 2 came out, or is HL2 just the latest high-water mark? I remember that even ten or fifteen years ago, many foreign games were localized in the US with stilted and amateurish translations, and often the only requirement for being a “voice actor” was to be in the office on the day the speech samples were being recorded.

Now that video games are Big Business, though, it’s much more common for games to feature slickly professional localization and voice work. Does this trend seem to apply to accessibility as well?

I’d also like to note that Deus Ex set a bar for accessibility that wasn’t really equaled until Half Life 2 came out years later. Every cut scene and every bit of dialog in Deus Ex is captioned, and it’s really quite well done.

Looking forward to more entries.