Drascula: Improving your Spanish language skills by playing an Adventure Game
Recently I was packaging one of the Retro freeware games, which are supported by the ScummVm project. It’s called Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back and the story is some kind of strange mixture between Dracula
and Frankenstein
.
Language Support
When testing the language support I noticed, that it has been originally developed by a company in Spain called Alcachofa Soft S.L.
, so additional to English it also includes speech in Spanish. Subtitles are available in English, German , French, Italian and Spanish. Therefore I decided to try improving my Spanish language skills and began to play this Adventure. And although the game is from 1996 I enjoyed it a lot!
I figured out that if you press SPACE
while a character is speaking, the sentence will be interrupted (apart from the voice part). And by pressing SPACE
again the game continues. Which was rather useful for me in order to have more time for reading and understanding the subtitles. Press F7/F10
to load/save the game.
Installation
You can find drascula and scummvm packages in the games repository of the openSUSE Build Service.
Installation instructions for openSUSE Leap:
# if you don't have added the 'games' repository yet
# Leap 15.4
zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Leap_15.4/ games
# Leap 15.5
zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Leap_15.5/ games
# will install 'scummvm' package and other dependancies automatically
zypper in drascula
Then just run the command drascula
, select your language (via xmessage
- isn’t this retro?) and enjoy!
Need help?
And in case you struggle - Walkthroughs are available on Youtube - also in Spanish. :-)
Running on Windows, MacOS, etc.
In case you’re using Windows, MacOS, etc. There are precompiled executables of the ScummVM
program availabe for download on the ScummVM Download Page, which you can easily install on your machine. Don’t forget to download also the Drascula datafiles. You will need: Freeware Version (English), Freeware Version (Music Adon, OGG format) and Freeware Version (Updated Spanish, German, French and Italian AddOn). Extract all of them in your favorite directory (readme.txt
can be overriden), then run scummvm
, press Add Game
and Choose
the directory, into which you installed the Drascula
datafiles right before. Now select Graphics
, enable Override global graphic setting
, set Scaler
to HQ
and 3x
and enable Fullscreen mode
. Now select Audio
, enable Override global audio setting
and set Text and speech
to Both
. Press Ok
. Then press Start
to start the game. Have fun!