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Tuesday’s Trope: Bilingual Bonus

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Most of us American gamers only understand English, and that means developers can have a bit of fun while keeping their jokes hidden. Many games use different languages for dialogue, narration, and even names, and if you understand those other languages, you can get a lot of great information that will fly over English-only gamers' heads. Sometimes the language isn't even real, and the game counts on the player to decipher it himself. Either way, this is the Bilingual Bonus.

Examples of the Bilingual Bonus include:

• Super Mario has Waluigi, which may seem like a dumb name, but in Japanese it's a pun. "Waru" means bad, thus "Wario" by combining Mario and Waru, Waluigi seems to be the same, but with L-R conversion, it's "waru iji" which is "ijiwaru (mean person)" backwards. Crosses over with Incredibly Lame Pun.
• The arcade game Metal Slug 2 starts out in a Middle-Eastern desert town filled with Arabic signs. At the end of the level, where the first boss is fought, two massive banners dominate the street in the background, stating (in Arabic) "I have diarrhea" and "I need medicine."
• In Crysis, on higher difficulty levels all the in-game enemy dialogue is spoken in Korean, which provides a handy advantage to players who happen to be fluent in the language. On lower difficulties, all enemy battle calls are spoken in English while the standard enemy chatter remains in Korean.
• The Commander Keen computer games featured a language named the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" that was just coded symbols corresponding to English letters. In the first game, you'd run across signs that, when decoded, said things like "This is neat" and "Behold the holy pogo stick". The coded alphabet remained consistent throughout the entire series.
• Final Fantasy X contains an entire language, Al Bhed, that is represented by a simple substitution cipher. The "translation" for the language is hidden throughout the game, one letter at a time. This gives the game a good replay value, as the translation can be retained. It is also possible for an enterprising player to successfully decipher the code well before actually receiving all 26 letter translations.
• Hitman: Blood Money has newspapers reporting on your deeds after each level, many in foreign languages. The foreign ones are full of jokes. For instance, in Spanish one says "No tengo ninguna pista que ha escrito", which is incorrect grammar for "I have no clue what I've written." (It should be "que he escrito".) Another, oddly, says "Read a book or play outside; to play a game will only make you dumber."
• Thanks to its setting, the Monkey Island series is rife with this. Just to give an example, one of the central antagonists in Tales Of Monkey Island is named Marquis De Singe ('singe' being French for 'monkey', which Guybrush lampshades by calling him Monkeyman in the 4th episode).
• The third generation of Pokemon had several legendary pokemon only accessible by following instructions written in visual braille.