Sounds like the beer is terrible.

Only if you go for Beer from Bremen... but Beer from Hamburg or Bavaria: Those are great :)

Neverwinter Nights 2 Chaotic Evil & Lawful Good were available in the UK as GAME store exclusives if I remember rightly (definitely seen them). Think I've seen the Eco Draconis one too in the UK :) probably another exclusive.

Sir, you clearly have never been in Reeperbahn / Hamburgh, so you don't know what you're talking about. ;)

Regarding pubs that's true. Because beer was the cheapest drink in pubs they were forced to offer at last one non-alcoholic cheaper - so now you can also drink very cheap milk there. I don't know if it's only in cologne but also elsewhere.

Well, when I was in Germany, beer in supermarkets was cheaper than a bag of chips or bar of chocolate. And this is how it always should be :P

Aren't some games censored in Germany/Europe?
IIRC the European version of Resident Evil didn't have blood.. I know that Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe(a WWII game) had all of the Nazi symbols and pictures of Hitler removed since I own that version of the game as well as the original uncensored versions released in the US..

The second part of my statement was actually referring to the consistency (rather than the price) of the beer in Cologne. But I can see how my grammar may have muddled the intended slight jab at Cologne's very ... special ... traditional brew. ;)

They are given a little extra attention by publishers because they have to suffer through the *shudder* German localization versions of many a classic.

Ahh, that old joke ;-) There are different sorts of kölsch, some are more rough (gaffel) and others are more fresh (früh). The problem for many outsiders is they start drinking it like water and then get really fast drunk ;-)

Actually I want to break a stance for localized content. Yes, it's always difficult and will produce funny effects like the Power graph in Civilization 4 german version effectively was translated to Electricity graph. :)))

But I still like it. Sometimes I like the german voices even more. LucasArts Adventures were almost as funny in german as in english. And GOG does not really care much to offer other languages besides english. Last time I checked BG and BG2 only supported english.

Well Germany is the biggest PC market so no wonder they have good special editions of PC games. Also most of games that you mentioned are made in Germany.

On other hand they have kinda rough censorship. Many games in Germany have censored brutality and gore. At least they don't censor nudity ;).

Breaking a stance for a mostly broken "feature" then ... fitting. ;)

One of the reasons why I spent so much money on GOG recently was that I could _finally_ get several of the games I wanted without having to put up with silly, broken, idiotic, misleading, half-baked translation attempts and the perpetually recycled voices of the same handful of actors.

For years the game publishers have gotten much less money from me than they could have because for a long time it was quite difficult to buy English versions in Germany. And each purchase I did was accompanied by worries if the English version would be included or not. It's very rarely mentioned on the box (they usually only mention "German manual" or "Game in German"), and when you ask the people working in a game/electronic store whether a game contains an English version, they look at you as if you were an alien.

Btw, to get (somewhat ;) ) back on topic: Doom (yes, the original Doom from the 90s) has just been released in Germany for the Xbox 360, because after 19 years the ban was finally dropped. Source (in German)

*cough* Obliv... *cough* (I mean the text, not the voices)

But I'll admit that localized versions are not all that bad (except for the fact that foreign versions will help learn that language better), IF the localization is of the same quality as the original audio/voice. Unfortunately, I believe there are only very few exceptions where this is actually the case.