hmm, so it was after my departure, in 2005 :)
No, I wasn't talking about NC, because I never bought anything from them. I was referring to companies which I worked with, like Vivendi-Universal/Atari, Greenleaf, the late Brasoft (which went bankrupt and each director founded another distributor, that's how TD was created)... Brasoft was kinda good actually.
Some of them did translate the games and hired some garage studio to dub the voice act, like they did in Starcraft (which I have original and could only play with original voice downloading from Battle.net digital distribution server) and Max Payne. That was really awful! And I say that as an studio owner and audio producer for games :)
Also, the tech support of any of these companies was really painful. I managed this department when I was at Tech Dealer and we did some very good work on it, solving almost any of the customers problems and actually digging the problems and creating a knowledge base for each game. No other publisher had it in Brazil by that time.
But now, I don't know how is the markey today. I never bought a console game in the stores around here, I bring them from outside, so I never recurred to NC support or something like it.
As I said, localization is a very sensitive subject, you need to have a very good team working on it so they won't write bs, translate part of the code, make text fit in the visual fields and boxes, make the text sync with events and dialogues... it's not so simple as it seems. Most of localizations here in Brazil really stinks.
I don't know about the games Microsoft did translate, like Viva Pinata, but seems it they looked (and sounded) good. But I always prefer to hear the original sounds.

Guys, buy Shatter!
I just played with that and possibly the best brick breaker game out there. It's like Krakout on steroids!
Also, Flatout UC and Torchlight are must have games from todays deal.

Also buy it because its by New Zealanders and all NZers are poor and need your help, lol.

Leaning towards Red Faction and possibly Guild 2 -- just a note for anyone interested you apparently only need to buy the Pirates edition of Guild 2 as it contains the original game and is stand alone so the bundle is just a money grab.

I'd certainly say so. Especially if you're hankering after something a bit different.
Just so you know, comparatively, it's a pretty slow game. But despite that it's not the easiest game either. There is however a patch for it that makes it easier.

Ooh.
In that case, I buy. Thanks.

I already owned the original and picked up the bundle because I was not sure whether the add-on would snap on to the retail version - d'oh! Oh well, so it's just a 60% instead of a 75% discount, and I think the money is well-spent on Guild games. It's just a pity because I have to take care of my Steam budget as it is...
Steam forums say that the same thing happened for Mount & Blade and Mount & Blade: Warband. Judging from the posts by the JoWooD guy I think he just didn't know that the original content was included when he set up the bundle. Interestingly, he also stated that The Guild 2: Venice was rejected by Valve because it had a low Metacritic score. I wasn't aware that Steam enforces such a policy (although he also said that if he could prove that patches removed the technical difficulties the critics mentioned, he could probably still get it approved).

IT's great that Eidos removed the region restrictin thing for Japan. I want to buy something to make sure they don't change their minds.. but it turns out there's nothing I want.
Still waiting for Total War, Rockstar and Dark Messiah then...
PS/ is it true that the only reason they haven't been on steam for the last few years is that no one thought of it?

According to Wada (CEO Square-Enix) it was due to a communication gap between them and Valve.
He Tweeted: 昨日深夜、Valve、海外版購入の解除完了しました。先方担当と当方担当、当方担当者間、各々のコミュニケーションギャップが複雑骨折になっていました。ご迷惑をおかけし申し訳ございませんでした。なお、当然ですが、我々にパブリッ シュ権限を持っているものが対象です。 (http://twitter.com/yoichiw/status/17377420245)
Which basically translates to:
"Yesterday evening, the restrictions on overseas versions were fully lifted by Valve. There were various communication gaps between the people in charge at their end and our end resulting in complications. We apologies for the inconvenience caused. It should go without saying that this only applies to the games that we publish."
So, I think we can expect Square-Enix/Eidos titles to now be available for good.

Spotted a lot of GOGers there :)

So it's more like no-one at Squenix noticed ;-)

Possibly. Makes you wonder if that's the only reason we still can't get games from EA and the like. Simply because Valve haven't even tried to contact them (after all, we know the publishers here won't contact them).

Yeap, so many GOGers. :)

I can also recommend "SlamIt Pinball: Big Score" for all pinball fans. It's $/€ 1.69, and it looks and plays great! Probably the best pinball game since the Pro Pinball series. And it's got an interesting feature: to nudge the table, you simply SLAM any keys on your keyboard. Check out the trailer!
I only have a slight problem (on Win7 64) with Trap.exe, the program that disables all Windows keys so you can mash away. It doesn't quit when the game quits, so I have to Ctrl+Alt+Del afterwards and kill the task so that I can use the taskbar, task-switch etc. again. Minor.