A while ago, somebody here (Partlett?) mentioned in a thread about Gothic that he enjoyed playing games in German, because it helped him learn the language.
Well, I’m learning Russian. So what (good) games are available in that language, especially RPGs?
in russia games play you!
Russia’s got a ton of home-made games, most of them unreleased here. You’ll have to order from a European site.
Space Rangers 2: Dominators. It’s primarily turn-based strategy/exploration, but it has RPG elements and a ton of text.
So what (good) games are available in that language, especially RPGs?
Tons of. Many games from western games are being localized and - as already mentioned above - there’s quite a number of titles by Russian developers you won’t get to see in the Western markets.
Our lead designer was in Russia last week to demo our title to the press for our local publisher there. He brought along some Russian gaming mags. There was quite a number of titles I had not heard of before, like that one Jagged-Alliance-style tactics game that got 8.6 out of 10 in one of the mags. (I’ll have to dig up the name when I’m in the office again.)
Most games cost around €2-4 bucks, pirated titles about half the price. Funnily enough, EA have tried to sell their titles for like €20 until recently.
-Julian
I found it very useful, although I ended up learning some very odd German. A lot of the Gothic II text is kind of medieval, and some of it is quite rude in a contemporary way. People in Gothic 2 are always talking down to the player at first, calling you “kleiner” (runt), “penne” (bum), “mistkerl” (scumbag) and “lump” (rascal).
I’d recommend you get a game with subtitles, though, unless your Russian is already pretty good. I found wandering into German games to be disheartening, as I would get a lot of words thrown at me very quickly that I’d have to try and understand, and usually I would fail. I found that German language games with English subtitles (like G2: NotR), or English language games with German subtitles (like a German release of Riddick), were the best.
The great thing about Gothic 2 was that it had so much spoken dialogue, but I could also get the characters to repeat their lines over and over again until I could pick out each word they were saying. Anything useful I’d write down for future reference. Unfortunately these kinds of subtitled games are becoming much less common - you might have to look at some older titles to get something similar in Russian.
How about all of Nival’s stuff? Silent Storm, for example, and the new Night Watch has been released over there, I believe. There’s quite a few Russian RPGs, space sims and other niche genre games that never make it to English.
Pretty much every Buka game is available in native Russian, as well as Nival, also like some people mentioned Russia indeed does localize pretty much every game, as far as I know 1C does most of that:
Good luck trying to get a hold of that though, I haven’t seen a copy of a 1C translated game since I left Russia :).