Why do you need to learn russian in australia?

My partner and many of our friends are Russian. But what is wrong with learning a foreign language? It's a fun hobby.

Probs not what you're looking for but there are a couple FPS / RPG hybrid games developed by a Russian dev team called Deep Shadows which have, obviously, a Russian version. Actually only the Russian versions were released officially before the company went under, myself and Wesp5 (the Vampire Bloodlines guy) hacked together a fan made English translation. Anyway check them out - they're on steam now I notice; I'm wondering if they used my translation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-iWnISp4H4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPUSVg2wYXM

Greetings from an ethnic Russian living in Australia. Russia was and is notorious for digital piracy and lax copyright laws. I am not aware of a single MS-DOS game which was sold legally in USSR/Russia (at least in my town of origin). I learned about existence of big box pc games when I turned 30 😀.

Previously I thought that all games are supposed to be distributed via BBS or on collection CDs. Posting links to Russian translations on vogons wouldn't be wise, because from what I experienced rather than releasing patches translators hacked right into game engines and released the whole thing on bootleg floppies or more commonly collection CDs.

On a positive note there exist a plethora of translations of outstanding quality. That is basically how I learned English - I played same games in Russian then English. Thankfully different collection CDs had different versions and there were hundreds of them available. Be warned though - a lot of Russian translators thought they are also comedians, so they often replaced English humour or phrases they didn't fully understand with something completely random, yet close and understandable to a person with an USSR mentality (things like idioms or references specific to culture).

P.S.:
Hint 1: "old games translations" in Russian is: переводы старых игр.
Hint 2: if you paste an url to a russian site to https://translate.google.com it will give you an approximate translation of website contents, maybe this way you'll have better luck finding something of interest, if not translations then maybe some other material which may help you in your language-learning quest.

Cheers

Here is a little list of fan translated games http://www.old-games.ru/wiki/%D0%91%D1%8E%D1% … B2_Old-Games.RU
But you will miss a TON of old games translated illegally by pirates, you will need to look on some russian torrent trackers (link in pm, if you want) 😎

alexsydneynsw wrote:

That is basically how I learned English - I played same games in Russian then English. Thankfully different collection CDs had different versions and there were hundreds of them available. Be warned though - a lot of Russian translators thought they are also comedians, so they often replaced English humour or phrases they didn't fully understand with something completely random, yet close and understandable to a person with an USSR mentality (things like idioms or references specific to culture).

Спасибо большое! Вы помните, как называются эти CD? Я хочу найти их.

KainXVIII wrote:

Here is a little list of fan translated games http://www.old-games.ru/wiki/%D0%91%D1%8E%D1% … B2_Old-Games.RU
But you will miss a TON of old games translated illegally by pirates, you will need to look on some russian torrent trackers (link in pm, if you want) 😎

могли бы вы отправить мне ссылки, пожалуйста?

DonutKing wrote:

Спасибо большое! Вы помните, как называются эти CD? Я хочу найти их.

Series which were widely available in my town were called "Crazy Collection 1,2,3,...,etc." (no idea how much there actually were, maybe around 20). This collection was indeed crazy because some discs contained viruses 😀. Not all games on these were translated though, so if you find these you'll have to dig through them manually to find translated games.

Funny ! I never liked translated games. Exception was only for amateur, self made translations that, thought were sold on CD's like Classic_Fond or Crasy_Games series. I still have a DooM-1 with Russian sounds, made with some humor.)

but for sure, the Civilisation II as well as Age of Empires were oficially translated, I remember it from the 1990's I had CD's then.

And I think many later games were translated, of PII-PIII era - I still have Nox, Midtown Madnes, Red Baron II, X-Wing Alliance, Revenant, Diablo ,Crimson Skyes and Deus Ex, - that seem to be translated professionaly. There was a lot more of them, but these CD's survived from PIII era.)

Hi!

Many of the best translations were produced by a pirate company named Fargus (Фаргус). They are the studio that basically started the Russian game localisation scene. Of course at some point after 2002-2003 their quality dropped significantly, but earlier titles were awesome. Be on the lookout for covers like this, with a golden frame and a fish logo:

Back in the day I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate, Diablo and Fallout in their translations.

Gog.com actually sells some games with Fargus translations.

Akella is also nice — this basically was the same company with Fargus.

I know there is a russian translation for RA2 and Yuris revenge expansion, for both the in-game text and the cutscenes (I couldn't get access to an english version at the time and was stuck with a translation)

Games werent a good way to learn another language for me personally, as being able to navigate the menus for options and save/load was the furthest I ever got.
Admittedly, everyones experience will vary.

Fargus fallout was great indeed! Thoroughly enjoyable complete with translated graphics like signs and banner ads in game. I was excited when I found Full Throttle made by them, but their fully voiced translation turned out to be worse than another subtitle only version by some unknown pirate team.

Weird but I remember Akella being atrocious. For me Akella mark on a cd was a sign to stay away. Can't remember a single good translation from them, maybe I was just unlucky with Akella games I got.

Also fargus came into play in late 90s and they didn't do much dos games aside from 7th guest and few others. I have never seen a fargus translation of a floppy game for sure.

alexsydneynsw wrote:

Fargus fallout was great indeed! Thoroughly enjoyable complete with translated graphics like signs and banner ads in game. I was excited when I found Full Throttle made by them, but their fully voiced translation turned out to be worse than another subtitle only version by some unknown pirate team.

Weird but I remember Akella being atrocious. For me Akella mark on a cd was a sign to stay away. Can't remember a single good translation from them, maybe I was just unlucky with Akella games I got.

Also fargus came into play in late 90s and they didn't do much dos games aside from 7th guest and few others. I have never seen a fargus translation of a floppy game for sure.

My theory is, it goes like this: Fargus produced pirated translations for games Akella (or any other Russian publisher like Buka, 1C or Russobit-M) didn't have an official deal to sell. Considering a game in late 90s needed to cost no more than 100-150 rubles (about 4-5 bucks after the 1998 crisis), most big-name publishers didn't agree to sell their hits on the Russian market. Which is why Akella simply didn't have good games until the mid-00s — they were all published under Fargus brand.

Still, there are some nice translations by Akella — Gothic comes to my mind right away.

Re: DOS games — I was a kid at the time, so I might be wrong, but I don't think there were too many translated floppy games. Taraley and Zhabokryak («Таралей и Жабокряк») translated most of Sierra quests, but that's about all I can name.

Also, there are some nice Russian games you can try. Back in the day I really liked "Vangers", "Rage of Mages" (Аллоды)/Evil Islands series and Silent Storm, among others. Many people also liked "Petka and Vasiliy Ivanovich" series of quests — those are games about Civil War in Russia. Also, "Cossacs" series is worth mentioning.

But again, no DOS games, unfortunately.

jheronimus wrote:

«Таралей и Жабокряк»

Awesome article! I don't browse much Russian internet past couple years but it looks like retro scene is thriving there now!

Good on them, they probably have plenty of old hardware lying around because USSR was not a throw-away society. You are supposed to store stuff you no longer use on your apartment block's balcony for around 50-70 years until it's socially acceptable to throw it away 😀.

Thanks everyone, lots of good information here.
I managed to find a few old games in Russian.

Last night I played Sid Meier's Colonization in Russian, even though I know the english version of this game back to front it was still challenging playing it in Russian.
I don't suppose anyone has version 3.0 patch for Russian version of Colonization? Only version I found was 2.25 which has some bugs, and it doesn't work with version 3.0 English executable.

I might try some Russian games, I remember reading a review of Vangers when it was released but I don't think the reviewer understood the game very well.

DonutKing wrote:

even though I know the english version of this game back to front it was still challenging playing it in Russian

Awesome! I sincerely believe this is the way to go for quick results for cheap. Maybe focus less on storytelling and more on menu items and gameplay related labels. I never attended any English courses in my life and didn't pay a penny for language textbooks. All English I know is from games, songs and books.

There also exists a huge rom translation scene in Russia. It's a cool hobby and a programming exercise - hacking through roms and trying to decompress resources, then translate them properly and pack them back in. Here: http://shedevr.org.ru/cgi-bin/gamez.cgi Just use the dropdowns to select platform and/or genre and click "Есть" on game page to download.

They have plenty of games there which were released for both console and ms-dos (snes and genesis had a lot of multiplatform ones), maybe you find some familiar titles which don't have too many text so you don't feel overwhelmed. Take note these are merely patches so you'll have to provide your own roms and patch them yourself.

alexsydneynsw wrote:

DonutKing wrote:

even though I know the english version of this game back to front it was still challenging playing it in Russian

Awesome! I sincerely believe this is the way to go for quick results for cheap. Maybe focus less on storytelling and more on menu items and gameplay related labels. I never attended any English courses in my life and didn't pay a penny for language textbooks. All English I know is from games, songs and books.

Your English is very good.
May I ask for how long you have been learning English this way?

All The Witcher games have professional full Russian audio
Also The Prince And The Coward (aka Galador)

DonutKing wrote:

May I ask for how long you have been learning English this way?

My current command of the language is a result of working with native speakers and living in English speaking countries for a limited time, so current state of affairs is not representative of the gaming/reading method I endorse 😀.

In addition to that it would be fair to mention that we had English and German lessons in school, but in defence of gaming/reading learning I can say I am not capable of understanding or speaking German in any capacity at this moment. My current German vocabulary consists of less then 10 words and I still have no idea how sentence structure works, because I didn't do German stuff outside school.

Anyway, I think it took me 1-2 years to get an intuitive grasp of how the language works when I was a teenager using just games and 1-2 books of short stories. I skipped all the tense tables and rules they forced us to learn by heart in school - intuition I developed while observing live language patterns was way more helpful for me personally I think.