My girlfriend’s dad has a lot of extra time on his hands these days and he loves shooters, sci-fi, realistic racing, and general action games, stuff like that, but his computer is too slow to play them. I got the idea to get him a PS2, but there’s one problem: He’s Slovak, and doesn’t speak any English. He’s an older gentleman, so he also knows perfect Czech (my guess is this is a more likely language to find games in), but that’s it.
I thought that it would be a simple matter of cross-checking a few top ten lists against a list of games translated into Czech or Slovak, but the latter is apparently even beyond the capabilities of Google. I checked Amazon to see if, for example, GTA3 is in Czech, and when I can find a PAL copy, it only has french, spanish, german, and russian.
Does anyone have any ideas? If there’s something that doesn’t need or use much text, this would be cool too (like Sin & Punishment on the N64). I’m looking for a way to find games in Czech or Slovak, or if you know of any games that happen to be translated into Czech or Slovak as well.
Aren’t the various Arma games and Operation Flashpoint available in Czech? It’s a shooter series, for those with a particularly masochistic bent. Considering an original developer of the series, Bohemia Interactive, is based in Prague, it seems natural. No idea if the language files are available in Czech.
Weeell, I was gonna say “Check either of the Witcher games, they’re based on Polish novels and were made by a Polish studio, there’s bound to be a Czech dub around (and if there isn’t, well, Polish is presumably close enough to Czech to fumble one’s way around) !”… but not on the PS2, there won’t be :(.
How about stuff like *Katamari Damacy *or Shadow of the Colossus ? I have no idea whether they were translated, but they don’t have much dialogue and in either case it’s inconsequential to the gameplay. I haven’t played KD myself, but I can definitely recommend SotC - it’s a beautiful game. Bit short, but it’s well worth a playthrough.
Here’s a list of PS2 games carried by a main Czech retailer - most of them say 'Anglická verze: ANO", or “English version - yes”; some of them have a český manuál, or Czech manual. I think that suggests that not a lot of Czech-language games are available commercially - not for PS2 at any rate.
One of the bigger Slovak stores, Martinus, also has a bunch of games but at a quick glance, they seem to all be “jazyková verzia: anglický” - language version: English. Looks like you’d have to go online and see if someone did their own translation.