This just in from the Hideo Kojima Twitter:

"Ken is testing out Castlevania."

Ken is one lucky guy. Kojima Productions' PR people, on the other hand -- not so lucky since Kojima discovered Twitter.

Incidentally, I didn't translate the above message about Ken. Kojima Productions has started up an English language version of Kojima's Twitter. It has only a few posts as of this writing, so it's hard to say how closely it's following Kojima's updates.

Still, I think this may be a first, at least for a Japanese game developer. My respect for Kojima has risen. I'm almost ready to forgive him for not releasing MGS on Saturn.

You might have guessed this having seen some of my translations of Twitter posts from Kojima and Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada, but it's a lot easier to fit Japanese text into the 140 character limit. The Kojima English Twitter deals with this problem by using a service called TwitLonger, which lets you post longer Tweets.

Castlevania isn't the only game getting scooped by the Kojima Twitter and its English counterpart. In a later post, Kojima wrote about how the "Walker Check Battalion" is headed out on the town with Peace Walker. The PSP's are chained to the testers to prevent the systems from being dropped.

I'm wondering why they feel the need to carry Peace Walker outside in order to test it. Maybe this has something to do with that super special feature that I don't think has been announced yet.

Here's a short summary of the other recent Peace Walker mentions at the Kojima Twitter:

• Peace Walker will have media install in order to shorten load times.
• Someone asked Kojima if Peace Walker is okay for Metal Gear Solid newbies. Kojima's response was that the they recently tested the game for about a week with people who'd never played MGS. Even the girl players got good toward the end. The players even said that the image they had of the series changed.
• Kojima managed to bring up Peace Walker in a Tweet about curling. He feels that a curling competition is like the business of making hits. You toss your stone at a target. There are people who set the direction, and people who sweep in order to make it go forward. "I want PW to be a hit," he finished. Incidentally, Kojima first started liking curling at the Vancouver olympics.
• I'm going to translate this Peace Walker reference directly: "For the future of games, a quadruple salchow [that's a figure skating jump] on next generation systems is important. However, this time we challenged a different dimension. I don't believe you could do this type of game design on next generation systems. Next, we'd like to challenge a quintuple salchow."
• One more direct translation, this one from last week: "PW is different from Ops. If you play it, you'd understand. I can't say it in a word, but PW is what MGS is. It's a new MGS that has mutated suddenly and been born in the portable era."

Kojima also seems to occasionally Tweet before he goes places. On the night on the 28th, he posted that he was going to be stopping off at the Tower Records in Shibuya on his way home.

If you're going to tweet like that, Kojima, you'd better get a bodyguard! Perhaps Konami can get a bilingual body guard to translate Kojima's tweets while protecting him from stalkers.