Policenauts In English 8/23/09

l337CrappyJack · August 2009

The fine folks at policenauts.net have been spending the past EIGHT or so years working on a translation patch for Hideo Kojima's legendary PS1 game, and about an hour ago, the bomb was dropped.

It's out NOW.

(linked for huge + AWESOME)
http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/4098/policenautsout.jpg

TRAILER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ1FpvVZeVA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpolicenauts.net%2Fenglish%2Ftrailers.html&feature=player_embedded

Policenauts is essentially the spiritual followup (i.e. not a sequel) to the Sega CD's Snatcher. Where that game had you going from screen to screen selecting your actions from a menu at the bottom of the screen, Policenauts upgraded to a point-and-click interface, where you can examine damn near EVERYTHING, and there's almost nothing that just has one description, down to the crumpled beer can on your desk. Add in full motion handdrawn animation cutscenes and a soundtrack that takes its cues from 80's buddy cop movies, and you've got yourself one of the most immersive and cinematic games imaginable.

You play Jonathan Ingram, who enjoyed a career in space station law enforcement (known as "Policenauts", of course), until a terrible mishap results in him drifting through space in cryogenic sleep for decades. After waking up to realize his wife has left him, and everyone he knows has gotten dramatically older while he hasn't aged a day, he's forced into the PI game. Business is slow until his ex-wife's husband goes missing, and when she's the victim of a car bomb shortly after asking Jonathan for help, he's forced to confront his fear of space to sort out the mysteries of not only his present, but his past as well.

All you need is an original copy of the game converted into an ISO, and the boys will release a patching program that will handily make all that moonspeak into the Queen's English, for the first time in the history of forever. Then you're free to play it on your hacked PS1, or even your PSP. Bright minds have informed me that I should remind you that this release is a patch, meant to be applied to your authentic copy of the original game. Considering the game's available on the Japanese PSN (the patch will NOT work on this version, by the way), this is in no way "abandonware", even if such a thing as that existed.

Commence nerd boners.

cooljammer00 · August 2009

What is this I don't even

But srsly, no idea what this is. Cool, I guess.

agoaj · August 2009

cooljammer00 wrote: »

What is this I don't even

But srsly, no idea what this is. Cool, I guess.

You know, Hideo Kojima. He's that guy who had Altair in his game for april fools.

cooljammer00 · August 2009

I know Kojima for being the MGS dude and wanting that one mech game to have a disc that exploded when you died.

GSM · August 2009

Oh wow. I still haven't finished playing the officially translated Sega CD version of Snatcher yet. Figured I'd get through that before this came out.

Bartholamue · August 2009

Does this have that much text? I find it hard to believe that they've been actively working on this for eight years unless they were slacking off on it. I mean, even with the reverse engeneering of text boxes and translations of Mother 3, it took them 1-2 years (or even less) at starmen.net.

GSM · August 2009

There is so much text you wouldn't even believe. And most of it is horrendously technical, and not specified in the decompiled stuff as to who is speaking. From what I've read, getting it done in 8 years is something of a rush-job.

Bartholamue · August 2009

Is it as massive as Dragon Quest 7, which had I think 17,000 pages of text to translate?

GSM · August 2009

Here's an article I read about it a while ago. They're scanned from a magazine.

l337CrappyJack · August 2009

Bartholamue wrote: »

Does this have that much text? I find it hard to believe that they've been actively working on this for eight years unless they were slacking off on it. I mean, even with the reverse engeneering of text boxes and translations of Mother 3, it took them 1-2 years (or even less) at starmen.net.

It wasn't a matter of how much text there was, it was a case that if they just straight up changed the text from Japanese to English characters, it would cause a buffer overrun and crash the game. They basically had to straightup reprogram the entire text system of the game, and a big portion of the wait (a year or so) was because they didn't have anyone with the technical expertise to reverse engineer an entire video game for the PS1.

randombattle · August 2009

l337CrappyJack wrote: »

Bartholamue wrote: »

Does this have that much text? I find it hard to believe that they've been actively working on this for eight years unless they were slacking off on it. I mean, even with the reverse engeneering of text boxes and translations of Mother 3, it took them 1-2 years (or even less) at starmen.net.

It wasn't a matter of how much text there was, it was a case that if they just straight up changed the text from Japanese to English characters, it would cause a buffer overrun and crash the game. They basically had to straightup reprogram the entire text system of the game, and a big portion of the wait (a year or so) was because they didn't have anyone with the technical expertise to reverse engineer an entire video game for the PS1.

Also there was a fuckton of stuff to translate.

Bartholamue · August 2009

That would make sense.

What kind of game is this, anyway? From the screen shots it looks a lot like Blade Runne...I mean Snatcher.

Saddler · August 2009

You're shitting me.

This is one of those things you hear about and laugh, because you know it will never be completed.

Monger · August 2009

Bartholamue wrote: »

That would make sense.

What kind of game is this, anyway? From the screen shots it looks a lot like Blade Runne...I mean Snatcher.

Pretty sure this is the one with Meryl in it.

...Beyond that, I got nothin.

l337CrappyJack · August 2009

Monger wrote: »

Bartholamue wrote: »

That would make sense.

What kind of game is this, anyway? From the screen shots it looks a lot like Blade Runne...I mean Snatcher.

Pretty sure this is the one with Meryl in it.

...Beyond that, I got nothin.

Yeah, my bad, I'll work on the OP when I get some sleep in me. It pretty much is Snatcher, but instead of menus, it's a point and click interface. Click on an object, a menu comes up and you can examine, talk to, blah blah. And I should point out that while Snatcher was Blade Runner, this is Lethal Weapon. The main character looks like Mel Gibson with blue hair, and his partner is a 50 year old black cop who is too old for shit. The soundtrack is also full of saxophone riffs.

RainbowDespair · August 2009

It's been a long time since I've played it, but it's basically a visual novel with a few puzzles and the occasional gun game segment thrown in for variety's sake so yes, there's a ton of dialogue to translate.

Saddler · August 2009

AFAIK, Policenauts is the sequel to the legendary Sega CD game, Snatcher.

I've been trying to play Snatcher recently for the first time, but my Sega CD is computer senile and won't play it for more than 15 minutes or so.

CygnusZ · August 2009

It's not a sequel to Snatcher, though it may take place in the same universe. The game is more of an interactive movie than anything else. With fantastic graphics, top rate music and believable voice-acting it is one of my favorite PS games. That said, I don't think it's quite on the same level as Cross Tantei Monogatari or Machi.

EDIT: One thing that I think the PA crowd will enjoy is the atmosphere of this game. Aside from the start, the game takes place on a giant space colony, so there's always hints of future-tech hidden within the otherwise very average look of the environment. If you're planning on playing this game, you might just want to duck out of the forums while you play it. It's pretty short, and the story will give you plenty to talk about.

UnbreakableVow · August 2009

Goddammit fuck this thread.

I thought this was somehow getting an XBLA or PSN rerelease when I saw the thread title.

Olivaw · August 2009

Holy shit this is wonderful

Well actually not really since I can't play it since I don't have a copy of the game or a SEGA CD or anything, really

But this means I could conceivably play it someday!

Or someone can LP it and then I can enjoy it vicariously. Either or

CygnusZ · August 2009

It's a very common game in Japan. I bet if you could get it off of e-bay for less than $20.

Okasvi · August 2009

There's an interesting thread in the something awful forums, that started as a let's play of the games prologue with a transcribed translation loaned from the translation project and turned into a developer commentary thread halfway through as the let's player joined the translation project and pretty much single handedly solved the text length problem. The last few pages have links to couple of articles that he's currently writing about the work he did on the project.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2899139

http://slowbeef.com/romhack/pnhack1.html

http://slowbeef.com/romhack/pnhack2.html

Mortal Sky · August 2009

So an we get the translation patch put onto a PS3? Cos then I could play this on my TV and whatnot.

Kuratosu · August 2009

UnbreakableVow wrote: »

Goddammit fuck this thread.

I thought this was somehow getting an XBLA or PSN rerelease when I saw the thread title.

Same here. =/

NickTheNewbie · August 2009

So how exactly does the patch work? If you have an iso from your copy of snatcher, it will go through and ada subtitles to everything?

l337CrappyJack · August 2009

NickTheNewbie wrote: »

So how exactly does the patch work? If you have an iso from your copy of snatcher, it will go through and ada subtitles to everything?

Subtitles on all spoken dialog, all ingame text is converted from Japanese to English. It's a pretty damn good job they did, I haven't found a single thing that lets me know this was some amateur hack job. Even the floating text that comes up in cutscenes to introduce a character is translated.

Food · August 2009

This is cool. I played Snatcher a few months ago and I loved it, even if it did get into some of that patented Kojima ridiculousness towards the end.

Vegan · August 2009

I honestly had pretty much lost hope on this when it seemed to have stalled for a year.

Zell · August 2009

This is released now.

cooljammer00 · August 2009

I figured they weren't working on it all the time during the 8 years. I mean...they probably had real, paying jobs to go do, with this as a side thing.

I hope.

TheSonicRetard · August 2009

This game fucking RULES.

I just got to disc 2. Fucking AWESOME. I've waited so long for more snatcher-style gameplay and this delivers so hard.

This is easily one of the best fan-translations I've ever seen. Better than Mother 3 IMO, and way better than Ys IV (which was also an ambiguous project).

Damn this game is good. I wish I had a PSX mouse so I could play this the right way.

Saddler · August 2009

It took a little while, but I finally got Policenauts up and running. I've played it for about an hour and a half total, and it is a superb digital comic style adventure game, with some shooting portions, very much like Snatcher. As far as I can tell, the translation is impeccable. You can see why the project took so long. Everything is clickable, and there is a LOT of text. Original voice acting is still present, and they somehow managed to subtitle it. I haven't seen an anime with such a cool, adult (detective) story in a long time. It's so refreshing to see some anime that's not made for 7 year olds.

Anyone into digital comics, adventure games, good anime, or sci-fi should play this game. I bet there are still a few more forumers who have what it takes to get into this amazing game.

Slicer · August 2009

randombattle wrote: »

l337CrappyJack wrote: »

Bartholamue wrote: »

Does this have that much text? I find it hard to believe that they've been actively working on this for eight years unless they were slacking off on it. I mean, even with the reverse engeneering of text boxes and translations of Mother 3, it took them 1-2 years (or even less) at starmen.net.

It wasn't a matter of how much text there was, it was a case that if they just straight up changed the text from Japanese to English characters, it would cause a buffer overrun and crash the game. They basically had to straightup reprogram the entire text system of the game, and a big portion of the wait (a year or so) was because they didn't have anyone with the technical expertise to reverse engineer an entire video game for the PS1.

Also there was a fuckton of stuff to translate.

Yeah, I've heard the quantity of text compared to that of Metal Gear Solid 2, so with that + technical issues + doing it for free, I'm not too surprised it took that long.

carmofin · September 2009

oh wow i cant believe i missed this, wheres all the hype for this one?

langfor6 · September 2009

GSM wrote: »

Oh wow. I still haven't finished playing the officially translated Sega CD version of Snatcher yet. Figured I'd get through that before this came out.

Is it a lot different than the American release? I didn't even know such a thing existed.

emnmnme · September 2009

Somewhere is Japan, fans eagerly await the five year long English-to-Japanese translation of Grim Fandango ... oh wait, no they're not.

Anyways, I have no Saturn but I'd like to see what all the fuss over this game is about. Does anyone plan on doing a Let's Play with video?

carmofin · September 2009

i dont know if a lets play video would work so well, the game is mostly about reading text, snatcher and policenauts are basically like the phoenix wright games, gameplaywise, but in dark gritty cyberpunk settings.

Hakunin · September 2009

carmofin wrote: »

i dont know if a lets play video would work so well, the game is mostly about reading text, snatcher and policenauts are basically like the phoenix wright games, gameplaywise, but in dark gritty cyberpunk settings.

Well, there is such a thing as Screenshot LP's. They're time consuming as hell for the LP'er though.

On a side note the guy who did that Snatcher LP was the one who got the ball rolling on this one and helped solve some of the problems that had stumped the team for quite a bit. The whole thing started when he tried to LP it using the translated script.

GSM · September 2009

langfor6 wrote: »

GSM wrote: »

Oh wow. I still haven't finished playing the officially translated Sega CD version of Snatcher yet. Figured I'd get through that before this came out.

Is it a lot different than the American release? I didn't even know such a thing existed.

The American release is the official translation I'm referring to. Did you think I meant something else?

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