Policenauts, Hideo Kojima’s 1996 interactive sci-fi detective story, wasnt available in English until 2009 when a group of dedicated fans at Junker HQ released a translation patch for the game’s PlayStation port. Since Konami never officially localized the game, English-speaking players had to make do with this, dealing with some cut content and other issues. No longer.
Earlier this month, the Junker team finished work on a patch for the “complete” Sega Saturn edition, making it possible to finally play Policenauts in its entirety without a working knowledge of Japanese. If you’re a fan of Kojima’s brand of storytelling, you’ll want to check it out.
Ts3 server cracked license. Over at Policenauts.net, the team has released very detailed instructions on what you need to do to get the game up and running on your PC (or Mac), and it requires a little bit of legwork. The patch itself is a series of files that must be applied to the game’s .iso and .cue files, which means you’ll need to do a little bit of command line tinkering to ultimately replace the Japanese with English text.
As for getting the game to work, it took me about an hour to muddle through the process and get it working on my MacBook Air with no coding knowledge whatsoever, though the process is actually short and relatively simple. If you follow the instructions, you shouldn’t run into any major issues. Just keep in mind they include extra steps to rip the necessary files from actual Policenauts discs, which you can skip if you feel comfortable finding the .iso files needed for emulation online.
And what does playing Policenauts feel like 20 years after its release? If you can stomach the point-and-click interface, it holds up pretty well. The pixel art of the Saturn release is great, particularly in the game’s light gun shooting sections, a holdover from Kojima’s Snatcher. Junker should also be commended on their stellar translation work, which captures the voice and tone of the game’s hardboiled protagonist with what I can only imagine is extreme authenticity; and it helps make up for the age of its design. Even two decades later, this is definitely a Kojima game.
It’s also interesting to play now as an early glimpse at Kojima-isms. His attentive prescience about technology and society is present here in mentions of things like virtual reality porn and artificial organs, and if you’ve ever wondered where his use of the font Helvetica and tendency to introduce characters by name and voice actor during cutscenes comes from, it’s here.
Need more convincing? Right off the bat there’s relatively blatant references to Blade Runner, Lethal Weapon, and 2001. Some things never change. Now you have no excuse to not see it for yourself.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VisualNovel/Policenauts
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Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is copied. Only the names have been changed, to protect our attorneys.
'Is it a challenge from man to space? Or a challenge from space against mankind?'
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Spiritual Successor to Hideo Kojima's interactive cult classic Snatcher, Policenauts is basically what you get when you let Konami's resident sci-fi author retell the story of Rip Van Winkle using the characters from Lethal Weapon.. then forget to tell America for about a decade until ComradeSlowbeefand pals whang the fandom upside the head with the digital equivalent of the Rosetta Stone.
In the year 2010, the United Nations handpicks five police officers from around the world to undergo astronaut training and become Policenauts, specially trained to bring law and order to Earth's first orbital colony Beyond Coast. But tragedy strikes in 2013, when LAPD representative Jonathan Ingram (above, with mullet) has an accident with his 'Yuri' spacewalking vehicle and spends the next 25 years drifting in low Earth orbit thanks to his suit's emergency cold sleep system. Upon finally being recovered by the probe Propaganda, he returns to Earth and sets up a floundering Private Detective agency after developing a severe case of cosmophobia.
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Fast forward three years after that, to 2040. Jonathan's ex-wife Lorraine, having exhausted all her options on Beyond, turns to him for assistance in finding her new husband, high-ranking Tokugawa Pharmaceuticals scientist Kenzo Hojo. Shortly after bequeathing to him the only clues to his absence - a cut leaf and some pills with a defaced watermark - Lorraine is killed by a white-bleeding motorcyclist's car bomb. Convinced that this is much more than a simple missing persons case, Jonathan must put aside his cosmophobia and return to Beyond - a radically changed place where the Policenauts are a faded memory, their BCPD replacements utilize Powered Armor and in-vitro-fertilized 'Frozeners', and the Tokugawa conglomerate runs enough of the show that Ingram can only draw upon the resources of the long-obsolete Vice unit, headed up by fellow ex-LAPD ex-Policenaut Ed Brown. The good news is, the Vice unit also includes Meryl Silverburgh, temporary FOXHOUND tattoo and all.
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Building on many of Snatcher's strengths (the Visual Novel interface with shooting segments sprinkled in for good measure), Policenauts was first released for the NEC PC-9821 computer platform in 1994, with console ports for the 3DO, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn following soon after. Konami announced an English localization of the Sega Saturn version in 1996 (two years before Metal Gear Solid), but ultimately chose to cancel it when the developers allegedly (according to an interview with Kojima in the official strategy guide) found themselves unable to properly sync the English dialogue to the game's pre-animated FMV cutscenes. The Fan Translation linked above is actually of the PS version - an ordeal in itself, voice recording notwithstanding, as translators ran up against a variety of oddly compressed graphics and sequences that would go outside the grain for only one or two parts of the game. The patch finally came out on Hideo Kojima's 46th birthday (August 24, 2009, which is also the date of Jonathan and Lorraine's wedding in the story), though, in what Something Awful forumer slowbeef (the 'Comrade' part was appended following a Russian site catching wind of the project) calls a Beta release: aside from the Japanese-only audio, the game is not only completely playable in English but is polished enough to be considered as good as any official release could have been.
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Policenauts Pc-98 Fan Translation System
Index
Policenauts (ポリスノーツ?) is a cinematicadventure game with a hard science fiction storyline, written and directed by Hideo Kojima, and published by Konami. It was initially released for the NEC PC-9821 computer platform in 1994, followed by remade versions, for the 3DO in 1995, and the PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1996. The game has never been officially released outside Japan, despite plans for an English localization of the Saturn version. On August 24, 2009 (in honor of the 46th birthday of the game designer, Hideo Kojima), an unofficial English translation patch was released onto the internet.
Policenauts, like Snatcher before it, pays various homages to previously existing works. An obvious one is Jonathan's and Ed's (the main characters) respective resemblances to Riggs and Murtaugh from the 1987 Hollywood film Lethal Weapon. The game also pays homage to the ancient 8th-century Japanese tale of Urashima Taro,[1] in addition to the 1987 Japanese anime film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise. Policenauts centers on a detective who travels to a space colony to investigate the circumstances surrounding his ex-wife's murder and her new husband's sudden disappearance.
Gameplay[edit | edit source]
The game is set in a primarily first person perspective and uses a point-and-click interface: the player can move the cursor and have the protagonist (Jonathan Ingram) analyze objects around his environment or talk to other characters in the game. Like in Snatcher, the game features shooting segments where the player must defend their character from incoming enemies. The player can use the shooting trainer at the police department to test their reflex and accuracy. There are numerous puzzles in the game, including an event where the player must dismantle a bomb by following their partner's instructions.
The console versions of the game all include support for their respective mouse peripherals. The Saturn version features light gun support for the shooting segments.
The game was notable for being an early example of extensive voice recording in video games.[2] It also featured a theme revolving around space exploration and occasional full-motion video cut scenes. The gameplay was largely similar to Snatcher, but with the addition of a point-and-click interface and some first-person shooter segments. Policenauts also introduced summary screens, which act to refresh the player's memory of the plot upon reloading a save, an element Kojima would later use in Metal Gear Solid. The PlayStation version of Policenauts could also read the memory card and give some easter egg dialogues if a save file of Konami's dating simTokimeki Memorial is present, a technique Kojima would also later use in Metal Gear Solid.[1]
Story[edit | edit source]Plot and setting[edit | edit source]
The game centers on Jonathan Ingram, one of the five 'Policenauts', astronauts with police training, assigned to ensure the safety of Beyond Coast, mankind's first fully functional space colony in the year 2013. A freak accident occurs while testing a new space walking suit and Jonathan is drifted away into space and is presumed dead by his colleagues. He is found alive and well 25 years later thanks to the cold-sleep module connected to the suit. Three years later, Jonathan (now a private investigator working in the former Los Angeles) is visited by his former wife, Lorraine. She asks for Jonathan's help in solving the disappearance of her current husband, Kenzo Hojo, the only clues he left behind being a torn leaf, a set of capsules, and the word 'Plato'. Jonathan is reluctant to take her case at first. However, after Lorraine leaves his office, she is attacked and murdered by a man in a black motorcycle suit. Jonathan, unable to catch the culprit, decides to fulfill his ex-wife's final request and travels to Beyond. There he is reunited with his former partner from his LAPD days, Ed Brown, who agrees to help Jonathan investigate the circumstances surrounding Hojo's disappearance and Lorraine's murder.
Characters[edit | edit source]
Release history[edit | edit source]Versions[edit | edit source]
Policenauts was first released for the NEC PC-9821 on July 29, 1994. The PC-98 came in one CD-ROM that included an installation floppy disk. All the cut-scenes were rendered using hand-drawn pixel art as opposed to full-motion video anime. The PC-9821 version's in-game artwork is today considered to be some of the best pixel art in the history of video games.[3]
The first console version was released for the 3DO on September 29, 1995, consisting of two CD-ROMs. Animated cut-scenes were added to this version along with CG animation, and all the graphics were redrawn. The PlayStation version (January 19, 1996), also on two discs, made further additions by digitally fixing most of the graphics and movies from the 3DO version. The last console version, released for the Sega Saturn (September 13, 1996), on three discs, added support for Sega's Virtua Gun light gun peripheral. Although the home console versions of the game mostly used pre-existing dialog tracks from the original PC-98 version, all of the original voice actors were brought back to record new lines of dialog for the new cutscenes.
Prior to releasing the standard version of the game, Konami issued the Policenauts: Pilot Disk for the 3DO on April 21, 1995. This disc contains a playable demo, an encyclopedia of the game's backstory, featurettes, and information about the game's voice actors and developers. Policenauts: Private Collection was released for the PlayStation on February 9, 1996, featuring much of the same content as the Pilot Disk, adding an earlier version of the game's script as well. The encyclopedia, featurettes and shooting trainer are included as hidden features in the Saturn version.
The PlayStation version has been re-issued twice. The first time was under the 'Konami the Best' label on September 18, 1997. A second reissue under the 'PSone Books' series was released on August 7, 2003. The game was added to the PlayStation Store's Japanese Game Archives on May 15, 2008, making the game downloadable for the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3.[4]
English localization[edit | edit source]
A mock-up cover art was produced and featured on a promotional Sega pamphlet packaged with certain games. However, the North American version was never released. According to Kojima, work began on the North American version, but the developers were unable to synchronize the English dialogue with the animated FMV cut-scenes.[5]
A fan translation of the PlayStation version has been produced, which has gained attention from the video game media. Although the translation of the game content was nearly completed by Marc Laidlaw and Artemio Urbina during the summer of 2007,[6][7] the translation project could not find a programmer to complete the insertion of translated material into a version of the game and progress stalled. In August 2008, Something Awful forum member Michael Sawyer (AKA Slowbeef) began experimenting[8] with approaches to add text to the PlayStation version of the game which led to a revival of the project.[9]The patch was released to the public at midnight (JST) on August 24, 2009, to coincide with Hideo Kojima's 46th birthday.[10]
Soundtracks[edit | edit source]
A total of four Policenauts related music albums have been released by King Records and Konami in Japan. An original soundtrack and three arranged albums. The soundtrack composed by Motoaki Furukawa and Koichi Namiki. Several tracks bare a resemblance to Ryuichi Sakamoto's soundtrack to the 1987 Japanese anime film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise.
Policenauts (original soundtrack)[edit | edit source]
Its catalog number is KICA-7653. Released on February 3, 1995. The soundtrack to the original PC-9821 version of Policenauts. Contains 38 tracks ripped from the game's PCM music.
Policenauts F/N[edit | edit source]
Released on November 1, 1996. Its catalog number is KICA-7724. Contains arranged versions of music from the game's soundtrack composed by Motoaki Furukawa and Koichi Namiki.
Track listing
Policenauts Pc-98 Fan Translation In EnglishMIDI Power Pro 3: POLICENAUTS[edit | edit source]
Released on November 21, 1996. Its catalog number is KICA-7729. MIDI arrangement of Policenauts music. Came packaged with a floppy disk containing the original MIDI versions of certain tracks.
Snatcher -- Policenauts/Music Collection of Hideo Kojima Black Disc[edit | edit source]
Released on August 21, 1998. Its catalog number is KICA-7888. Contains music from previous Snatcher and Policenauts albums (originals and arrangements), as well as newly recorded arrangements.
References[edit | edit source]
Bibliography[edit | edit source]
External links[edit | edit source]
Retrieved from 'https://gamicus.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Policenauts&oldid=88617'
Part 42: Tales of ROMhacking: Part 1Tales of ROMhacking!Part 1: Well, Why Don't You ROMhack The Stupid Game? 'Well, why don't you ROMhack the stupid game?' This is me, July 2008, standing on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. I'm two updates into Let's Play Policenauts (Prologue Only), and trying to figure out how to get Marc Laidlaw to give me the rest of the game script so I can finish the thread. I am thinking this because Laidlaw has just e-mailed me about some of the group's previous progress, because I've offered other suggestions to Laidlaw (why not rip all the assets and recode it in Flash?), and because, after all, I've been a professional computer programmer for about a decade, and who else would be qualified? 'No. No, I can't. It's beyond me.' That is my first instinctual reaction. I don't even think about this or mull it over, it just comes out. For some reason, this just seemed way out of my league. Assembly hacking/reprogramming a video game's executable to make Japanese into English was for an idiot savant, or guys who did tensor products over breakfast. Me? I was a Java programmer who did server side web stuff. I hadn't gone that low-level since college, and .. It was a depressing train of thought. There on the boardwalk, I'd thought back to doing Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm in C as a college sophomore, winning a coding argument with some asshole with a notebook full of hypothetical unsorted heaps I'd written up in a hurry ('that's why you need an updateHeapVertex function!'), completing finals with proof-by-inductions in a little blue book. Even taking a 20-credit semester because they offered Computer Graphics for the first time in my school's Computer Science curriculum and I didn't want to miss it, yet I also wanted to graduate in four years. Back then, I really enjoyed programming and the puzzle solving it seemed to entail. Now, though, I was thirty - I'd never programmed a game (one of those things I wanted to get around to doing), and the thought of assembly hacking Policenauts felt too difficult for me. It was sobering, and depressing. And awful. I had a technical challenge that deep down, I knew I couldn't do. And I'd done it professionally for ten years. Around 2004, I started playing a fan translation of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake on an MSX emulator. I had a website for.. some reason or another, and I decided to try a funny thing where I took screenshots of the game and made a snarky 'strategy guide' out of it. People liked it and at the end, I mentioned doing another Kojima game - my personal favorite - called Snatcher. But I didn't really want to take the piss out of Snatcher, my favorite game growing up, so I just let the idea fester. Later on, I saw people doing Let's Plays on the Something Awful forums, and decided that was a better venue to showcase Snatcher (it never occurred to me I could've made a strategy guide that wasn't sarcastic, or even done the send-up as an homage, because I'm kind of dense at times. Well maybe often. Okay shut up.) During the Snatcher LP, I mentioned possibly doing a 'surprise' (showing off the 32-bit versions of the game), and a poster named nachobox took that opportunity to joke, 'A full screenshot LP of Policenauts (Snatcher's spiritual sequel) with a translation? Oh slowbeef, you shouldn't have!' Obviously, I was not equipped to do this and nachobox was kidding, but I thought it would be really cool if I could somehow pull it off. So naturally, I let the idea fester as I am wont to do. A couple of years later, I wrote up a Let's Play for SD Snatcher, and someon else lamented that there was no Policenauts translation. This solidified the idea, and I contacted a group of Hideo Kojima fans (Artemio Urbina and Marc Laidlaw) from Junker HQ and discussed doing a Let's Play of Policenauts. It read: So, being a Snatcher fan, I'm of course interested in Policenauts. I noticed on the Junker HQ forums there was discussion about releasing the translated script (using Marc Laidlaw's very in-depth translation) or, since the translation patch is in limbo, releasing pictures accompanying the translation. I was thinking that if you wanted, an LP of Policenauts might be the next best thing. Using subtitled video, music, and static image, it's possible to show off the game in its entirety - something to tide people over until the actual translation patch works through. My Japanese isn't very good, so while I've played through the prologue, I don't understand enough of it (I'm only able to get the sleeping pill from the stewardess on the PC9821 version, not the PSX) - but if you'd like, I could try and LP the Prologue to the game to show you what exactly I'm envisioning the end product to be. I can do all the legwork insofar as capturing the game media, and using descriptive text. If this is something that sounds interesting, please let me know. Obviously, since Marc has the translation, if he's interested in this idea, I'd give him the final word on what and how it'd be presented. The response: Hi Mike, This is Marc. I apologize for this late reply. I remember your Let's Play Snatcher, which I really enjoyed despite knowing the game inside out! It was great to see the reactions from people experiencing it for the first time. I also loved the commentary you added to it. I like the idea, but the only potential problem I can see is with Snatcher and SD Snatcher, people can play the game themselves in English if they like after watching the LP. One advantage is it would be a nice, clean way to present the material right now. Maybe I could take you up on your offer and you could show us part of the Prologue as a LP? Just give me a little time to prepare the text for you. There is more variation depending on the order you do things than in Snatcher. Anyway, thank you for contacting us and I look forward to hearing from you soon. I was in luck - Laidlaw had actully read my Let's Play of Snatcher back in the day, and had even posted about it on the Junker HQ forums. He would be interested in the Prologue and provided a script. I figured it was the closest anyone could get to playing the game. Myself included. Three LP updates later, broaching the subject with Marc, however slightly, didn't seem to produce results. Now apparently, on the JHQ side of things, Marc and Artemio were liking the LP's reception and considering releasing more of the script to me. But I didn't know that. I was out having a cigarette in midtown Manhattan, pondering how I could convince Marc to give me more of the script. I'd learned that he'd spent over a year on it (and I thought that he'd therefore, never just release it to some guy on the Internet) and while Artemio had spent months trying to find a programmer to finish the ROMhack since their last one left, they got stymied on the fact that the English translation was so much bigger than the original Japanese. I mean, I didn't know what that meant, but what did I care? I just wanted to play Policenauts. 'Leverage,' I thought. 'I need leverage. I need something I can trade them.' It hit me that they wanted the ROMhack, most of all. And then it hit me that that was the biggest obstacle, really. Convincing Junker HQ to release the script for the Let's Play would be convincing them to admit defeat; to take the silver trophy. It would be admitting, 'We cannot finish the ROMhack, so we agree this is the closest you'll ever get to a translated Policenauts.' Since the ROMhacking community (mostly found on romhacking.net or RHDN as I'd learn) - and even members of the Junker HQ forums - had long considered the Policenauts Translation Project vaporware, it would be insult to injury. And even worse, at this point, I'd exchanged e-mails with Marc and Artemio and they were decent folk. I really didn't like the idea of trying to convince them to admit defeat. Yeah, some evil corporate part of me considered it, but I didn't want to. Well.. Maybe I wasn't good enough to ROMhack Policenauts.. But maybe I could solve the problem their last ROMhacker had. Maybe I could get them one step closer. I couldn't be good enough to get the game in English, but surely I was good enough for just one step further, right? Surely that would earn me an English version of Act 1? It'd at least get me closer to seeing the spiritual sequel to the game I'd loved as a teenager, wouldn't it? Couldn't it? Coming up: - Slowbeef almost leaves the project - Slowbeef almost leaves the project (again) - The sad, sad tale of akor1108 - The Catastrophe
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