cj_iwakura
Member
Never occurred to me, but Silver Case and Snatcher do have a lot in common.
There's a scene where you're investigating a warehouse, and a snatcher has planted a bomb in there unbeknownst to the player.
Metal Gear then explicitly asks you to jack up the volume on your TV to max so you can make out any quiet noises that might reveal a clue.
And then BOOM!
Design wise, how you investigate and interact with stuff is very inconsistent. That's the one part that's a hassle.
Oh, what's that?
He had other crazy real world 4th wall busters planned too, like a smell-o-vision floppy disk which would emit scene-specific smells when a certain section of the disc was read due to heat from the reader, but of course it wasn't practical. Still, gotta give the dude's imagination credit.
Outside of watching the playthroughs of these games, its a shame that they can't be played on today's systems....
Policenauts would have had an official translation...It would be great if Konami could make a new localization for the PCE version of Snatcher that is being released on the TG16/PCE Core Mini. But it seems like they are just going to release the Japanese version. I'd even settle with english subtitles over the spoken dialog scenes.
I'd be happy with a re-release of the Sega CD game, even though I own it on disc. I still recommend people to just download this version and play it whatever way you can. But, it would be nice to see an official release.
The Sega CD port is an interesting oddity. The Sega CD was never that big of a hit worldwide. The UK release on the Mega CD came out in December 1994, the North American release came out one month later in January 1995. There was never a Japanese release. Snatcher Sega CD was made exclusively for english speaking audiences. Hideo Kojima had nothing to do with the development. The director/ Japanese port team and localization team made a lot of their own changes and additions to the game.
At that point, the Sega CD was already pretty irrelevant in the market. Sega still supported the add-on. But people weren't exactly buying the hardware in large numbers. It was a niche thing. Snatcher was released with little fanfare, aside from maybe one or two "hardcore" gaming magazines that hyped it up. The game was a pretty obscure release, along with just about every other Sega/ Mega CD game released at that time.
Hideo Kojima didn't even become a well known name until after the release of Metal Gear Solid 2. The MGS2 E3 trailer was such a huge deal. That's when I started noticing the price of Snatcher on the Sega CD going up in price.
You would really think that Konami would give this release on their mini console a little more attention for non-Japanese speaking audiences. Since Kojima is a well known name these days, and even Cyberpunk as a genre is going through a re-resurgence. A lot of people would probably be interested in seeing a 1980's era Cyberpunk digital novel that was created by Hideo Kojima. Both Snatcher and Policenauts deserve some sort of modern localization.
Nobody really has a solid idea why Policenauts was never translated in the first place. The Saturn version initially appeared on retail release lists, and there was even a promotional box mockup, but it dropped off pretty quickly. Jeremy Blaustein, the localizer of Snatcher and Metal Gear Solid, said he heard of no internal plans to localize the game at the time he was working at Konami. Kojima had once said in an interview that translation work had started, but he wasn’t happy with the lip synching in the cutscenes due to timing issues – a strange, idiosyncratic reason to deny an overseas release, and possibly a false one. It may have just been the fact that Snatcher for the Sega CD was a huge failure, and Konami didn’t want to risk sinking huge amounts of money into translation and dubbing, only to get a small return, especially in a world marketplace that was looking for 3D action games, which Policenauts was not. After the release of Metal Gear Solid, Kojima was interviewed several times by the Western press about an English translation of Policenauts, but he shirked them all off, essentially saying that they should look forward to his new games and forget his old ones. Very strange words, from a rather strange man.
Nobody really has a solid idea why Policenauts was never translated in the first place. The Saturn version initially appeared on retail release lists, and there was even a promotional box mockup, but it dropped off pretty quickly.
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It would be great if Konami could make a new localization for the PCE version of Snatcher that is being released on the TG16/PCE Core Mini. But it seems like they are just going to release the Japanese version. I'd even settle with english subtitles over the spoken dialog scenes.
I'd be happy with a re-release of the Sega CD game, even though I own it on disc. I still recommend people to just download this version and play it whatever way you can. But, it would be nice to see an official release.
The Sega CD port is an interesting oddity. The Sega CD was never that big of a hit worldwide. The UK release on the Mega CD came out in December 1994, the North American release came out one month later in January 1995. There was never a Japanese release. Snatcher Sega CD was made exclusively for english speaking audiences. Hideo Kojima had nothing to do with the development. The director/ Japanese port team and localization team made a lot of their own changes and additions to the game.
At that point, the Sega CD was already pretty irrelevant in the market. Sega still supported the add-on. But people weren't exactly buying the hardware in large numbers. It was a niche thing. Snatcher was released with little fanfare, aside from maybe one or two "hardcore" gaming magazines that hyped it up. The game was a pretty obscure release, along with just about every other Sega/ Mega CD game released at that time.
Hideo Kojima didn't even become a well known name until after the release of Metal Gear Solid 2. The MGS2 E3 trailer was such a huge deal. That's when I started noticing the price of Snatcher on the Sega CD going up in price.
You would really think that Konami would give this release on their mini console a little more attention for non-Japanese speaking audiences. Since Kojima is a well known name these days, and even Cyberpunk as a genre is going through a re-resurgence. A lot of people would probably be interested in seeing a 1980's era Cyberpunk digital novel that was created by Hideo Kojima. Both Snatcher and Policenauts deserve some sort of modern localization.
even though yes eventually it did come to those systems