Kojima's Policenauts now playable in English
Now here's some Kojima-related news worth counting down to. The fan translation patch for Hideo Kojima's sci-fi graphical text adventure, Policenauts, is now complete and available for download. The game, originally planned for official release on the Sega Saturn in 1996, was never released in English by Konami, so a group of fans worked to localize and patch the files.
Policenauts is an adventure game in a similar style to Kojima's Snatcher, consisting of mostly still images with fully-voiced dialogue and a text-based menu interface. The game follows Jonathan Ingram, a one-time policeman on an extraterrestrial Earth colony, who drifted into space and returned to Earth 25 years later, having been saved by a "cold sleep" system in his suit. Following his return, he works as a private investigator and attempts to solve a murder and a mysterious disappearance.
The patch requires a copy of the Japanese PlayStation version of the game and a PlayStation that can play CD-R discs -- that's because you have to rip the game files, apply the patch, and then burn it to another disc. Finally, a reason to dust off that PlayStation you modded to play Beatmania ten years ago!
[Thanks, Mike]
