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Kojima and Suda 51 tease Snatcher fans
Last Saturday, Suda 51's company Grasshopper Manufacture held the coolest event ever, at least for game nerds: Snake vs. Zombie vol. 2, a series of informal panel discussions by big names in the Japanese game industry, including Hideo Kojima, Shinji Mikami, ICO's Fumito Ueda, and Tetsuya Mizuguchi. There were also musical performances from Metal Gear Solid 3/Portable Ops soundtrack composer Norihiko Hibino and Silent Hill series producer and composer Akira Yamaoka.As if the mere existence of this event (and our non-attendance at said event) weren't causing us physical pain, now we have unbearable anticipation buzzing around in our heads. During a Kojima/Mikami panel hosted by Suda, Mikami, a man of taste, mentioned that his favorite Kojima game was Snatcher, to which the other two responded "Ah yes, Snatcher," followed by "Oh, should we announce it here?" To sum up, in italics, there is a possibility that Hideo Kojima and Suda 51 are collaborating on some kind of Snatcher game. We do not care if it is a sequel, a remake, a port, an action figure, or an official recipe for Neo Kobe Pizza. We want ten.
DS wishlist is an excuse to talk about Snatcher
We'd like to thank Racketboy for composing this list of games he'd like to see on the DS. Sure, everyone's got their own wishlist, but they're not online, and they don't all include Snatcher and Policenauts. And we want more opportunities to talk about those two games. He's absolutely right that these games are a good fit for the DS: between Hotel Dusk, Phoenix Wright and stuff like Suda 51's The Silver Case, the DS is pretty much the only system that can be said to be experiencing a graphical-text-adventure boom. It also happens to be the current sales leader. If there were ever a time to shovel all your old adventure games onto a console, this is it.Snatcher and Policenauts are high-quality games that would both sell to and satisfy the Phoenix Wright crowd. Throw a "FROM HIDEO KOJIMA, PRODUCER OF METAL GEAR" sticker on the box and you've got a game that is guaranteed to sell. Here's our totally unsolicited advice for Konami: port Snatcher first, and then if that sells, put some of the profits into translating Policenauts.Other notable games on the list include Metroids (yay) and Pac-Man Vs. We can get behind that, since with Wi-Fi play, we'd actually get to try Pac-Man Vs. against another person for once. Unfortunately, we kind of think that Nintendo is loath to embarrass themselves further by referring back to the GBA/GC connectivity experiment. But more adventure games? That's an easy call.
Virtually Overlooked: SD Snatcher
var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/An_impassioned_plea_for_a_Wii_VC_release_of_Konami_s_SD_Snatcher'; Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.We didn't intend to cover the same series two weeks in a row, but recent developments in the world of Virtual Console made a discussion of a Konami RPG for the MSX2 computer seem timely. Maybe, we thought, our prayers for Snatcher caused the universe to swing things our way a little bit. Well, here's another appeal. SD Snatcher takes the violent, gritty, sci-fi detective story of Snatcher, and presents it as a turn-based RPG populated by big-headed "super deformed" characters. We choose to believe this decision was some postmodern playfulness from Hideo Kojima-- deliberately downplaying the dramatic aspects of his game and overlaying obvious videogame conventions on top of it, like when Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid read your memory card. Or it could just have been that Japanese gamers like RPG's a lot.
Virtually Overlooked: Snatcher [update 1]
Update: screens!Welcome to our new weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.This week, we'd like to talk about Snatcher, a Sega CD game from Konami released in the US in 1994. The game was also released in Japan for the MSX2, PC8801, PC Engine CD-Rom, Playstation, and Saturn.Why the game hasn't been announced for Virtual Console yet: Not too long ago, the obvious answer to this question would have been "because it is a graphical text adventure." Luckily, however, the DS has changed that, bringing an era where graphical text adventures are the subjects of rabid fandom. What hasn't changed is that Snatcher is a Sega CD game, and Nintendo has made no announcements regarding support for CD systems. The size of the files may be prohibitive, although it would be possible to save space by compressing the sound and music.
