Ok so Snatcher on the sega CD was hella good. What people might now know is that Policenauts is a spin-off kind of sequel from Kojima himself. Mark Laidlaw has been working on a English translation with slowbeef/Michael Sawyer for YEARS and it's still not done. It's a big game and all but its weird how he does it. Check out what slowbeef said on the Somethingawful LP thread


Kind of weird right? I lurked on Laidlaw's board at Policenauts.Net and it seems he CLOSED the translation board. I don't get it is it so Konami doesn't close up their site? Is anyone here close to slowbeef or Laidlaw that can share?

True true. I know I saw a birthday request somewhere in the forums.. it makes perfect sense even though I hate the RADIO SILENCE. i mean really. why do the patient people have to be left in the dark too? it makes no sense. I felt alot of anticipation just to find every one's shut out. I really hope Konami doesn't shut down their site, i really really need to play this. i can't stand the silence!

There's a contest to become a beta tester, sounds like they're very close:

http://forums.junkerhq.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2510&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

I wasn't working on it for years.  I came on exactly a year ago.

edit:  Not to sound like a jerk or anything, but it's just that Junker HQ gets a lot of crap for taking so long to finish it.  They needed a programmer, I did a lot of research here and I came on board to see if I could fill in.  It turned out I could.

I can't speak to why it took so long because I wasn't there for it.

edit2:
I guess I should say more.

Pre-August 2008, I don't really know.  Laidlaw worked for months on the script.  I've not actually audited it, but I've heard that it's about the same length as Metal Gear Solid 2, which I can completely believe.  To that end, he didn't want to just hand it over to a random person on the Internet which is fair.

Early on they had a couple guys tooling around with it, but one game programmer stepped up and worked on it for a few months but had to leave due to personal issues.

If you didn't know, I'm not a ROM hacker, and this is my first real ROM hacking sort of project, so in July of 2008 - interested to read the script - I contacted Laidlaw about doing a guided playthrough of it.  He agreed to give me the Prologue, so I decided to bide my time and see just what the hell was so challenging about inserting the text.

If you want to know, it's this.  The previous programmer got stuck on the fact that the text pointers are in a compiled bytecode script.  I showed them a couple tricks I'd figured out (that ended up not being in the final product) and they put me in touch with him.  I came up with a method to get new text pointers in without modifying the old ones, and it was sound enough to solve the problem.

The old programmer still didn't have any time to work on it, so I shrugged and said I thought I could do it.

Junker HQ's feature list was pretty enormous - we've ended up fixing original game bugs, doing all sorts of graphical modifications, etc.  A programmer friend of mine who I brought in, even got around the graphical compression algorithm in a really cool way.  (He used a PS2 compiler to make an LZO decompressor.  Our new graphics are LZO-compressed; we hijack the decompression routine jump and if we detect a modified graphic, we decompress at runtime.  Otherwise, we jump back and let the game do its proprietary decompression.)

Even though I'm a project coordinator on it, I still consider it mostly their project, since they've worked on it for much longer than I have.  To that end, they've asked me not to speak about potential release dates, or our progress.  It's frustrating to be sure, but it's necessary and I agree that it's ultimately better to keep quiet until we have substantial news.

So to that end, I really can't post about the progress we've made/are making/will make and the contest spawned like this:

Somebody posted a thread 'predict the Policenauts release date' and Marc decided to make it interesting with that 'reward'.  I can't think of any way to go into more detail about that without inadvertently slipping something they've asked me not to, so that's where I'll leave it.

last edit, I promise:

"Why radio silence?  It's so frustrating.'

We don't know either at times.  Here are my previous release dates that I thought we'd be releasing on:

- November 20, 2008
- December 31, 2008
- May 15, 2009

It's challenging and you never know what bugs someone might find.  When I was status updating, it was stupid crap like:  "3 bugs to go.  2 bugs to go.  Shit, 5 bugs to go.  Zero known bugs!  ...Okay, there's a graphical change requested.  So 4 bugs to go."

It was a countdown of countdowns.  What was the point?

Yeah, I can't really speak to that except to say that I am indeed cognizant of "development hell" and the fear that projects without deadlines tend to never release at all because "oh hey we can finish whenever, don't worry about it".

Believe me there is no one on this green Earth who wants to release Policenauts like I do.  I am so effing sick of working on this game it's not even funny.

No sleep for you! =p

It's better to get everything set the way you want it, to make sure it is as big free as possible, and just to make sure that your work looks good. In my experience I find it extremely difficult to go back and work on something I have put down for a while, and I have never worked on anything on the scale of Policenauts, so I cannot fathom that.

That looks awesome, actually. There aren't that many comprehensive docs for newbies with step-by-step explanations (I do regret Gid's stopped working on his Bible ). Especially those covering disc-media based consoles. 

I like the default font that Policenauts includes for english text, I'm surprised they made it variable width - that doesn't happen a lot in Japanese games.