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Ziggy587
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by Ziggy587 Sun Jun 09, 2019 8:00 pm

Nemoide wrote:I've bought myself a spindle of CD-Rs for the first time in many years so I'll be ready to place Policenauts on the Sega Saturn!

I'm going to do this the hard/legit way by actually ripping my own discs and then patching them. Thankfully Ziggy587 wrote a guide for burning retro games which I'll be using and the Policenauts translation-patch readme has specific instructions. I'll figure this out!


There's something more satisfying about doing it yourself, if you ask me.

Be sure to check out the forum thread associated with the guide (there's a link to it in the first paragraph). There's a few updates worth knowing about.
I'm parting with some duplicate Blu-Ray and DVD movies. Check out this thread if interested.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by pierrot Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:34 pm

I finished Madou Monogatari for the Saturn earlier today, so I think I'm ready to start with Policenauts. (By the way, something I meant to mention for anyone playing Madou Monogatari on the Game Gear: Bump into all the walls. The Mega Drive version actually gives hints to where a lot of the walls you want to bump into are, by generally putting candles and things on walls that don't have anything buried in them, and leaving the suspicious walls bare, but I don't think any other versions do that. There's some pretty helpful stuff that can fall out of the walls.)


So, I began my journey with Policenauts by poking through the manual. I do really wish I had a setup that I felt good about to play this with the light gun, but I don't have a good TV for it, so oh well. The nice thing is that it seems the light gun segments of the story are unlocked as they're encountered in the main game, and can be revisited at any time in a special menu on the title screen. So that's kind of comforting. The special edition that I have has a bunch of stickers for the light gun in the back of the included art book, and it's so tempting to add them to my light gun even though I can't use it while playing. I have the Japanese light gun, too, so it would potentially look really good, but I think I'd rather not actually peel them out of the book.

A couple things stood out to me while thumbing through the manual: The prologue suggests that when beginning to send tens of thousands of "Beyonds" (colonizers of the space colony, "Beyond Coast") that they only needed five "policenauts" to enforce the law there. They may be elite police officers, but that sounds like they'd be pretty severely understaffed--apparently they even lost one of the five (the main character) to an accident when testing some space suits, so I wouldn't have very high hopes for the initial law enforcement on this colony. There's a young-gun, hotshot named Tony Redwood, who apparently pilots EMPS (the space suits) so well that he's known as "Mr Goddard"; A reference to the Goddard Space Flight Center, maybe? Finally, what is Meryl Silverburgh doing in this game? Was she in any of the Metal Gear games (before MGS)? I haven't really played anything in the Metal Gear (Solid) franchise, so I don't think I would be able to tell if this game is actually set in the same universe as Metal Gear, but I'm still just really confused about her apparently being a character in this game.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by MrPopo Mon Jun 10, 2019 1:13 am

So I'm four chapters in to Scenario 3 and they definitely spent the time between the release of Scenario 2 and 3 on map design and more aesthetic stuff. Pretty much every map has some sort of gimmick to it, so even though I've done 75+ battles they aren't dragging, because all the Scenario 3 battles have some sort of wrinkle I need to account for. They also did something a bit interesting; a set of enemies that showed up in Scenario 2 got new models for Scenario 3. Frankly, I think the new models are worse; while they are more differentiated from each other compared to the originals (it's six unique enemies) the base body is now more "normal" than it previously was, which I think is a mistake. The slightly otherworldly nature of the originals was more in keeping with the way they've been described in the story.

I'm a few battles out from unlocking the third promotion tier. I can't wait to start pimping out the team.
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prfsnl_gmr
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by prfsnl_gmr Mon Jun 10, 2019 11:36 pm

Awesome work, everyone. I’m enjoying reading about these games, I’ve always been curious about the other Shining Force III scenarios.

.....

Tonight, I beat Phantasy Star Adventure. It’s a short, first-person adventure game for the Game Gear that takes place in the classic Phantasy Star universe. It’s pretty fun and very short. The battles are a bit forced and detract from the game. (Even in a Phantasy Star adventure game, you still have to grind for Meseta...) The fan translation was fine, even with a few typos. Hesitantly recommended for fans of the series or people looking for a short handheld adventure game.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by pierrot Mon Jun 10, 2019 11:46 pm

Well, I played through the Disc 1 Prologue, and a bit into Act 1 of Disc 2 in Policenauts. Yup, this is a Kojima joint, all right. I kind of feel like it's testing me on what I remember of my coursework in satellite control theory, with the details of Beyond Coast orbiting at the L5 Lagrange Point, at approximately 380,000 kilometers. It checks out, though. I was kind of surprised by this info on this particular space colony, because it made me realize that I've never really considered if the orbits of the colonies in the Gundam franchise actually make any sense. (Basically, Beyond Coast is just ripped wholesale from the Gundam colonies. It's kind of shameless, even for Kojima.) The level of just raw information dumped into this game is really excessive, though. It makes me tired just reading about all of these inane details about the colony, physiological effects of space flight, and artificial humans. Kojima, we get it. You did some research. That's fantastic, but it's not world building if you feel the need to run an encyclopedia of terms along with the game. I'm actually curious, did the translators go through the trouble of translating all of the descriptions for the terms? 'Cause that's a lot of damn work.

Anyway, along with "paying homage" to a lot of other entertainment products, Policenauts also self emulates by reprising a bunch of ideas from Snatcher. The main character, Jonathan Ingram, and his relationship with his ex(?)-wife (I feel like technically she's just engaged in polygamy, but whatever) is only slightly different from Gillian's, but I much preferred Jamie in Snatcher, and their relationship, even though Gillian spent most of his time hitting on other younger women. Of course, just in the prologue chapter alone, Kojima presents a fine stewardess for the player to flirt with. Sometimes there are things that I kind of like about Kojima's style, and other times I kind of find it to be a little insufferable.

The thing I'm most confused about right now is why Jonathan doesn't have any suspicions of Lorain's daughter actually being his daughter. Maybe I've mixed something up with the timeline, but Lorain shows up at Jonathan's office 30 years after his disappearance, and he's been working on Earth for two or three years since he was recovered from his cold sleep. Lorain's daughter is 27 years old. The only way this makes sense is if she were his kid, or she just straight lied about when she met her new husband. The thing is, since it's Kojima, I'm pretty sure Jonathan is going to have a serious romantic thing with this woman, and I will not be able to believe that they aren't related.

I ran into Meryl, in the story, as well. She's former Fox Hound (I'm pretty sure that was a thing in MGS), but she's also nearly two meters tall (I'm pretty sure that wasn't a thing in MGS). The game's all right so far, but I kind of get the sense that I'm going to end up preferring Snatcher.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by BoneSnapDeez Tue Jun 11, 2019 11:01 am

prfsnl_gmr wrote:Tonight, I beat Phantasy Star Adventure. It’s a short, first-person adventure game for the Game Gear that takes place in the classic Phantasy Star universe. It’s pretty fun and very short. The battles are a bit forced and detract from the game. (Even in a Phantasy Star adventure game, you still have to grind for Meseta...) The fan translation was fine, even with a few typos. Hesitantly recommended for fans of the series or people looking for a short handheld adventure game.


Accurate assessment. By the way, the eight Phantasy Star II text adventure games play just like Phantasy Star Adventure, but with one PSII protagonist each. I played all eight back-to-back a couple years ago, which was as exhausting as it sounds.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by prfsnl_gmr Tue Jun 11, 2019 11:42 am

BoneSnapDeez wrote:Accurate assessment. By the way, the eight Phantasy Star II text adventure games play just like Phantasy Star Adventure, but with one PSII protagonist each. I played all eight back-to-back a couple years ago, which was as exhausting as it sounds.


Cool. I’m thinking of doing a couple now and working more in as I proceed through PSIII and PSIV. Are they each as long as PS Adventure? I’m having a hard time gushing how much of a time commitment is needed to get through all of them.
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by BoneSnapDeez Tue Jun 11, 2019 12:14 pm

I think each one took me "a day or two" to complete... so that's probably like 90-120 minutes of "game time" each. That may even be an overestimate. Walkthroughs are helpful, of course.

(World of Longplays has all the games combined clocked at 4 hours... but those are "perfect" runs.)
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by prfsnl_gmr Tue Jun 11, 2019 3:50 pm

BoneSnapDeez wrote:I think each one took me "a day or two" to complete... so that's probably like 90-120 minutes of "game time" each. That may even be an overestimate. Walkthroughs are helpful, of course.

(World of Longplays has all the games combined clocked at 4 hours... but those are "perfect" runs.)


Ugh....<deep breath>...uuuugggghhhh....

I jest. That’s good to know. These will be nice little bite-sized games that will help me break up all the grinding in PSIII. :lol:
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Re: June Together Retro 2019 - Now You're Talking My Languag

by prfsnl_gmr Wed Jun 12, 2019 11:21 pm

Too many RPGs in here; so, I decided to play through Panzer Dragoon Mini. It’s a pretty awful Game Gear rail shooter based on the first two Saturn Panzer Dragoon games. After playing through it, I understand why it was never released outside Japan. What I don’t understand, however, is why it was even released in Japan. It feels like a demo. The levels are distinguished only by the colored bars scrolling underneath your dragon; the bosses are all basically the same; and one mini-boss is re-used four times...in a game with only five levels. You can also choose from three different dragons at the beginning of the game, but your choice does not influence the gameplay at all. The game is also, for the most part, incredibly easy, but there is an weird spike in difficulty at the fourth level, followed by an even weirder precipitous decline in difficulty in the last level. Finally, the game doesn’t keep any sort of score; none of the enemies drop any sort of power up; and there’s no story. Accordingly, there’s no point to the shooting. Adding insult to injury, the game concludes with a “Congraturations!” screen; so, I can’t even say the translation is that good.

I have played genuinely unfinished games that were more polished than Panzer Dragoon Mini, and I can’t recommend it to anyone.
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