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.