Gaming History 101

No one likes to release something that is half finished.  It’s even more embarrassing when you know there’s no way to complete something you started.  This is one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn with the world of hacked consoles, fan translations, and promising things before you’ve completed them here on Gaming History 101.  With a perfectly working copy of Policenauts, the English fan translation that released for PS1, I set out to do a longplay for tonight’s game club just as I had with Snatcher.  Unfortunately the game seems to break in several parts of disc 2’s translation despite disc 1 working perfectly (more than half the game as well) and the same disc 2 that broke on my PS1 and PS2 doesn’t have problems playing on my PC through the ePSXe emulator.  While I have no idea why this is happening – I can’t seem to find anyone who played on console and the other YouTube videos are clearly from emulation – it rendered my longplay unable to be finished.  Rest assured I beat Policenauts on Sunday night and am ready to discuss it in full for tonight’s game club, but I only have the first 2 acts captured on video before the game began to break in Act 3.  I used various save data to load parts of Acts 4 and 5, which loaded fine and played fine until certain moments of scripted events that occur within 15-30 minutes of loading a save (same place, has nothing to do with the save point, load point, or amount of time played).  Fortunately out of the 12 hours of length that is Policenauts, 7 or so of those hours is Acts 1 & 2, leaving the other 5 hours for Acts 3-7 and the epilogue, oh Kojima.  With all that said, I was debating on whether or not to release the videos, but I haven’t released much video content in the last two weeks and I’ve been cranking out videos so I figured you should see where half of this hard work went.  Here is the official playlist of the first six videos of my longplay in full upscaled 720p HD with commentary.  You won’t get to see me complete the game, but you can get a great feel for what the game as a whole was like.  Additionally this playlist is available openly on YouTube, but I’ve put it as “unlisted”, which means it will only be accessed by direct link or searches, not on the main channel page proper.  Be sure to listen to our game club for complete coverage on this never released in the US title.  We also will have reviews going live on Thursday.  Below is the first video of the series, enjoy!