This week on RetroNots, I'm too old for this shit.

Hey everybody, it's me, your host Bob Mackie for episode 23 of RetroNots Pocket.

And today's episode is all about police knots.

And before I continue any further, let me introduce my co-host for today, who's across the table from me?

Ray Barnholes is across from you.

You're not just a co-host, right? You're also a host. I'm not going to, you know, and first of all a friend.

And a friend too, yes. Ray and I have grown quite close in this room.

And let me just continue before I go any further. Who is Skyping in with us today?

My name is Michael Soer. I go by Slow Beef on the Internet and I am the lead programmer on the police knots translation project.

Yes, Michael knows a whole hell of a lot about police knots. And for those of you who don't know, police knots is Hideyokojima, who you probably know from the Metal Gear Solid series and Metal Gear in general.

It's this sort of follow up to Snatcher. It's what you would maybe call a visual novel, a Japanese adventure game, very, very limited input.

It's really all about the story. And maybe Michael can tell us a little bit more about where his interest in police knots came from before we continue.

Sure. When I was younger, I was one of the thousanders who bought a copy of Snatcher for the Sega CD.

And I really loved the game when I was younger. I thought the story was great, all that.

And they never made a sequel to the game, but I had learned, as the years went by, about the spiritual sequel and police knots that was never brought over to the West.

The years have been by, I just kind of look it up online every now and again. I found out about this group, Junker HQ, who apparently had done a translation of the game, meaning actually got in the Japanese text rendered an English script out of it, but weren't able to put it back in the game.

So I had contacted them with the intention of doing a let's play a screenshot, let's play of it. And one thing went to another and I never attempted a translation around that before, but I just sort of got into it and became one of the programmers and I worked with them for about 12, 13 months actually getting a patchable version of the PlayStation version of police knots so you can play the game in English finally.

That's right. And police knots sort of had this kind of mythic quality before your the fan translation you assisted with came out and where it was like the one piece of the puzzle that was missing from the Kojima gameography where we saw it in middle girl song, we're like, oh my God, he made this game. And then we would hear about it. This like this strange game that no one ever played will know and let's spoke English anyways.

And it was a sort of this object that we all wanted to cover it and you know finally 2009 the translation came out and can you talk a little bit about like the difficulties you face I know it was a super complex undertaking much like you know the mother three translation but maybe you can go to maybe a few of the the problems you face and maybe just you know how the game was actually program because I know you fix some bugs in the game itself.

Yeah, so again it was it was my first big translation Romack project you know I mean I played around every now and again very little but this was the sort of first in depth thing that having been said it's sort of funny to see the corners can only cut actually ported this because this is originally on the I believe it's the PC 98 police knots.

That's right. And then when it got ported to the PlayStation they added a bunch of cutscenes and anime style animated that is.

By AIC and when they inserted the movies they decided to do the to program those sections in a completely different way than the majority of the gameplay and then they had a lot of new voice acting that they put on to the discs as well which also had a different encoding than everything else which was different from then they have a lot of little things all the shooting scenes are done almost individually differently.

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