Snatcher

[Vaipon]

I finally managed to play Snatcher yesterday, about 10 years too late. The recent thread about Shadowrun reminded me of this game which shares many themes, so I finally tracked it down. I remember years ago really wanting to experience this but because of the Japanese language I never got a chance to try the PCE version. The MegaCD version was also off-limits to me as I never owned the system.

Anyway, I finally got hold of the MegaCD game with the English language and I'm quite enjoying it so far. Gens does a great job of running it on the PC. It's pretty amusing how much stuff is ripped straight out of Blade-Runner (the Junkers who hunt the snatchers are even referred to as "Runners"), and even Max Headroom (the Freemen are basically Blanks from MH). The mood of it is very dark though and quite true to the cyberpunk genre. The back-story is typical Kojima, and there are even a few practical jokes like the ones in MGS. In an abandoned building near the beginning, a very quiet sound effect is played. Your Navigator droid (called "Metal Gear" LOL) instructs you to turn up the volume so that you can hear it more clearly. It transpires that it is a bomb timer. When it finally explodes, a really loud sound effect is played and the central character (Gilliam) complains that his ears are ringing, to which Metal Gear replies "that's because you forgot to turn your volume down". I instantly thought of the psycho mantis sequence in Metal Gear during this event.

Even though the graphics are of typical megadrive standard, the music and sound still holds up quite well and there is full dialogue for many of the cutscenes. The MegaCD version was the only one with full English dialogue and text. If you are a fan of Metal Gear but have never checked out snatcher, it's well worth a look, and the background world and story are very well developed.







The iso is very easy to obtain from a certain well-known abandonware games site and you should have no problem tracking it down if you are interested. All the music tracks are in mp3 though, so if you want to burn it to a CDR you will need a suitable cue file. Just cut and paste this one I made into a text file called snatcher.cue and feed it into nero. As long as all the snatcher files (iso and mp3s) are in a folder called c:\snatcher, it will burn you a perfect copy.

Have fun cyberpunks.

FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER.ISO" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2048
INDEX 01 00:00:00
POSTGAP 00:02:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 02.MP3" MP3
TRACK 02 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 03.MP3" MP3
TRACK 03 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 04.MP3" MP3
TRACK 04 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 05.MP3" MP3
TRACK 05 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 06.MP3" MP3
TRACK 06 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 07.MP3" MP3
TRACK 07 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 08.MP3" MP3
TRACK 08 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 09.MP3" MP3
TRACK 09 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 10.MP3" MP3
TRACK 10 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 11.MP3" MP3
TRACK 11 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 12.MP3" MP3
TRACK 12 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 13.MP3" MP3
TRACK 13 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 14.MP3" MP3
TRACK 14 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 15.MP3" MP3
TRACK 15 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 16.MP3" MP3
TRACK 16 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 17.MP3" MP3
TRACK 17 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 18.MP3" MP3
TRACK 18 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 19.MP3" MP3
TRACK 19 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 20.MP3" MP3
TRACK 20 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 21.MP3" MP3
TRACK 21 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "C:\SNATCHER\SNATCHER 22.MP3" MP3
TRACK 22 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 00:00:00

[Saurian]

Snatcher is a very good story - the plot is heavy and there are so many little secrets and messages from the dev team. I badly want to play the follow ups to it, but have never seen them translated.

[Vaipon]

Are you talking about "Policenauts", or some other games? I never realised there were any other games in the Snatcher series, but I'd really like to see them. I really want to play Policenauts too, but it seems unlikely that it will ever be translated and released now. They should remake it like they are doing with MGS1. That would be cool.

[SuperBrother]

What sort of size d'load am I looking at for this - I only have 56k you see!

[Vaipon]

What sort of size d'load am I looking at for this - I only have 56k you see!

Afraid it's around 115MB mate. It's do-able on a 56k modem, but you'd be pissed if your connection dropped after a few hours of downloading. It'd take around 8 hours I should think, overnight job. Probably not worth it tbh unless you are a really big kojima fan or you love Blade-Runner's story. The storyline really is cool though.

[beecee]

snatcher was one cool game,

i only played mines for about 3 hours before my mega cd died on me.
so i sold it! but now i am getting another one and i gotta get this game.

i just cant wait!!!!!

[Vaipon]

Just finished this after 8 hours(ish) of play. Fantastic. Storyline is superb, and the third act has plenty of cool plot twists to keep you interested. There aren't that many retro games that I can play through till the end, but Snatcher really impressed me. If you are a Kojima fan and you haven't had chance to play this yet, you really need to check it out.

[Hodge]

Thanks for posting that vaipon, i did originally play this when it 1st came out about 10 years ago and have always wanted to play it again but not wanting to buy a mega cd again and being very had to find stopped me. I just DL snatcher and gen and it works a treat. Runs perfectly, sound works fine and saves fine as well. Only if i knew about gen sooner. Thanks again

[Thom]

Did you know there also exists a RPG version of Snatcher, called SD Snatcher? It was made for MSX2 and English translations do exist!

[dataDave]

I remember playing and completing Snatcher back in the day. I damn fine experience. This along with Final Fight, Sonic CD and Road Avenger (yes, I liked it) made me so proud of my Mega CD.

I remember me and my mate getting into Snatcher so much we were righting down notes about everything as we were playing. I'd even go as far as saying it was an educational experience, especially for a couple of 12 year olds.