Famicom Detective Club and Shin Onigashima - Anyone ever played these?

[zmaster18]

These text adventures are pretty common and it seems that Nintendo made a whole bunch of these games, other ones are all called YuuYuuKi, Tokimeki High School featuring Creepy Japanese Girl, and Time Twist. I don't understand Japanese, but want to learn. Is it even possible for someone like me to play these games, even with a translation guide and a dictionary by my side (along with a bit of Japanese grammer)?

Also can anyone describe what these games are like? I actually remember trying a ROM of the SFC version of Famicom Detective Club translated by Tomato.

[P]

I'm a big fan of Famicom Detective Club but I haven't had time to try the others too much or at all, but I'm going to one of these days hopefully...

Is it even possible for someone like me to play these games, even with a translation guide and a dictionary by my side (along with a bit of Japanese grammer)?

Possible yes of course! Japanese requires lots of hard work but it's definitely possible. Some of our forum members have been successful in studying Japanese by themselves (not me though, I took formal classes at university for 3 years).
An adventure game like this is no newbie game though, you should have learned all the basic grammar first.

Read my mini-guide to learning Japanese here http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=10300.msg143570#msg143570 and post questions about studying the language in the thread. I should be able to answer most newbie questions and I've been coaching a few people that tries to learn by themselves.
I really like Tae Kim's grammar guide at http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/ for grammar. I've been using it only for grammar lookup, but I know people that used it instead of a textbook.

Also can anyone describe what these games are like? I actually remember trying a ROM of the SFC version of Famicom Detective Club translated by Tomato.

They are adventure games mostly driven by text like reading a book but with sound, pictures, animations, and of course some level of interactivity (they are not like pure visual novels though, which often have around zero interactivity). Famicom Tantei is largely played by choosing options what to say and do. Since it's a detective game you are often asking questions to people what they know or saw regarding the murder case. Since the story are most often told like a book, expect them to be quite linear.

[zmaster18]

I have disk 1 and 2 for Shin Onigashima. When I try and load disk 2, I get error 27. I know that you cannot load disk 2 by itself and that you need to trigger the end of disk 1 to actually be prompted to change disks. Is my game not working, or is error 27 normal? I have no way of checking if this disk works or not.

[P]

Wrong disk side error is error $08. And I believe Shin Onigashima is one of those games that allows booting the "wrong" disk side maybe?

Anyway, error $27 means CRC error so it sounds like something has become corrupt on the disk.