Shadowrun (Genesis)

Platform:  Sega Genesis
Developer:  BlueSky Software
Released:  1994
Genre:  Action RPG

The Game
Joshua is not a happy man.  His brother Michael was killed in a failed shadowrun, and he intends to find out who did it and why.  To these ends, he spend the last of his money to buy a ticket to Seattle to visit Michael's last known place of residence, a coffin motel in the Redmond Barrens.  From there, Joshua becomes a shadowrunner himself, traveling back and forth across the Seattle Metroplex and beyond in his tireless quest to avenge Michael's death.

The Genesis version of Shadowrun was released a year after its SNES cousin by a different developer and with a completely different storyline and gameplay.

The Characters
You play as Joshua, a somewhat hot-headed young lad who starts out looking for revenge and ends up on a quest to save the world.  The way he does this is partially determined by the player's choice of archetype at the beginning of the game . . . specifically, he can be a decker (hacker who projects his very consciousness into a virtual construct of the computer system), a street samurai (big, tough fighter skilled in the use of guns, armor, and punching things very hard), or a gator shaman (magician who follows the precepts of his spirit animal, allowing its magical energy to flow through him).

You face a number of different adversaries, but the main ones are Renraku, one of the biggest megacorporations around, and Thon, a free spirit bent on world domination.  These two forces have joined together in a mutual bid for power that naturally degenerates into each side trying to use and then lose the other.  Many of the other baddies you end up facing are working for either one or both of these nasty villains.

Fortunately for Joshua, he's also got a lot of folks on his side, though not all of them work for free.  He meets up with a number of Mr. Johnsons, people who specialize in working as middlemen for corporations and other organizations and do the actual hiring of shadowrunners for their various illegal and quasi-legal activities, who give him jobs and information.  He cultivates a list of contacts who are willing to provide him with info, gear, and various services for the right price.  And there are several fellow shadowrunners hanging about and are willing to team up with Joshua as long as he keeps them paid and alive.

He also eventually meets and teams up with Harlequin and Frosty, two legendary figures in the Shadowrun setting.  So that's pretty neat!

Like its SNES predecessor, the Genesis SR has a lot of characterization floating around.  Virtually every NPC you meet has their own unique personality and mode of speech, with only a few glitches here and there . . . every single hotel owner, for example, bitches about all their towels being stolen, even in the classiest joints.  Though there may just be an epidemic of towel thieves in Seattle, meaning it might have been done that way on purpose!

The Writing
The game's story is even deeper than the characterization, branching in several interesting directions with nicely cinematic reveals of important plot elements.  It really feels like Joshua is moving through a long and complex Shadowrun campaign, and it's great to see how they pull various disparate elements together to make a cohesive whole.

The dialogue between Joshua and the NPCs is extremely well written, and in several parts it and/or the narrative sections are interspersed with what amounts to action scenes, putting you in a short firefight before returning to the discussion at hand.  And while it partakes of the Shadowrun slang from time to time, it doesn't try to beat the player over the head with it and uses it in contexts where it's easy to understand if you're not already familiar with it.

The Gameplay
If nothing else, the gameplay alone in this game makes it worth playing.  It's an overhead game with a sandbox setup, allowing you to go anywhere in the game right off the bat as long as you're willing to pay cab fare and - in one case - for a passport.

Combat is as easy as cycling through targets and shooting/punching/magicking them until they stop moving, but the mechanics behind it are very deep.  You have a sizable list of attributes which can be advanced through gaining and applying karma, there is a wide selection of different types of guns and spells, you can buy various cyberware upgrades to enhance your stats and abilities, and you have two different life meters, one for physical damage and another for stun damage.

Your attributes also include a number of non-combat stats, including but not limited to Negotiation (influences buying and selling as well as the pay for shadowrunning jobs and for hiring other runners), Electronics (allowing you to pick maglocks and hack security systems), and Reputation (allowing you access to certain buildings, reducing the costs of entering certain clubs, and getting the attention of certain high-class contacts), adding even further depth to other areas of gameplay.

When speaking with NPCs, Joshua can pick from up to three different dialogue options (one each for the A, B, and C buttons on the Genesis controller), making chats with other people a decently interactive experience.

The menu screen overall is incredibly in-depth, storing tons of information about your character and the mission he's on.

Running the Matrix - the cyberspace construct of the city's computer grid - can get a bit repetitive at times, but there's so many options of what you can do that the player can mix things up a little if they start getting bored of the same old "continuous Deception/Attack" routine.

While there are many other games that were made since that have this kind of depth or more, this was one of the few console games of the time that went to such lengths to give the player such an immersive experience, and in my opinion all that hard work was worth it.

The Challenge
The game remains fairly challenging throughout - unless you go on a shadowrun binge and simply upgrade everything to insane levels - but is especially so at the very beginning, mostly because your stats start off so low as to be almost non-existent.  Joshua is a very weak character to start off with, and it takes a great deal of time grinding shadowruns before things start equalizing.

This is one of my few gripes with the game.  There is a nice variety of runs you can go on, but by the time you get to where you really need tons of cash and karma to get where you need to be to advance the storyline, your options have been whittled down to only two real choices:  Matrix runs or breaking into corporate buildings to retrieve a package/person.  The challenge at this point is to merely keep up the grind without getting burnt out.  I realize, however, that the limitations of the Genesis were probably what kept the developers from introducing even more variety in the run types . . . but it can still wear the player down after a while.

The Graphics
Overall the graphics were very well designed.  The opening screen itself with the Shadowrun logo looks absolutely beautiful, and all of the different areas of the city look like they should.  There's a lot of great detail all over the place - from litter and debris lining the streets in the barrens to the futuristic looking high-tech gadgetry on the desks in the office buildings - but some of it is marred by a strange sort of pixellation effect.  Some of the streets and sidewalks, for instance, look like they're only about half there, as there's a grid of black spots laying across them.  I think it may have been an attempt to give them a more textured look, but I'd say it failed if that's the case.

Another small but sometimes annoying problem is a slight warping of the image from time to time.  Most noticeable in office buildings and out in the woods, a horizontal section of the screen will sometimes become raggedy.  It doesn't obscure the image any, but it is a bit distracting at times.  I've played this game both as a cartridge and as a ROM and this ghost warping occurs in both, so it's definitely a problem with the programming of the game itself, though I can't personally imagine the exact mechanics behind it.

A lot of the NPCs that wander around outside are clones of each other with no real individualization, and there's only about five different types at most.  Meh.

These are all just minor issues, however.  The game as a whole looks great.  Especially cyberspace . . . even though they use a very basic topography (in the pencil and paper RPG, the virtual construct of a computer system can look like virtually anything the programmers want it to look like), it's very pretty and utilizes a pretty snazzy mock 3D setup.

The Music
Shadowrun is one of the few games I'd consider buying the soundtrack from.  Where it's SNES predecessor was kind of "rock noir", the Genesis version is much more techno with an occasional hint of grunge underlying it.  Each specific musical snatchet is completely appropriate for the area it plays in as well, adding to the atmosphere without taking it over.

Only problem is that when you load your game while you're already playing, the music glitches and starts playing the Redmond Barrens theme no matter where you had saved last.  Fortunately it fixes itself once you leave the area.

The Bottom Line
I absolutely adore this game.  Though it has its moments where it's a bit of a grind, the excellent gameplay keeps even doing the same thing over and over again interesting.  I love that it's very tightly based on the Second Edition Shadowrun rules, making it feel even more like Shadowrun than just the setting alone could do.  Great story, great graphics, great music . . . overall, this is just a great game and I highly recommend it.

Shadowrun (SNES)

Platform:  Super Nintendo
Developer:  Beam Software
Released:  1993
Genre:  Action RPG

The Game
Jake Armitage is having a bad day.  But most days in which you die and wake up in the morgue aren't going to be your best, and that's just the situation in which Jake has found himself.  Unable to remember exactly what happened to him, he has to follow a thin trail of clues in order to figure it all out.  As he makes his way around the Seattle Metroplex in the year 2050 he has to dodge all of the people trying to kill him a second time, find help wherever he can get it, learn the path of a shamanic magician, and take down a couple of megacorporations to bring a conclusion to his adventure.  Just another day in the life of a shadowrunner.

Shadowrun is based on the popular pencil and paper RPG system of the same name.  Set in the only somewhat distant future, corporations more or less rule the parts of the world that the remnants of the sovereign nations no longer hold (and some of those chunks as well) and magic has returned to the world.  Shadowrunners are mercenaries willing to do virtually any job for the right price, finding profit by slipping through the cracks of civilization and doing the jobs the corporations aren't willing or able to dirty their own hands with directly.

The Characters
You can hire on other shadowrunners throughout the course of the game, but the only main protagonist is Jake himself, and he only speaks a few times, making any determinations concerning his character fairly difficult.  At the very least he seems prepared to finish the job he's been given and do the right thing when it comes down to it.

The bad guys - primarily taking the form of Drake, a dragon in charge of his own little corporate empire - are usually distant and cranky, but they're undeniably evil because . . . well, I guess they just are, dammit.  It's really a black and grey morality at work here.  The best baddie is undeniably the Jester Spirit, however, with his sadistically amusing dialogue and interesting character arc.

While characterization in this game isn't exactly deep, it's still there.  Virtually every NPC and PC you meet has their own distinct voice, all speaking with different accents, turns of phrase, and attitude.  Some of them - like Norbert, my favorite little maniac dwarf shadowrunner - are actually pretty damn entertaining at times.

The Writing
The story is a mildly complex plot that holds up pretty well, even if specific motivations are rarely called into question.  There are a few good revelations and a couple of decent twists . . . nothing great, but enough to keep a player interested and entertained.  In the end and despite a few oddities here and there, it definitely gives the feel of a typical Shadowrun adventure.

The dialogue is where the writing really shines, however.  As mentioned before, each character has their own particular way of talking, meaning you won't get bored chatting up four or five people with identical speech patterns.  The writing also has a good bit of clever wit about it . . . one of the runners you can hire on is a shaman named Dances With Clams, and he makes ocean references from time to time.

One thumb up.

The Gameplay
The game works on a point and click interface that would have been more at home on a PC than on the SNES.  Examining, manipulating, and picking up things isn't really so bad, but having to hit a button, move the cursor over, and then start spamming the button some more whenever one wants to initiate combat is a little bothersome, especially since no one else - including any runners you may have hired - aren't bound by any such restriction.  You also can't move Jake around while any of the cursors (manipulate, attack, magic) are active, meaning that while your enemies are free to go wherever they want while they're filling Jake with lead, Jake has to stand rooted to one spot while he returns fire.

Also unfortunate is the dialogue window.  While talking to people, you receive certain words and phrases that you can repeat to them for more information or tell to other people to get more info or advance the story in some way.  The unfortunate part is that after a while you collect an exorbitant number of keywords, and unless you already know exactly which ones will and won't get a response, you have to go down through the entire list, one word at a time, until you find just the right one or two that will make things proceed.  And if you forget or miss that one little word somehow, you might go nuts trying to figure out what you did wrong and end up starting the whole process all over again.  I remember that the first time I played this game, I was stuck in the first section for what seemed like hours all because I somehow missed saying "Lone Star" to this one guy tucked off the back office of a building.

Still, it's not too horrible.  The system is, overall, workable.  The karma system is okay.  Basic, not too deep, but it does its job.

The Challenge
I've played and beaten this game several times before, but even knowing exactly where I needed to go and exactly what I needed to do when I got there, it was still fairly challenging for me.  I'd like to take this as a hallmark of a well-balanced game, that it can be challenging (if not as challenging) for veteran players and newbie players alike.  It helps keep one from getting bored with it too easily.

The Graphics
For the most part, the graphics are beautiful, showing off worn-down slums and shiny, glittering office buildings alike with wonderful style.  The overall map of the game is pretty small compared to most SNES games, but it makes up for it by making each section of that map unique, a collection of greatly varied environments from a car-lined junkyard to a Gothic cemetery to high-rise offices to underground computer labs, with almost no cloning of rooms whatsoever.

Where the graphics fail is regarding small clickable objects, a common problem with a lot of early point and click adventure games.  One of the first items you're supposed to pick up is a scalpel from the morgue Jake wakes up in.  Unfortunately, the scalpel is only about three pixels long, so it takes a little trial and error to even discover that it's something you're supposed to take unless you already know what you're looking for.

The Music
I love the music in this game.  It's got a kind of "rock noir" sound to it a lot of the time, and I found myself quite often singing along with the catchy background tunes.

The Bottom Line
I'm an avid fan of the Shadowrun setting, having been playing and GMing it off and on since high school.  I can't say I'm horribly impressed with this particular outing . . . I'm not particularly fluent in the first edition version that this game is apparently based on, but I'm still fairly certain that a lot was cut out or changed in the transition.  Prickly little things like a very shallow stats system and having a character use magic and cyberware without any sort of detriment.

Still, I don't hate it, either.  It plays pretty well and is a decent diversion for a slow afternoon.  Let's just call it middle of the road and leave it at that.