Slot Off, Frag-Face! Let's Play Sega's Shadowrun

Wiz, chummers. Welcome back. Sorry about the delay, but I had to do a little traveling for biz. You never know where the next big score will come in. (Rumors that I was instead playing Super Meat Boy until my eyeballs bled are completely unfounded!)

When we last left our hero - things were pretty crap. Let's hope they improve...



As luck would have it, our first order of business is right next door to Seattle General.



-- Reconnaissance photograph courtesy of Nunix Enterprises GmbH --

Welcome to Icarus Descending.



Now normally a hoity-toity place like this would throw us out on our ear -but it seems as if someone's expecting us.



Not bad. Could use more harpsichord, though, preferably being played by scantily-clad women. And more waiters. Firing a warning shot doesn't seem to get me a table any faster. Given there aren't any runners around, something tells me that the back booth is important.

(Incidentally, folks in this game care little about random gunfire provided it isn't hitting them. Well, most of the time. There are some exceptions...)



Ah, the man himself. Something tells me that this is the reason a no-name lowlife like us made it past the bouncer.



That's one of the best causes of death ever. I think the only ones that can top it are "death by snuu-snuu" and "use of immortality escape clause after performing every other possible action in the universe."



Apparently I'll recognize her by her corncob pipe, button nose, and seething murderous hatred of our family line.



Ah, the standard company line.

And the standard company shutdown. Both of these guys seems fairly useful, though...we've just gotta pick up some scratch.




Whoa. Bing-fragging-go. Just one tiny technical problem with this run - we currently have no way of doing it. Even if we did have a decker, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to head into a serious system with a bargain bin deck.

That said, this is the best way to get cash fast in Shadowrun - Matrix, Matrix, Matrix. Even if you have to hire someone to head inside for you. While we won't be making the fat stacks yet, it's definitely on our to-do list.



Given we just got here a couple hours ago, I figure now's as good a time as any to play tourist.



For instance, here's a peek inside Fuchi, one of Shadowrun's megacorps. We'll be taking a grand tour later - when we have a good reason to. Much like in real life, corporations are all smiles on the outside, but the second you go somewhere you don't belong, they'll crush you like an ant.



Anyway, let's pre...



Whoa. Maybe that helping hand from Caleb should be purchased sooner rather than later. These guys are Lone Star. Given the recent economic collapse, the traditional police force has folded into these privatized guys. While they do a token job of patrolling the streets, they're all playthings of the corps. They'd even kidnap Princess Vespa for a million space bucks.

We'd best make ourself scarce.



Not bad, not bad at all - but does it revolve? Also, unfortunately, Pike's fish Market is not in this game. Bummer, chummers.



Hey there, tall, dark, and trenchcoated.




Oh goodie, a college dropout shadowrunner. I suppose it's better than him backpacking through Europe or constantly calling Mom and asking when the next check's coming.



Finally, we get a bone thrown our way. This is our first contact, and the only one we can get without slipping a few bucks to the referrer. We'll have to give him a call once we're done here, especially since we're both magicians and all.



Hey! I resemble that! Did you not see my FSU postcard?



Sadly, here I can only nod solemly in agreement.



Damn! I thought college students were all about having unpaid internships for course credit. Ah well, given the general tone of my readers, I don't think hiring a second mage would be a popular choice right now.

Time to give the big man on campus a ring-a-ding-ding.



Ahhh! OK, OK! I stole the diamonds! (Though I figure this is about what you'd respond with when random ex-students of yours freely distribute your number.)



His info is pretty sound, though. Well, as sound as it can be. How many hellhounds are roaming the streets of Seattle?



We'll have to find a vorpal blade and go all jabberwocky on his ass, then. OK, enough about Lewis Carroll's laudanum adventures, let's see if we can get into that secret club.



Now this could come in handy for when we get some scratch and move from shooting people to killing yaks at 200 yards with mind bullets. But, like everything so far, is a bit our of our grasp, costwise.



As is him giving us the number of a former teacher's pet. This better not be Trent again...



As a nice bonus, once we're off the line we can review what El Jefe has to offer in our pocket secretary.



Enough messing around here - it's time to increase our BAC.

I think the answer here is obvious.



Nuts. Didn't quite work as well that I thought it would.



Ah well - there's always the club down the street. Incidentally, I think that Seattle here consists of 50% abandoned buildings and 48% pubs.



Oh yeah? Well, I'll start my own bar! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the bar! And the blackjack!





-- Reconnaissance photograph courtesy of Nunix Enterprises GmbH --

I've been kicked out of too many bars. I'm not nearly drunk enough to be here yet...oh, wait. Why does this sound familiar?



Wow - the ork influence really shows in this place. Look how different it is from all the other bars! But I think the real reason we're here is in the back booth.

Huh. I'm not sure which of Mike's old bosses to trust less.



Yeah, I think we'll go with the free sample version of your info for the moment. Next up, we'll visit an ice cream shoppe and get about 10 free samples for dinner.



Great. Our next lead is boxed in by a uncoolness-detecting auto-gun. (And this one won't be bypassed by our quest for revenge, either.)



I think I like this guy. I bet he jaywalks while littering.



Sigh. Ah well. Time to take our lumps again...




At least the pay for running Reed's packages is significantly more than Gunderson's. I'll leave it here for the moment. Next time, though - we're gonna get a little cash, get a decker, and get a lotta cash. 'Cause, brother - we're gonna need it.

Wiz, chummers - I'm back after a longer than expected hiatus. I've also learned two important lessons. First off, make sure your computer has all your important LP constructing stuff *before* you jet off for biz, and secondly, avoid the red-eye at all costs. Even if it's the last flight out of the city before it gets nuked. At least your pain will be over briefly.

Anyway, when we last left off, I was performing menial jobs for substandard pay. Then I got off work and decided to play this game instead...



Isn't escapism fun? Ah well, time to knock off again.



Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or have we been here before? We better hire a DD to be sure.




Hmmm...he's talking about some weird computer crap. Are we sure that we want to sully our nature-blessed hands with him?

(The answer, as always, is "Go directly to hell, nature.")



I suppose that making short jokes are right out, though. All a consequence of us not seeing eye-to-eye, I guess. Ah well, they'd probably go right over his head.

He also covers in three screens of text what it takes Morpheus most of a movie to cover. Morpheus really sucks at explaining.



And after that last courier run (and a couple more that I decided to edit out in the interest of not attracting torch and pitchfork wielding mobs) - we finally have a decker in our party.



Mind you, he still needs a bit of work. OK, OK, a lot of work. (Notice that his 'Computer' skill is a whopping 2...out of 12.) But here in the early game, he's here to fulfill another important purpose - getting scratch.



For the nine folks that voted Decker before the LP started - your time has finally come! Now, after much delay, we'll finally enter the Matrix right no...



...um, once I switch over (by hitting C) to the guy with the hardware in his brain. (Also, don't forget to switch back once you're done with the Matrix if you're pretty used to using Joshua. I mean, Melvin Helpwanted.)




Once we plug in, we get to choose where we want to go. Selecting "Enter Passcode" will put us into whatever system a Mr. Johnson wants us to break into. (Not only that, but once we've connected with one of these passcodes, it will be saved to our address book so that we can shake down that system for data later - provided that it's a named (and thus fairly heavily guarded) system.)

We'll muck around with System Search, which will dump us into a random system. Odds are good that it'll be a fairly low-end system, but this can (and does) dump you into Renraku central on occasion. This will more than likely end your run rather fast.



Before you're connected, you get this Cyberdeck configuration screen, where you get to set up what programs you want to run. Luckily, Mike's old deck had a few programs pre-loaded on it already. No Minesweeper here, though - these programs are all designed to crack ice. IC, that is - Intrusion Countermeasures. Ice is your biggest threat in The Matrix, and we'll be seeing many different varieties of it through our adventure.

Attack is simple enough - it tries to pull a Control-Alt-Delete on Norton Antivirus. It's very effective at what it does, but the moment you use it, ice will start actively attacking you. So don't fire this unless ice attacks you first.



Next up is Medic. This fixes up your Persona (or avatar) once it gets hurt in battle. If it gets hurt too much, your decker will be booted off the system and you'll have to break in all over again!



Ah - Deception. This baby is worth its weight in...erm...it's worth several tons of gold and lingerie models. It's a password cracker! While it doesn't work against all ice - those it does work against are beaten in one shot if it successfully works.



Finally, we have Analyze. This will attempt to determine how strong the ice you're fighting against is so that you'll know if it's time to throw in the towel or now.

Unfortunately, it's too big for us right now. See, each program has its own size (in the top right). All of the loaded programs have to fit inside your deck's free memory. Thing is, our bargain bin deck is fairly low on RAM, so we're limited to loading the first three programs. (Actually, Attack and Deception are your two real go-to programs, so they take up the first slots. With the room left, we could only fit Medic into that space. If we had more room, though, I'd definitely go with Analyze.)

Now, while you're fighting against ice, you can unload programs from active memory and load up other ones - but they each take time to load (which may be filled with the other computer shooting at you.) So we'll just go with these three for now.



I'm flying! I'm flying! I'M FLYING!



Ooh, a low security system - we waltzed right in the front door through no ice at all. Thank you, dice roll. Anyway, once we get into a node we'll have some options on what to do based on where we are. Since this is the front door, all we can do is go inside the system.



When we move between nodes, we get this map showing us where we've been and where we're headed. We're the stick figure, and the question mark is our destination. Looks like we're heading into a SPU (sub-processing unit.)



Matrix Man on final approach to the SPU. This time, however, it's protected by ice. Here's where Analyze would come in handy so we'll know what we're dealing with. However, there is one thing we can try that works fairly often...



Boom. One shot. That'll teach you to use "dragonpants" as your login!

Unfortunately, SPU's are very dull. All you can do is leave them and head for another node. Fortunately, this SPU is blocking something very juicy...



This is the CPU - and it's usually the best defended component of the system (and for good reason.) Notice that Deception didn't work (see the "Resisted!" notice in the top left.)



That said, since Deception isn't an active-breaking bit of software, you're free to try again if you screw up - until even the CPU gets cracked.



Once you're in the CPU, you more or less have free rein over the entire system. (The only problem is that you can still trip over yourself in here, like in any node. Chalk it up to Pter's low computer skill. Unfortunately, each screw up may attract some unwelcome attention from ice as well...)



What we'll play with now is "Go To Node". Here, you can travel to any node in the system - even those you're not next to at the moment, like you're restricted to in any other node. Our main targets are the squares - DS. Data Stores. Information wants to be free (and subsequently downloaded and sold on the black market for a steep markup!)



Data Stores look a little like safes, and in practice that's a good way to think about them - crack them open for fabulous prizes.



Uh-oh.

Here, we see that we've run into some ice that doesn't accept input from our password cracker. And I don't mean that it doesn't accept it on the first try, I mean just plain will not accept its input. (See the "SYNTAX ERROR" note in the top left there.)

This leads to a double whammy - not only is our go-to program useless against this ice, but attempting to use it means the ice now knows we're trying to break in! Thus, we are left with only one option...



AAAAAAHHHHHH-ttack!

Direct hit! However, this ice has a few counters of its own. It's sending out a little sphere to the right there. Once it goes off the screen, it has a chance of triggering an alert and strengthening all the ice in the system.



Aaah, missed!



There we go, back on track. Let's just keep shelling this ice.



Come on...come on...



YES! We're in like Flynn.



Now that we're in the data store, we have the opportunity to root around for files. Odds are that we won't mess around with the erase function unless we're paid to. Transferring Data - now that's another story.



Problem is that the good stuff takes a few tries to get to.



Ooh, this looks important. *snag*



That said, there's still one DS left on the system, so let's pop over next door and see what we can find.



Bam! One shot!

Hmmm...could have some good stuff. Note the name of each datastore. Usually it will be a good indicator of whether it's worth grabbing stuff from or not. Here System Files could be good for passwords and such, and management files earlier is good for some nice info too...but sometimes you'll break into stuff like "Outdated Files."



Another snag! This time it's with our storage space. The problem here is that we've only got a set amount of space on our deck for both datafiles and our programs. We've got 100 Mp (Mega-peta-bytes? I guess?) of space, but only 28 left to hold our ill-gotten gains. Thus, the files we steal should be really small if we can help it.



Let's head back to the management files section and see if anything good is there. Note that since we've beaten the ice here already, we won't need to fight it again - as long as we're still connected. Jacking out resets all the ice to their original state.



Gotta be something here...



Dammit! Well, it's to be expected with Petr's low computer skills. I'll go into alerts and such a bit later, but suffice it to say that if you're a bit too crap on a deck, the system will notice and boot you out. (Yes, even though we had control of the CPU, too.)



Ah well, at least we got one file out of the system. Let's see if we can fence it for anything.



Time for a quick recap. I've spent the past four updates ferrying packages around for almost no pay. I've been shot at and deposited at hospitals at least a dozen times. I can't even walk two steps without someone taking a swing at me. Through it all, I've managed to just barely scratch together enough to hire a decker.

Right here - in one data farming expedition - with a net total of one file - I've got a bigger paycheck then I've gotten in most of my playtime so far.

Frag yeah.



I'm rich!

That said - we definitely have room for improvement in our current setup. Let's take a quick jaunt over to MicroTronics...



Ah, new iron. This reminds me of when I was a kid and would pore over the MacWarehouse catalog with my friend before going back and waiting for Space Quest IV to load on his Mac LC. "Wow - this one has a whole 1.2 GIGABYTES of hard drive space! Is there even that much data IN THE WORLD?!!"

While the prices are quite a bit higher than gear we've seen before, after that matrix run I feel confident rather than horribly depressed about it.



That said, there are also upgrades available to your current deck. The extra storage upgrade will help us store more ill-gotten gains perfectly legal BitTorrent streams. We'll go ahead and bump the storage capacity up to 200 Mp - this will give us roughly three times the amount of space for datafiles that we had before.



Also while we're here, we can pick up the handy Sleaze utility. It (potentially) works on everything, but it won't let us into a node we bypass - meaning we'll have to break out our old standbys for things like Data Stores and the CPU.



Note, however, that each program has a level - higher level programs are more effective. Unfortunately, they're also bigger and more expensive - note the price jump between levels 1 and 2 here.



Now that I've got some upgrades, I'm heading back in. Bring on the Data Stores!

Good sign so far - no ice on the front door.



And what's this? I start out RIGHT NEXT to the CPU?!! I knew that fatted calf sacrifice to the RNG Gods would finally turn my luck around!



Ah. Well, I did want a little challenge. No, wait, I didn't. Time to break out the happy crasher!




This is one tough nut to crack...maybe they were onto something putting the CPU at the forefront.



Drek! One of those spheres got through - and set off an alert! (Note the top left where it says so.) There are three levels of alerts here. No alert is the default state (and where you'd like to be if at all possible). During Passive Alerts, all the ice in the system gets a little tougher...



Double Drek! And during Active Alerts all the ice in the system gets a lot tougher. Not only that, but if another alert request comes in while the system is in Active Alert, everyone connected instantly gets booted out of the system - meaning you'll have to start your run all over again.




But we get through, and not a moment too soon.

Once you're in a node, you can tell at which alert level you're at by the little indicator at the bottom. If the 'Alert' text is green, there's no alert, yellow is passive, and red is active.

Since we're in the CPU, though, we've got an ace up our sleeve.



Hah! Canceling an alert puts all the ice back to normal strength. Sweet. (For this reason, CPUs are usually buried really far into a system map.) No idea why this system's CPU was literally the very first iced node we came across. Time to teach these guys a security object lesson, Kevin Mitnick-style.



Unfortunately, just about everything you do in a system has a chance of triggering an alert - including canceling the current alert. No biggie here now that we're in the CPU, though - all we have to do is just cancel the alert again until it keeps.



Ooh, three juicy datastores this time. Eenie-meenie-miney-moe...



O-S-O-K. Or is it One-Shot-One-Crack?



Oh yes. I foresee definite financial activity in the future.



I'm sure this will come in handy.



Yeah, a 'business' junket to the Bahamas. I smell blackmail!



OH. HELL. YES.

Let's take a quick jump over to another DS to see if it's got some more cool stuff to swipe...



Eh, not quite as good, but we'll pick up a file anyway.



One more to go - and we're in! Let's see what we can g...



Wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhhhhh. Well, even if we had the space, odds are that nothing here would be too useful anyway. That said, we've had another quite successful jaunt in the Matrix - and this LP is finally starting to pick up again. But I've taken up too much of your time this go-round, so Petr, take us out.

Yes! That was so awesome!

How much will all the data sell for? Inquiring minds want to know!

Do you know what's up with the alternate attacks (like if you press b or c) in the Matrix? I get the feeling the ones that take longer are more powerful but I never use analyze so I can't tell the difference.

Ok now the decking makes a little more sense than it did before. And it sure as hell pays a lot better than I ever would have thought!

Did you bring Petr along forever? How much did that cost you?

The cool/broken (depending on how you look at it) aspect of hiring deckers for a single run is that you can make them go on as many random file hunts as you like as long as you don't complete a contract. You can get rich off of some hired decker's work and never give him a dime, but as soon as Johnson pays you $50 for a fedex run the decker's all woohoo payday so long sucker

Genesis Shadowrun hacking is apparently like four billion times more complex and awesome than SNES Shadowrun hacking. Guess I need to play this finally.

I heard from a friend that he found the Genesis Shadowrun more awesome in general than the SNES one.

Wiz chummers, time once again to head into the sprawl. (Incidentally, I think that our little trips into running will be on a weekly basis from now on. That should give me enough time to do commentary and all that without the feeling that I'm under the gun all the time. Rumors that I'm instead blowing this off and playing Pac-Man Tournament Edition DX all day are completely unfounded!)

When we last left off - actually, I can't do that joke this time because we were actually really well off when we left, having grabbed a lot of valuable datafiles from a random system.

Time to find our fence.



Oh yeah, our fence. I'm not sure there's a way to find this guy mentioned in the game, other than just randomly going into buildings to see what you can see. (If you're playing along, this building is in the lower left corner of downtown Seattle.) Suffice to say, once you find this guy and have some data, you've got it made. Odds are that he will be the single largest bankroller in the game, owing to the sheer profitability of crawling around in the matrix.

As StrawberryChrist (smoothie elision) noted, runners hired for the short term will stick around until either you finish a run or you suffer a TPK. (Though as we saw with Ricky, doing FedEx and escort runs don't count as runs for some reason.) So, a quick way to make money with little outlay is what we're doing now - hiring a decker and breaking into random systems, stealing all the data files we can carry.

And, summarily, selling them...



Um...if they're worth anything. The problem is that the value of these files are essentially random. Sometimes it's a big score - sometimes it's a big goose egg. Drek! I can't believe we wasted all that tim...



Holy drek! More money than I've made over THE ENTIRE GAME SO FAR?!! FRAG YES!!



And wouldn't you know it, the one file that I though unprofitable turns out to be worth a nice chunk of change. One man's trash, indeed.



This calls for a celebratory shopping spree - what've you got for me, Ares?



Hmmm...not bad, not bad.



Whoa, even better. The unassuming Jacket is the best armor you can get for a (fairly) low price - any better than this and we're talking military issue (and illegal) gear. Not that legality is a moral quandary - it's more a Lone Star and insane markup quandary.



We get some spare change (and more importantly, free up some inventory) by selling back our clothing. Unfortunately, Shadowrun follows the Resident Evil school of inventory management in which a one ounce stim patch takes up the same amount of space as a thirty pound military bodysuit or a three-foot long shotgun - thus it behooves you to swap out useless crap for useful stuff ASAP.



As long as we're in the area, we need to check up on an old friend. Well, acquaintance. Well...money-sink....



At least he's still alive - though an option for charging him for said save doesn't appear on our screen for some reason...

I just saved your life, ungrateful whelp! 100 to hear your life story...is actually a drop in the bucket at this point, so what the hell.



Though we could have surmised this considering that he sold our bro some crap, learning it this way is the only way we can get him to sell *us* some additional crap. Also, Hollywood refers not to the land of reality shows, but the Hollywood Correctional Facility maximum security prison. So a step up, is what I'm saying.



The Mach 22 is a machine pistol that's more or less an Uzi expy. While a fairly good price for it, this game falls into one of many that state that pistol bullets are for some reason much stronger than machinegun bullets. Pass.



As far as items go, he's got not a lot that we're interested in for the moment. Oh yeah, we forgot to pump him for info on this Owlfeather guy...




Hmmm. It looks like we're not gonna be able to visit Owlfeather without a visa after all - but considering the markup Boris here is offering, we'll call that plan B. His brother, on the other hand...



Since he seems to be dealing with corps in the city, maybe we can get to Owlfeather through him instead.

Don't worry, we're not doing another series of fetch quests - it's info gathering time.



Heh. Gunderson more or less confirms our feelings on Boris. That said, there's another talking point that popped up as well...



This Vigore guy sounds interesting - I'll have to see where he's holed up. But don't worry Gunderson, you'll always have a place in my heart for your low-end fetch quests. (That place will be unvisited after bypass surgery.)

OK, time to get mo...



While I really like the random encounter aspect of Shadowrun, the only problem is that the few encounters it has tend to be repeated time and time again. Kind of like Red Dead Redemption, really, where I'm asked to stop three random lynchings by shooting the rope daily.



Enough with random encounters, though - it's time to get us some hardware.



Ladies and gents, welcome to The Crime Mall.

Remember, guns don't kill people - I do.



Here we have the Mach 22, which Boris was trying to foist on us. Thing is, it's really not got a lot of power against armor.



Unfortunately, the same is true for the updated AK as well - which is odd, because apparently the AK using a 7.62mm round is supposed to equal tremendous stopping power. I blame game balance reasons - mainly I blame the game for attempting to have balance. It's a single player game! Screw balance!



Ah, here we go. This baby has good damage, good armor penetration, and even a couple accessories, to boot! We'll take a look at accessories when we have more money to play with, but the one on top is a laser sight (which increases accuracy), and the one on the bottom is a gas vent (which reduces recoil - but the purpose of that is to...increase accuracy.) Only problem here is that it costs...oh...EIGHT TIMES MORE THAN THE PREDATOR DID. Yeesh.



In a sort of bizarro England setting, pistols are legal while shotguns are not. Shotguns are absolutely devastating against everything, but they have a major problem - you can't add accessories to them. (The big necessary accessory being, as on TV, a silencer.)



We wrap up the weapons section with Frag Grenades - pretty much the only grenade worth messing with. (There are also Stun and Concussion grenades, which don't do as much damage.) The thing is that grenades are really not worth fighting with - they take forever to toss (when even the pistol is shooting once every couple of seconds, that five second fuse is an eternity) and they can hurt you just as bad as the enemies. There is still one use for them, though, which I will keep you in the dark about to cheaply build suspense. Muhahahaha.



Looking at the armor, we have a lined duster - which I don't really see the point of. While it can conceal illegal weapons, it's use as armor is rather crap. Since thugs tend to appear way more often than Lone Star, you're better off just attempting to bluff or shoot your way out of Lone Star ambushes than try to stand and fight thugs with crap armor.



Ah, here we go. Now this is something to work towards. Sure, it's illegal, but how're they going to arrest you while you're wearing this?

Over on the computer side of the mall, we've got a new version of our favorite one-shot killer, which should cut down on the whole trying and failing sections of the run.



Some other cool programs are Slow, which slows ice down if it connects, and Relocate, which acts like Deception does for Trace Ice. I'm not sure about the utility of Relocate, though - I think that you can keep running it after you're in combat, though, so it may be worth it.

The problem here is that each program takes up space, just like datafiles do - thus, I'll hold off on buying any now programs until I buff up my hard drive space.



Finally, here are a couple of almost certainly hot (in both senses) decks. When looking at the Fairlight Excalibur, it helps to put Wayne's World on in the background and say solemnly, "It will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine."

I suppose I should go over what all the numbers mean. The top three are fairly obvious now that we're in a much more computer literate age. Hardening is how much defense your deck has against attacks by ice - higher means more defense. Response is how fast your deck will obey your commands (higher is faster here too.) Finally the MPCP is the top level aspects your deck can have. You can upgrade individual parts of your deck as well as buying a new deck itself - and this number represents how high you can push things.



For comparison, here're the stats for our current deck, the Allegiance Alpha. Its MPCP is 3, and its general characteristics (the bottom four) are already at 3 - meaning we can't upgrade any of them. Oh yeah - Bod is how well you take attacks, Evasion is how well you dodge them, Masking is how well Deception works, and Sensor is how well Analyze works.



Anyway, we're pretty much tapped out for the moment after upgrades, so let's go on another fact-and-cash-finding expedition.

Deception v3 shows its magic by one shotting this SPU.



And look at that! One hop away from the CPU, as well as two data stores. Hmmm...while the CPU should be taken over first, I'm just too greedy...



D'oh! I knew my hubris would cost me!



OK, I'm in, but I'm already at yellow alert here. Let's see what this thing has...



Hmmm...sounds expensive.




Unfortunately, messing around in there put me at Active Alert, so let's mosey on down the the CPU to smooth things over.



Ah, that never gets old.



Interesting system design - the CPU isn't hiding any data this go around. Oh well - back to safe cracking.



One-shotted...

And we have a couple more data files to play with. Note that the second Surveillance Data is different from the first, being a bit smaller. Also note that these data files are huge, so it's time to disconnect and fence.



Ah, frag.



Whoa, defrag! Once again the randomness of datafile values rears it's ugly head. One Surveillance Data is useless, the other invaluable. I must have picked up the mens' locker room, then the womens' locker room.



I'm rich!

But not for long, as I think it's time to make an investment...



Heading over to Microtronics to trade up on decks.



The main draw for the cheapest non-Mike deck is that it has more potential to increase its abilities. (All my attributes are still at 3 while this deck's MPCP is 4.)



Problem here is that upgrading seems to cost an arm and a leg too. Drek. (Also note that, oddly enough, when you hire a decker, they use the deck that *you're* carrying. Yes, even though their portrait shows them tapping away at their own decks. Go fig.)

We'll leave off here for the moment, after a few profitable expeditions. Now that we're a bit better equipped, I'd like the peanut gallery to chime in as to what our next move is. We've got Owlfeather in the Salish-Shide, but we need a visa to visit him. Then there's his brother, somewhere in the city. Finally, there's Mako Sochou in Club Penumbra (which means, apparently, Club " partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object. ") Then again, I could just say frag all that and get some more cash, either by what I'm doing now or chatting it up with Mr. Johnsons.

So, where to now?

Make some more money preferably by breaking into businesses?