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

It's a good idea to fix this place in your mind, though. See, that there is the only link to civilization for fifty miles. Meaning that unless you want to spend the rest of your life communing with nature (which only applies to hippies or those fleeing town after a zombie apocalypse) you'll want to know where that is at all times so you can hail a cab back. (Though your Medic Alert bracelet still gets reception out here, so you can have the nurses haul you off to safety as well.)



Luckily, the way to the phone booth is clearly marked by this trai...



...why do I suddenly hear a pair of banjos?



Luckily, we won't get too lost staying on this set of screens, which means that we can take in the sights - such as the...um...totem pole to the almighty sunbather tribe. Even after sixteen years, I have no idea what these things are supposed to represent.



Fortunately, the Dances With Negative SPF tribe has established a little village nearby. We'll have to check it ou...



AAAAAAAHHHHHH

What the hell?!! How do these guys live in this environment? What are these things? Bears? Bigfeet? What? Lucky for us they go down fairly easy to gunfire. Evolve Kevlar, nature, then we'll talk!

We avoid the creatures looking for a pic-a-nic basket and duck into the nearby ranger station.



A-ha! Time to finally get back to that avenging my brother thing. Good thing, too, we were dealing with Shenmue levels of distraction, there. (Sadly, there's no option to ask him about Terry.)




Yahoo Answers.



I'll hope against hope that I just need to rake some leaves or clean out his gutters or something.



Hmmm...apparently Viggo Mortessen didn't do so well in the city. Probably pawned that broadsword the first day.




Our standard-issue pumping for free info nets us knowledge of another village nearby. Looking for it may be worthwhile...



...as well as info on where we just were. (This is a bit more useful if you skipped Council Island by buying a fake visa from Boris. Still a bit odd to get info about the island here and not, in say, the city.)

After a brief reminder to blow our nose, it's time to look for that other village.



For being in harmony with nature, the AmerIndians sure have dug out a lot of tunnels into Mt. Rainer.



It's also nice to see that they were considerate enough to put in some flood lighting, too.



Yikes. Hope it's not still active. That's the last thing we ne...



AAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Hell hounds? Just running amok in the caves? That's it, screw nature!



Thankfully, we escape the caves and move into that village.



Oops. Well, since he's not an elf, we must be somewhere else. Granted, when you have to travel through a cave on foot to get from one village to another it's kinda easy to lose track of where you're headed.




Wha...?

Bah, I can take him. I have magic *and* a gun.



Whoa. I guess he wasn't dead after all. That tri-vid lied to me!




Looks like he doesn't need holistic medicine, but actual medicine. And I know someone that can help...




*pant pant*

Now where the hell was she when I had to call the ER 'cause I kept throwing up? Oh, right, Seattle. Duh.



I will? Um, thanks game. Apparently I knew Stark too at some point beforehand, but the game doesn't seem to mention this anywhere.



Oh boy. It's time.



Next time, chummers, we're gonna break into a heavily guarded corporation and steal something highly valuable. What could possibly go wrong?

Anyone dressed like that would "seem occupied with some fetishes". I'm not even going to touch the nurse in leathers. Not while she's on duty!

I approve of hiring a leather-lovin' ork shaman.

Hi-yoh! (Warning - NSFW!)

Wiz, chummers. Welcome back to another jaunt through the Sprawl. When we last left off, we found that one of our brother's fellow runners and best friends was in sad shape, and needed a cyber-heart to live. Unfortunately, said heart is located in the bowels of a heavily guarded corp.



I told you that we'd be taking the grand tour of this place sooner or later, so let's step inside...



Ah. Well. Seems that Fuchi has more than one building in Seattle. (This is only a minor annoyance, though, as you'll just be politely escorted out unless you're trying to swipe something.)



Anyhoo, the building we're looking for is located at the other end of the ci...



This random encounter just plain doesn't make any sense. Am I supposed to be threatened by these guys? Confused? Partying? What? Granted, I still like the random encounter system for moments like these - which serve to affirm that, no, in fact, you are not the only important person in the world. Other folks still move on with their own lives, and don't solely exist to give you stuff/try to kill you.



Enough with the wannabe runners, though - we've got a corp to infiltrate.



Good luck off the bat, here. Isn't it strange how we can get inside effortlessly every single time there's a reason for us to be here, and we're pushed out every time there's not? It's almost as if some arbitrary event flag is set or reset based on our previous actions.

Ladies and germs, welcome to Fuchi - one of the few megacorps with a presence in the Seattle area.

This is as good a place as any to talk about corps - their closest analog in role-playing games would be dungeons, in that they exist to provide a gauntlet of obstacles for your party to run through to get to the treasure at the end.

Most of these obstacles come in the form of security guards, who tend to follow set patrols or guard certain areas, not unlike a certain group of children of Big Boss. Fortunately, though, these encounters are not random, meaning you can avoid or circumvent them with careful planning.

First off, though, we'll try and deal with other obstacles in our path...



Fairly close to the entrance, we spot a security panel to try and hack. (It's a good idea to let your decker (or if you have none, whoever has the greatest Electronics skill) take the lead here.)



Using electronics is a roll of the dice. This is a moderate success, in that it turns off the alarm if it's blaring. (There isn't a way to turn the alarm off permanently, sadly.)



A little more luck gives a critical success, which turns off cameras as well. This is very handy, since cameras like to hide in blind alleys and places you have to pass through, and there's no other way to get rid of them.

Also helpful is the note on which floor you should look for things - since all the corps have at least four floors, it's a good idea to narrow down your search area ASAP as running through any corp willy-nilly is a bad idea.

Now that the cameras are down, all we have to do is waltz to the elevator and sna...



Oh drek.

Charm, don't fail me now...



*phew!*



DREK!! WEAPONS FREE WEAPONS FREE!!



BRRN! BRRN! BRRN! BRRN!

Bit of a problem with these corp guards - mainly they hit like a train and can take a lot of abuse too. Not to mention that they tend to keep coming as long as the alarm's going off. Obviously our best strategy here is not to take them head on, but to play it cool and not arouse suspicions around these guys.



...next time. (I like to imagine the the ambulance just plowed through the front doors, spraying plate glass shards everywhere.)



Eh, what the heck, let's give it one more try. Nothing to lose but my life, right?



Hell, maybe I'll get through easier since there's just one of me instead of my whole team trying to infiltrate. (Note: This ain't the case.)



OK, now how did she do it again?



Drek drek drek drek drek drek!



Phew. Better not try anything involving Electronics with Nature Boy here.

C'mon silver tongue...



Oh no, not again!



*Whew!* All the same, if we're gonna do many more of these runs, we will, unlike those searching for the treasure of the Sierra Madre, need some steenkin' badges.



Thankfully, we make it to the elevator. Not a stairwell in sight, though - these guys are asking for it if someone torches their building.



No muzak, oddly enough. Huh.



OK, here we are on the third floor, where hopefully we'll find that cyber-heart. Just one minor technical problem - all the doors around us are closed...



...and locked. These doors are locked through a secure system that can only be opened via Maglock Passkeys. They're not unlike the ID card system used in the first Metal Gear Solid, in that each door has its own security level needed to open it. (Even across different corps, oddly enough.) If you've got a key with a greater number than the one on the door, you can walk right through. Unfortunately, we don't...



So let's run down our options. After the bungling with the alarm, it probably isn't a good idea to mess with this door's electronics. As well, we can't walk away from all the doors, as the cyber-heart is on the other side. This leaves us with the option which will henceforth be referred to as

AAAAAAVOOONNNN CALLING!

Sweet! We got the door open! Only one tiny problem, though - for some reason the sound of a grenade going off and a door flying off its hinges triggered an alarm.




Unfortunately, this situation gets real ugly real quick.



Apparently the ambulance now crashed through the front door, wedged itself into the elevator, picked me up, and dove out the window.

Thankfully...



It was all a dream! Yes, this update was mainly a cautionary tale about what to expect if you do a corp run unprepared. Mainly, you get deaded a lot. Looks like we'll need to some more grinding in order to move along with the story. Until next time, chummers!

Note that, in the pen & paper RPG, Trauma Teams won't actually enter Corp property. Corporations are extraterritorial entities in 20XX, and they have full legal jurisdiction to waste you eight ways to Sunday. If you get shot up in a corporate compound, you better hope you have enough blood left to limp to the curb.

You have to wonder whose artificial heart it is that you're stealing. Obviously they're shipping it off somewhere to be transplanted. So who's going to die because you have to save Stark? Little Suzy? A promising young star captain, maybe?

It's too bad Bioware didn't make this or you could go through a whole subplot about the moral implications of stealing this for your own ends. But I doubt their writing team would have ever given us "Slot off, frag-face!!!," so it's probably for the best.

I'm an update late, but...

...looks like Exposure Burial to me. This is a real thing where some cultures will put their dead up on a platform to be picked clean by vultures and such.

Really? Huh. It still seems really inconvenient to place them on the pillar, though. Just chuck 'em in the forest and let the hell hounds have at 'em. (This reminds me of the best thing that I've heard cadavers used for - testing bulletproof vests. Sheer genius!)

And don't worry about being an update late - looks like I've got that problem too. Concentrating on writing it up now, so it should be up either today or tomorrow.

I'm remembering this really vaguely, so grain of salt and all that, but I think it had something to do with sky-worship, so being exposed to sun and birds only as opposed to other terrestrial scavengers was key. I have no idea if such a thing actually belongs anywhere near the Pacific Northwest, though.

If you want exposure to sun, the PNW is definitely the wrong location.

Wiz, chummers. Welcome back to the year-round rain festival city, Seattle. Last time we noted that our bro's best friend needed a new cybernetic heart to live, and is no longer a kid so the Make-A-Wish foundation is right out. We also had a surpisingly vivid dream about what would happen if we walked into Fuchi right now to steal the heart. Must be those psycho powers or something.

One thing's for sure, though. If we're gonna get through that corp in one piece, we'll need some serious hardware. To get that hardware, we're gonna need to know the right people. And to get to know the right people, we're gonna need scratch, spoundoli, scripts, simoleons, and even s-nuyen. How're we gonna get that?



OK Ms. Hotshot Decker, let's see if you've gotten over that morbid fear of death. (Shut up, Dix.)



Whoa, Rocko's Modern Life was wrong! You can fight City Hall! It actually helps that they are big and we are small, as it allows us to infiltrate without their knowledge.



Ooh, DS right off the bat here.



Let's see what this city has to offer...



Whoa. Run over. I'll just monkey around in here for a while.

Snag snag snag snag. Right, that's enough for today.



We'll take the quick way out. Pressing Start while in Cyberspace will take you back to the configuration screen, where you can manipulate programs and such - but also jack out. Jacking out ends your Matrix session immediately, which is handy if you've already done what needs doing. The problem is that it can be blocked by Black Ice - thus, jacking out before Rianna's clinical death would've made her just as dead. So, yeah. But enough about that.



Time to play Wheel Of Boris.




Not a bad haul. A few more of these and we'll be sitting pretty.

Fairly light here - let's see what we can wring out.



Already at the CPU - which won't take our damn password. Figures.




Man, this one just doesn't want to play nice. C'mon, I'm only trying to subjugate you to my whims!



AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

OK, let's go over this one. While most ice is fairly benign, just kicking you out if you screw up, this one is the mean sort. It's called Tar Paper, and is essentially a suicide bomber. It lies in wait until you have a failure running a program, then activates. When it activates, it pops up, sets Active Alert, deletes your program, and dies. (Notice how Attack is suddenly gone from the lower left corner.)



Fortunately, Tar Paper only deletes your program from active memory, so you can reload it from the configuration menu and keep running. That said, it has a big brother, Tar Pit, that will delete your program from memory and your deck. Which sucks, because not only is your run more or less screwed from that point, but you're actually out money replacing the hosed program. So like the Surgeon General says, Tar is bad for you.

The only good part is that now there's just the one harmless bit of ice to contend with. Enough attempts and we crash through to the CPU at long last.



Off with the alarm and the alarm-alarming-alarm.



Stop.

Data Time.




Whoa, full to the brim this time. Perhaps it's time for some more storage upgrades.

Beats a stick in the eye, I guess. I'll skip the next system I cracked - believe it or not, it was the first system I cracked with Petr a second time - from that I made less than 2k. But then I stumbled onto another system...




Now this system is a pretty tough nut to crack. Just maybe it'll be worth it.



Now this is getting interesting...usually an unlisted system would dump me at the CPU by now.

While it doesn't come through in screenshots, it's taking me longer and longer to crack the ice the deeper I go. Usually it falls in one or two shots of Deception - here, it's taking about five to ten. Attack usually takes about four or five shots for lesser ice. (Something I should probably do is either upgrade my comp skill or my comp.)

I'm rather interested in cracking open this CPU now.



Oh drek - it's Wintermute.



I'm not scared of you.





YES! In your face, braindeath! Wait...oh, you're dead and a computer program. Who cares if what I said sounds stupid?

Whoa, this is heavy. Generally security follows a color hue pattern - Blue is the weakest. Then Green. Then Orange...and now we have Red. We've stumbled onto some serious sh...drek here.



Behind the CPU was this single Datastore. Interesting...






We snatch a few things and make our escape.




Holy living drek. With what we were paid here, perhaps making a run on Fuchi won't be suicidal after all. We'll need some time to prepare, though. And some friends...

First, you get the nuyen. Then, you get the power. Then, you get the women... er, half-orc women.

Wiz chummers, welcome back to the Sprawl. When we left off last time, we'd just gotten rich.



Quite rich indeed.

With all this cash burning a hole in our pocket - or is it all the ones and zeroes weighing down our credstick? Whatever, man - it's time for us to go on a little contact high.



First things first - let's slum it in the little bar next to Digipen in the Redmond Barrens for a moment and pick up the first contact we were ever offered. Ah, remember when 1k was considered an absurdly huge amount of cash? Those were the days. Wait, scratch that. Those weren't the days. Those weren't the days at all! After this I think we can leave small-time behind for the rest of the game.

And I lost The Game. Dammit!

Let's ring up the cyber-chick already...



Well. I think I'll just fill in the blank there with curvy ork-woman instead. Given that she also says to accept all fees before talking, I think that's what I'm supposed to do anyway.



www.whatisthematrix.com - password: steak

(Note that this site is no longer actually there. C'mon Warner Brothers, surely you can maintain an 11-year old site alluded to in the closing credits of the one good Matrix movie!)




For her part, Wilma tells us stuff that we already found out first hand with Petr some time ago. Maybe this contact would've been more useful earlier...



In addition, she offers to sell us some stuff to facilitate cracking. Both sound nice, but at 5k each she's seriously pushing her luck here. Level 3 Deception cost about 1,500 and it cuts through ice like vorpal through jabberwock - 5,000 for a support program seems a bit silly. Then again, when we pass the RPG cash usefulness event horizon, we may as well pick it up. Unless we head into and out of The Matchstick hundreds of times.



Enough.

Time to head to somewhere a bit more upscale...

Captain Price obliges us with the phone number of one of his non-Soap friends.



And here's Quinton, once again upset that someone gave away his number. Perhaps I should just start dialing random numbers and saying random Johnsons sent me. That may cut the meet and greet expenses down a tad.



Anyway, he's got info, guns, and another contact to offer. Let's start with the free samples.



As much as option B appeals to us all, I don't know if it's such a wise idea to speak to ex-mercs with serious hardware that way. At least until we extract everything of worth from him before discarding his desiccated husk. Time to make with the brown nose...



Sound advice, though. Should we ever have need to go to prison (note: if it exists in a Genesis game, you will be going there) we'll need contacts and a level 4 maglock. (Or grenades, but given how things turned out last time we used them...) Distressing, especially considering that Fuchi seemed to have only level 2 doors.



Time for guns. The grenades are pretty meh, but that H&K is quite tempting - especially since it's the same model previously drooled over at the crime mall at less than a fourth of its price. Definitely file that away for later. Thank you Mr. Wholesaler.

Finally, let's move on to the merc's friends...



Sounds interesting. Some sort of taxi service, perhaps? It could come in handy, even though the orks ferry me around for free after reaching an understanding with Roadrash.

Wow, Sharkey's put in a cameo! And apparently had that surgery he's been putting off for a while. I'm surprised that he was able to find the time, what with being the CEO of Earth and all. But before we find out what's up with hi...her, there's one loose end to tie off...



Heh heh heh.



Wait, this can't be Sharkey! S/He's not nearly sarcastic enough! Also, asking if we need help is the antithesis of all that is shark. Ey.



That said, Sharkey provides some handy services - mainly flying us over the visa checkpoint. That would be handy if we didn't already have the vi...never mind, apparently it's not so much a visa as it is a one-time pass. Well. Perhaps we will take her up on that. Not to mention her offer to drop us off at the Sinsearch village, somewhere we haven't even been yet nor know where it is.



As for the gear, Smart Goggles are actually a good buy for shamen - providing a good jump to accuracy (if your gun has the SmartLink dongle on it) without having to sacrifice some magic power getting cybered and all. Only problem is that they too take up an inventory slot. Ah well, can't win 'em all. I'll file this away for later too.



Wait a sec...Sharkey is Ness's Mom? And the phone is his dad?

Ah well. While we've gotten a lot of useful stuff out of these guys so far, we still don't have what we really need to get into a corp. Let's try the last Mr. J in the game...