Enough talk, Let's Play: Shadowrun

Ah, Shadowrun for the SNES. Still the best cyberpunk video game ever made. The game draws from the pen and paper RPG of the same name which I've never played, but I can at least appreciate its rich universe.

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Box Art for the Genesis game, which is entirely different and best left unplayed.




Some cards from the tragically short lived and very much dead card game.


The general setting for Shadowrun is the year 2050, and frequently major events in Shadowrun occur in or around Seattle (sort of the New York City for Shadowrun). At some point in the timeline an event called 'The Awakening' returned magic to the world. This also caused the reappearance of magical races, such as your common elves, orcs, trolls, and dwarves but also vampires, gargoyles, dragons, and other magical beasts (basically it's an excuse for melding sci-fi with fantasy). The power that governments used to have is now in the hands of massive corporations ('megacorps'), who employ hired guns ('shadowrunners') to perform espionage, assassinations, or any other general dirty work. There is also a worldwide computer network called the Matrix (read: the Internet) which is usually handled by a class of shadowrunners called deckers (read: hackers). Among the other types of shadowrunners are shamans, mages and street samurais (cybernetically enhanced fighters). Our main character, Jake, is somewhat a unique jack-of-all-trades and gets to have magic, cyberware and decking skills.




Intro shot lifted straight from Bladerunner. (No really)


When you break it down, the game is fairly simplistic. Winning firefights is mostly just about standing still and shooting the bejesus out of the other guy, and the 'puzzles' are a scaled back version of point and click adventure item puzzles. However it's sort of like an Actraiser-effect; when you magically combine the two simple ideas you've got yourself an awesome game.

This LP was a speedrun of the game, clocking in around 90 minutes. Beating the game normally is 2-3 hours if you know what to do, so we're not talking a very long game here. Since this is a non-temporal medium, the speedrunning aspect isn't going to be as prominent as, say, how to deal with being underleveled and underequiped. I'll also be including screenshots that aren't strictly from the speedrun, since it would be a shame to miss out on some of optional details that build the game's gritty setting.

The game starts off with Jake being gunned down by some street gang. Ah, but wait.. a shape shifting fox girl (no this is not an anime) runs in at the last minute and casts a heal spell on our corpse just before the morgue guys haul us away. We wake up in the morgue with absolutely no memory and a splitting headache. All the explanation for what just happened is left for you to piece together from clues strewn about the first area, although later on other characters will spell it out for you. Really the first area is mostly exposition, the real action comes later.



*One of the cool things about the Shadowrun is that it has its own slang words, and they can often be quite clever or humorous. This is not one of them.





*The nameplate on the slab reveals your name (Jake Armitage), and the piece of paper just has 'Warehouse No. 5' written on it.


The hunt for useless adventure items begins with the very first room. Picking up the scalpel on the table and the slap patch from the refrigerator is a requirement for completing the first little sidequest. And yes, it is possible to miss a key item and be forced to backtrack all the way back to the begining of the game (although it won't take as long as it sounds). In case you are wondering, slap patches are single use curative items. However, since they only restore 10 hp and you can only carry 5 of them they're a real poor excuse for true heal spells. Once we are done stealing office supplies it is time to open the door and spook the morgue guys.





If you leave and come back, the morgue guys get scared again and duck back into the closet, but more on this later.

Leaving the morgue we are immediately greeted by someone who knows us. Aside from being shocked we are alive he warns us that we are a wanted man and hitmen will try to kill us on the spot. Brother he ain't kidding, because everywhere we go there will be jerks jumping out of dumpsters and hanging off buildings trying to shoot us. He also adds that we should wise up like him and pack a firearm, although we're about to see it doesn't do this guy any good.



*A face only a mother could love.


You can see from the screenshots the keyword system in this game. If a word is highlighted it means it is a keyword, and just by hearing a keyword you can ask anyone else in the game about that keyword. Asking the right person a certain keyword can be essential to advance the game, either by triggering events of by giving you new keywords. Other times asking about keywords will spit back some non-essential NPC dialogue about that keyword. And if the person doesn't even have *that* to say, they just give their generic reply. There is no way to tell who will react to what keyword. Although usually you can be guess your way through, sometimes you get stuck and have to start asking every NPC the whole list of keywords one by one looking for missed responses.





Our friend (?) runs away after you finish talking to him, as he says if they see him with you they'll kill him too. Following him leads to the first firefight in the game.



*Surprise! Pug face gets wasted by some random Orc.





Our only means of fighting back is to run over to his corpse, take his Beretta handgun and fire back. Like many firefights in the game, all you do is stand in one place and shoot. There is no ammo, no reloading, or even shooting while you move. How our friend managed to lose this fight is beyond me. You might be tempted to seek cover and shoot around a corner or from behind a dumpster, but it doesn't offer any actual advantage and running somewhere only lets the enemy get free shots.



* 'Leather Armor' didn't sound very protective in Final Fantasy and it sounds even less protective now. It does, however, reduce every source of damage by 1 which is very nice indeed.


Generally speaking enemies in this game only drop some money when they die. A couple special enemies like this one will drop armor, and no enemy in the game will drop their gun. If you poke around the alley a bit you'll bump into...





*Hey! A talking dog!


An explanation is in order. Shamans in Shadowrun get their magic energy from their 'totem', an animal spirit guide. The type of animal is supposed to determine what types of magic they can use, although in this game all magic is universal. Our buddy Jake here didn't even know he was a shaman till now, but hey his day has been pretty weird already. We also get the 'Dog' keyword, and no matter how many NPCs you ask about 'Dog' only magically inclined characters know what the heck you are talking about. Nevertheless, the real of purpose of the 'Dog' keyword it seems is to ask random NPCs about it and turn their generic response into something humorous.

At this point in the game it is quite easy to stumble around and get killed, as what you have to do to get to the next area is far from straightforward. Our first stop is to reach Jake's apartment so we can save and heal up. You'll need the key to unlock the door though, and this poor guy happens to have it.



*Memo sitting on the desk. Ho-hum.


If you put your cursor over the body it says 'Seems Familiar...' In all likelihood this was our "Mr. Johnson", the name for the person who hires you and sets you up for a run. Why he has our apartment key is anyone's guess. If you try to save his life with the slap patch it will give you the "I'm not using that on HIM!" error response, despite the fact that this is exactly what you must do on someone else later. Way to reinforce the player, Shadowrun!

Our apartment is the building next door, and it looks like we have a message on the machine from some guy named 'Drake':






Turns out Jake probably should not have gone on that run, eh? In our apartment we can also find a pair of sunglasses and the phone number for 'Sassie', but without a credstick we cannot call her up... phooey! Since there is a bed right here, killing bad guys in the office next door is a good way to level up. We need 150 dollars in cash anyways to advance the next plot point so this'll work out well.




*The currency in this game is the almighty Nuyen.


Like I said before, there isn't a lot of art to combat. One of the few strategic things you can do is know which enemies to pick off first, e.g. here the 'mages' have the less hp and deal more damage than the 'heavy dudes'. Contrary to their names, mages do not cast spells at this point in the game. Another trick is not engaging every enemy at once. Only enemies visible on the screen will shoot you, so if necessary you can inch your way through a big room full of bad guys.





Besides cash, killing enemies nets you karma (experience/skill points). You can spend your karma to improve stats and abilities at beds. The most important stats for the first half of the game are firearms (increases accuracy) and body (increases hitpoints). Normally you'd build up firearms to at least level 3 and probably body up another level or two before going onto the next area, but with a single karma point will be content to merely level up firearms once to level 2.





A slightly quicker way to get the needed cash is to kill the 'hitman' guys above the trail station. They can drop around 50 nuyen apiece while everyone else drops 10-20. However it can be somewhat luck dependent because you need to keep entering the room until one appears and also hope they don't take away so much hp that you waste all the time you've saved running back to your bed to heal. I'm really not fond of manipulating luck through repeated tries in order to get an optimal result; consistency in any type of challenge run is much more sublime. Further I want to do this run "single segmented" as they say, so I avoid this method. As a bonus, the slower method gives more karma, a precious quantity in this run. Thankfully this is the only place where preference for consistency over luck costs time.

The dog mentioned seeking out three items in his favor. This is supposed to make more sense later on when you learn that your spirit guide teaches you new spells if you bring him certain sets of items. It basically feels like a messed up scavenger hunt in which sometimes you are collecting paperweights and dog collars, and other times you are tracking down mermaid scales and a ghoul bones. The first of these spells is required to advance the game, and one of the necessary items for it is the dog collar dropped by this doggie.

You can see some businessmen walking around in this screenshot. You can try talking to them but they have nothing useful to say. One thing this game teaches you is that generic NPCs on the street should be ignored, the people to talk to are at bars and clubs (it's this game's equivalent of heading to the castle in a fantasy RPG to talk to the king). In the next segment we'll do just that. But we can end this segment by talking to these jokers for kicks. In case you are wondering you are free to kill innocent NPCS on the streets, but a voice will tell you to stop and take away karma if you keep doing it (you know, just like in real life).








*No, seriously. I'm trying to ask you about 'Dog'.




*Dog will take over the world!

- End of Segment 1 -
Time of the run so far: 6:02

Oh, cool. I never played this game, but always wanted to. Now I can play it vicariously!

Hopefully dosboot won't mind if I jump in here and share some details on the Shadowrun setting and point out some references.

The basic Shadowrun storyline: at the turn of the 21st century, the earth "wakes up" and magic comes back to the world. The US had been rounding up the First Nations for a "final solution to the Indian Problem", they got magic, and promptly took back about half the US and most of Canada, which was then broken up a little bit into different tribal dominions. The rest of the landmass was split between United American and Canadian States, the Confederated American States, and the California Free State. Elves took Oregon and some of northern California. Seattle metro area is UCAS territory but it's surrounded by other sovereign nations now, and in reality the megacorps run a lot of it. The Amazon's grown back, there are dragons (and one of them runs a corporation and another takes a run as president of the UCAS), there are all kinds of monsters..

Shadowrun borrows veeeeeery heavily from William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). Where it's not doing the cyberpunk thing, it's doing the magic thing: dwarves, orcs, trolls, and elves are technically humans (homo whatever, and so on), who have manifested due to increased mana levels. Most people nowadays are born "metahuman", but some still switch during puberty, and the original outbreak of orcs and trolls wiped out something like 1/6th of the world's population, as the transformation is exceedingly painful and many outright died from it.

Magic is generally either hermetic (4 elements, fireballs, that kind of thing) or shamanic (you have a totem such as Dog, Bear, Rat, et cetera and tend to summon spirits). Jake here's a Dog shaman, which is a nice all-round urban totem.

The Shadowrun video games were based off 1st and 2nd edition Shadowrun; 3rd Edition changed some of the rules, especially in relation to decking (computer hacking), and started to significantly warp the original setting. 4th edition went off the fucking rails and doesn't have much in common setting-wise with the original setting. FASA (the original publisher) was a big fan of metaplot, or advancing and changing the game setting in each sourcebook that was published. Sometimes was a cool thing, but the power creep really got out of hand by the end, and the later publisher continued the trend.

Uh, references.. well, "Armitage" is one of the central characters in Neuromancer.

EDIT: I'm adding some more reference stuff here, as I started this post when he was only a couple of updates in.. I got too excited. ;D

Gibson uses "New Yen"; those books were written in the early and mid eighties during Japan's rising economy. A lot of that era of cyberpunk literature took that idea and ran with it, suggesting that Japan and its zaibatsu, the megacorporations (IBM ain't got nothin' on these guys), would become ascendant. To, I guess, avoid out-and-out plagarism, FASA renamed it the "nuyen".

tl;dr: Neuromancer and D&D had a kid and named it Shadowrun.

Jake Armitage's eyes distress me something terrible. Always have.

Is this the bowdlerized Nintendo version, or the later romhack I've heard rumors about?

Both Genesis and SNES versions were originally US productions. GameFAQs sez 93 for US and 94 for Japan and Europe. Genesis version never got out of the US at all, even, it seems.

Oh, I getcha. What I was talking about were the rumors that romhackers had gone in and redone dialog and things like that.

EDIT: Oh please, romhackers, someone do the Shadowrun text adventure that came out in Japan. (It could happen; someone's doing the SamSho RPG.)

Huh. Never heard of that, and romhacking.net shows nothing of the sort (and they'll list pretty much everything, whether there's progress to show for it or not).

Alas. I should never listen to /tg/.

No, you were correct. There are two versions, but the other version is not a romhack.

The run was done on the "censored" version. The uncensored version is almost identical except for the phrasing of 3 sentences, and the addition of 1 useless phone number. I can add in the changed dialogue, although as many of you read HG101 you should already know the differences ;-)

Yes, thanks for the better exposition nunix. I used to have a summary of the timeline in the rulebook from the board game (another one of Shadowrun's gaming offshoots), but it isn't with me right now. One of the cute things about the Shadowrun timeline is how it's the Native Americans and other various tribal cultures which stayed true to their heritage who inherit most of the magical powers, and this leads to them forming nations out of most of their old territory.

I love the hell out of this game and have been wanting to play it again, but couldn't bring myself to drop the cash monies on it at the local game shop. This is a good way to do it vicariously. When I played this game back in the day I had to play "guess that keyword" SO HARD when trying to figure out how to kill the Vampire.

I'm wondering how you're going to get out of the Caryards in a speedrun. I could never do it without getting like a zillion Karma, but after that the game became much easier (Shotgun + Fast Reflexes).

Shadowrun's awkwardly designed and mostly a pain in the ass but somehow it manages to be a really cool game anyway.

I rented the crap out of this game way back when, I was never able to get past the Vampire though. Eventually, I had to write to Nintendo Power for advice. Their help wasn't especially useful.

I still remember the battle and dialogue music clearly.

It's been stuck in my head, off and on, for about fifteen years now.

Wait, what's with the Genesis version haterade? I thought it was way better than the SNES version. It had a kind of pre-GTA open world aspect to it in addition to having a Rez-esque hacking subgame and fun character customization. The SNES version had none of those to my knowledge.

The SNES version came without punch-you-in-the-dick difficulty. Sometimes it's about what you leave out.

The Genesis vs SNES hate mostly comes down to.. wait for it.. which system you had! I know, I know. Unfuckingprecidented.

Both games are interesting and handle SR a little differently, and if you like one should probably check out the other.

I had fond memories of playing this game in the 16-bit era, back when I had no knowledge of its origins, so I got the ROM of the SNES version and was surprised to find that it was completely unfamiliar. Turns out I played the Genesis version, even though I owned an SNES. I must have rented it while a friend and I had traded systems for a little while. So I got the ROM of the Genesis version, and played it for a bit, and got punched in the dick, and wondered how I managed to play this for even ten minutes as a kid. Shame, since it's such a great universe for an open world game design.

I liked both versions of the game, but I could never beat the SNES one. Now I live vicariously through dosboot!

Man, didn't you know this statement would precipitate a religious war?

The final word:
Both the Genesis and SNES versions of Shadowrun are good games.

I haven't played this since reading Neuromancer for the first time last fall, but geez. I sure hope William Gibson got some hefty royalties on this.

Shadowrun is Neuromancer: The RPG.

also, the genesis one was fucking great.

also, the recent version is insulting.

Just like we live in hope that the Tolkein family will get their paycheck for decades of Warhammer and D&D?

Though I admit, at least those lot attempted to look less derivative. Cyberpunk in general pretty much went right out there with "Neuromancer: The Game/Spinoff/RPG/Movie" in all but name.

I agree 110%.

Of course, people are entitled to their own opinion on the Genesis game. You aren't going to find me singing its praises though.

Man, this reminds me of the Aladdin debate. In that the Genesis side is utterly wrong in every respect, and the SNES supporters are merely reasonable human beings.

Shadowrun Update 2:



The Grim Reaper Club is our next destination. The bartender is the most helpful NPC there. He seems to know Jake quite well and brings over Jake's 'usual' - an iced tea. Reading some of the dialogue I can't help feel bad for poor Jake. The bartender seems to paint a picture that Jake suddenly got caught up in something right before the beginning of the game.






Yea, we were lined up a run alright and it ended with us being sent to the morgue. The 'datajack' here is a cybernetic implant that lets you connect your brain to the net. The significance of the Jake's datajack is going to be hinted at again later on.


*You noticed? Funny story...





The orc 'Hamfist' here is another shadowrunner. You can hire most of the shadowrunners in the game to tag along with you, but there's no need for that right now. As an aside, for some reason they programmed Hamfist to respond to a lot of the major event keywords that we get much later; everyone else - including the most important NPCs in the game - only respond to a few select keywords that you get around the time you talk to that person. I suppose the programmers realized it was a wasted effort since the player would rarely try to backtrack very far to look for more information.