Enough talk, Let's Play: Shadowrun

True. I don't think it was originally planned this way, but the designer's pet characters (or whatever) - Harlequin in particular, the dragons, and some others - became carryover characters; essentially, Earthdawn was the last time the planet's mana levels were really high. Then things cooled down again, and Shadowrun picks up when the cycle renews.

Thankfully, none of this bullshit comes up in the SNES game! Sorry we're slaloming off on tangents here, db. ;D

I'm impressed with your caryards technique. I knew some of the safe spots for the earlier fights, now I'm wondering if there are spots for some of the later fights that require better equipment.

Man, if I knew about glitching your way through the Car Yards...

Or that Strength had nothing to do with how hard you shoot...

My point is: I always paid The King and went along my merry way.

Don't worry about the tangents, that's fine.

There's a spot on the right side of the arena for glitching the next fighter, the Ferocious Orc, although he's generally not a problem with the starting equipment. For the very last fighter, the replicating mage, standing on the far left will cause the clones to stay off screen. Naturally, everyone would like a glitch for the troll but I don't know of any.

Alright chummers, time for Shadowrun Update 4:

There's one more arena fighter we could reasonably defeat at this point. However, we're sitting on enough money to buy everything we need from the local shop, and it will be quicker to fight the last contestant with better weaponry. The caryards is situated in a completely new neighborhood: 'Old Town'. It feels like a dirty slum with the depressing music and 'street scum' lying on the sidewalk.




Not sure about the Japanese text on some of the signs but the place we want to go is the gun shop.





The owner is a crazy dwarf - well, all the dwarves in this game seem to be a bit crazy.





Check out this lovely customer though:

At first glance there appears to be a nice assortment of light and heavy pistols to choose from, but practically speaking most of them are barely any different from the weapon we start with. Normally we'd want to buy the best weapon here: the Defiance T-250 Shotgun. Our Beretta has an attack rating of 3 while the shotgun has a mighty 8. It's certainly reasonable to beat the whole game with the shotgun; by the time this gun becomes weak you'll have overpowered magic anyway.





We'll purchase the next best weapon though: the Ruger Warhawk Pistol. It's the strongest gun we can use without upgrading our strength, and with the 6,000 nuyen saved we can more than make up for it by hiring shadowrunners.

The shop next door is the talisman shop. The stuff here isn't as directly usable: there are a couple of potion bottles necessary for learning certain spells, and a wooden stake.



Never been used? Sold! Gee, I wonder when this'll come in handy?

We've spent most of our money, so enough shopping for now. We aren't going to trek back later for the potions bottles either - no learning invisibility this game!

It hasn't come up yet, but if we were to jack into the matrix at this point in the game we would get an error and disconnect immediately. Turns out something is wrong with our datajack, and the locals suggest we visit Ed's Patch 'N Fix:











Well that's no good. That's no good at all.






Ok - there's a cortex bomb attached to our head computer designed to protect whatever sensitive data we got in there. [strikeout]And it's set to go off when we utter Jake's most frequently used word.[/strikeout] (Hint: it's 'you'). Actually, Jake doesn't speak a single word for the rest of the game. It is easy to forget that Jake is not a silent protoganist because he never talks in the dialogue screens. In truth, he does have half a dozen lines in various special scenes like this one.

The cortex bomb will go off in '30 hours' according to the game, which means 30 minutes in real time. There's another street doc in the game who can disarm it (you know, one who isn't blatantly incompetent). We could go directly to him from here, but we've got a half hour to kill, so no rush.

It's time to finish up business and leave Old Town. The local bar - the 'Sputnik Club' - is the only place where there are shadowrunners who out and out refuse to go on runs with you. There's just two runners you can actually hire and they won't even stay with you for 10 battles. I don't know why they made this place so useless, but a good guess is because we're about to reach two new clubs which are chock full of great runners.







Nevertheless, we'll hire the orc 'Orifice' here for 500 nuyen. If nothing else, he's cheap and available (that's what she said.. ok ok). There's still one arena contestant that we were going to challenge (yet another Orc). We're starting to see lots of 5's and 6's when we deal damage and our Ruger makes short work of this guy.





One last level up as we leave: we increase firearms once more to level 4. Watch out cause we won't level up firearms or body anymore this game - this is as good as it gets! We also start working on charisma, upping it from 3 to 5. Charisma determines how many runners you can have concurenty. Normally you wouldn't prioritize it, but in a speedrun having a trio of runners is the fastest way to kill enemies. At charisma level 4 you can have two runners with you, and with charisma level 6 you can have three. That's right, charisma level 5 does absolutely nothing.

This is the point in the game where everything basically opens up. The subway/monorail that was out of order in the first section of the game has been fixed and now you can travel to all the major locations in the game: Tenth Street (where we were), Old Town (where we are), and Daley Station (where we're going). The Daley Station section of the game is huge compared to Tenth Street and Old Town, with many different places to see.





Two thugs self identified as members of Rust Stilleto gang try to frag us when we step off the monorail. After wasting them we bump into a second dog acolyte who tells us to once again seek out our totem's shrine.





The nice thing about the Daley Station/downtown area isn't just that it's huge, but it's also wide open the moment you get there. Right now the game is tugging us in many directions at once: there's the Rust Stilleto gang to deal with, the dog shrine to visit, and the cortex bomb in our head to take care of. We also have a couple clues from the beginning of the game that start becoming relevant: a matchbox with the 'Wastelands club' logo on it and a scrap of paper mentioning 'Warehouse no. 5'. Plus when you go to all these places you'll discover more areas that you can poke around but can't quite get into yet.

We're heading to the Wastelands club first. Some jerk tries to gun us down at the door; probably another Rust Stilleto but the game doesn't say.



The clubs we're starting to visit are going to have great shadowrunners for hire. The dwarf Norbert has an obscene damage output (second best in the game), so he deserves a spot in our group.



There's also Frogtongue, an orc with stats like Norbet except with less damage output and more defense. He's much better than our first runner Orifice, and if you really need extra muscle beyond Norbet he is worth buying, but we don't have the money.



The street samurai Anders is step down from the other runners. He looks flashy and has an automatic weapon, but he is worse than Frogtongue and Norbet in every way and doesn't stay with you very long. I remember way back when I used to value Anders a lot, but there isn't much point in getting him.



Anders likes to talk about other shadowrunners and he boasts that he only works with pros like Steelflight and Akimi - the two most expensive and highest leveled shadowrunners in the game. Whatever.





The bartender will give us the essential 'Ice' keyword. Right now it just seems to be innocently related to iced tea, but later on when you have to use the keyword its purpose feels much more obscure.



Everyone here drop clues that the Rust Stilleto's hang out is nearby, which is where we should head next. We'll end this segment by paying them back for trying to kill us.

For whatever reason, there's a grenade right outside the Rust Stilleto's hideout, and when examined it says 'the pin has been pulled out'. Heh, it's only function is to explode in your face when you pick it up, but it doesn't do much damage.

The Rust Stilleto gang includes new enemies we haven't seen before. This time there are 'gang member' enemies who throw Molotov cocktails. A single blast could potentially hit us and both our runners, so this makes them a priority target.







With Orifice and Norbet in tow we're racking up the damage really quickly and plow our way to the main hideout. The hideout is divided by wall sections that you can't shoot through, so with a little care we can eliminate the enemies individually. If you're doing it this way the first enemy is the most delicate, since you can't take a single step forward without going in range of the others. Really though, with all this firepower extra strategy like this is a little unnecessary.







Behind the final door is the boss encounter. The gang leader isn't going to fight fair either: alongside him is a beefed up gang member enemy and 3 more chump enemies. We'll be taking a hail of fire the moment we enter, so right now we catch our breath and heal up with the slap patches we bought earlier. Better safe than sorry!

Immediately after stepping into the final room both sides just let loose. You can even the odds a little by running closer to the gang leader. This causes one of the chump enemies to go off screen and stop shooting. The gang member enemy will focus exclusively on Jake, and your guys always auto target him, so it's best to eliminate him right away.





The gang member is a bit ridiculous: He just has a melee attack (some spiked club weapon? hard to tell), but even with us shooting him in the face plus Norbert and Orifice blasting away he still takes a while to go down. The gang leader is next on the list and once he's toast the rest is just inserting some holes into the chump enemies.





The gang leader coughs up some final words when you kill him. Looks like Drake has a serious grudge against us; the road ahead ain't going to be easy.





- End of Segment 4 -
Time before cortex bomb goes off: 26 hours
Time of the run so far: 26:34

Reference Points!

* The cortext bomb is from a completely throwaway line about 1/3rd of the way through Neuromancer, and there's no mention of it ever again. FASA, as they were dredging the books for cyberware ideas, fleshed it out a bit more. It's actually listed in the core handbook with a price (which.. I don't recall now, because I'm lame) and the suggestion that they're used to protect courier data.

* The melee attack that you most often see in the SNES game here looks, to me, like "spurs"; these are cyberware implants that are, I am not kidding you, exactly like Wolverine claws. There are also "razors" which hide under the fingernails (and are another Gibson borrowing, although to be fair it seems like a logical piece of 'ware they could've come up on with on their own. but they didn't, so)

Ah yes, razors. The fingernail variety was a card in the CCG, I think I have a picture here.

The CCG was actually pretty interesting. There is - or was - some kinda win32 program that had a bunch of different card and some board games, mostly out-of-print games, and I got to play some of Shadowrun CCG via that. What I remember of it involved putting together a team of runners and then laying out objective (basically the shadowruns themselves) cards, and assigning gear and then trying to complete the objective. It seemed to capture the feel of a good tabletop session very well.

man, i wanna play a shadowrun campaign again so badly. monofilament whips, anyone?

Yeah, I do. Under the same name, even.

And you might be the only person this side of a D20 that didn't know that Earthdawn and Shadowrun were linked.

Well, to be fair, Shadowrun seems to have had the idea of some ancient age of magic built in from the start. Practically the very first novel trilogy introduces the concept of immortal elves and the mana cycle, and even before then we knew that the dragons had been sleeping from... Something. From what I've heard tell from people who should know, Earthdawn was actually planned to connect to Shadowrun from the start. If one ignores the novels and all the actual details of the metaplot, the connection's not half-bad - you get two very different settings spun off from the same general basic metaphysics.

It's just that, as usual, FASA never knew when to stop...

It makes me warm and fuzzy inside to know there's so much Shadowrun love here.

That said, fuck immortal elves. Those things are possibly worse than Elminster and Drizzt put together.

You see, there was this thing called high school football that kept me from falling completely into the geek abyss.
My favorite character in the entire game! When I was a kid I would read his dialog to myself in a pirate voice. Anders troubled me with his mirror shades and vast forehead, but Norbie's cheery psychopathology never let me down.

I prefer a minigun, but there's no accounting for taste.

Yea, Norbet's great. I'm going to include some more of his dialog later. In this game at least, he's the only shadowrunner to really bring the funny.

We really pick up steam as we head into Shadowrun Update 5:

The Jagged Nails is the last new place to hire shadowrunners. It's a much more exclusive "shadowrunners only" club, and we managed to qualify since we wiped out the Rust Stilletos. They still charge us 50 nuyen though...







Everyone's favorite fox girl Kitsune is the performer on stage here; she's the shape shifter who saved us right before we were taken by the morgue guys. Her dialogue with Jake tends to be flirty, altougth it is toned down in the final release:





In the earlier version she says "Ever snuggled down with a fox before? Wanna try?"





Jake doesn't seem to remember Kitsune, but she certainly remembers Jake. Kitsune is a dog shaman just like us and is interested in helping out (dogs stick together I guess?). The important thing is getting the leaves item from her by asking about 'Dog'. It's the last item we need to learn the Heal spell from our spirit guide.





With our charisma now maxed out we will hire Kitsune for a pricey 3,000 nuyen. The 19,000 nuyen we had from the arena fights has dwindled to just 2,000. She's completely weak but she has a couple important spells and plenty of mana to use them. Try talking to her during a run:

We're not interested in wasting time so we make a beeline to the docks to meet our spirit guide. With 3 runners tagging along the random enemies on the streets go down quickly. This is nice because we get some free karma without having to stop, but it also can be too much of a good thing because shadowrunners only stick with you for a fixed number of battles. Orifice here decides to leave already.





If we had a choice in the matter we wouldn't waste our battles on wimpy guys on the streets. The best is when our guys kill a bunch of enemies but leave the last one standing; if you leave the screen before the battle music stops you still get karma but it doesn't count as a battle.





Inside one of the empty warehouses we find our dog spirit: H'oochin-kawa. His function is to teach us spells and give us vague clues for where to go next. For the first spell he asks for "items of a man, creature, and the earth." This is the magic fetish amulet, the dog collar, and the leaves. Right after earning the Heal spell though he tasks us with the mission of rubbing out the Rat Shaman. According to him, the Rat Shaman is the enemy of Dog but to me it sounds like we're being lassoed into doing a run for no pay.

We'll be leaving the docks right away, but there's a few points of interest here that relate to the game's plot. In one of the warehouses we can find a vacant office belonging to Matrix Systems. If we had a decker with us we could grab a data file which explains that the data in our head computer is an anti AI program. It looks like we didn't steal it either, Matrix Systems handed it off to us and we were going to deliver it to 'Pushkin' before the hit squad got us.







There's also a warehouse containing a person who appears to be Sassie, Jake's ex-girlfriend. If you talk to her from afar she keeps asking you to come closer. When you do, she turns into a giant octopus and attacks you. Presumably she is a shape shifter working for Drake.







The scrap of paper from the beginning of the game had 'Warehouse 5' written on it. The warehouses aren't actually numbered so this may just be a throwaway reference, but it's fun to try to guess which of the warehouses it was leading us to. I like to think it was a clue that Kitsune slipped in our pocket for finding our spirit's shrine. It could be a reference to the Matrix Systems office, and Jake would have plenty of reason to be carrying a note like that. The least interesting interpretation would be to say it refers to the 5th warehouse door starting from the docks entrance. This would mean the piece of paper is telling us to go to the octopus room. But if one of Drake's agents had the chance to slip this piece of paper on our body why didn't they just kill us then?

The Rat Shaman we gotta take out lives in the sewers. Kitsune starts coming in handy with her summon spirit spell here. For a hefty mana cost a spirit dog will damage everyone in the room. Most importantly, it even hits enemies offscreen and it's the only attack or spell in the game capable of doing so. In the sewers it's possible to wipe out the whole room with 1 cast.







Our strategy for the Rat Shaman is simple: Norbet unloads with his uzi while we order Kitsune to burn through her mana by casting summon spirit over and over. It's an extraordinary waste of mana, but speed counts. Kitsune's summon spirit has a maximum damage 30 while the Rat Shaman only has 70 hp so it's possible for this to end very quickly. Unfortunately, all attacks in Shadowrun have a minimum damage of 1 and everything inbetween is equally likely to occur. In particular, the best attacks in the game still might deal 1 damage from time to time, or even 0 due to armor.







Just as Kitsune runs out of mana the Rat Shaman goes down and a Jester Spirit rises from his corpse. He'll be an upcoming villain in the future, but for now he just taunts us.







There is a special event that happens only if Kitsune is with you at this point. Defeating the Rat Shaman together has caused her to take quite a liking to Jake and if you keep her alive she won't leave you for the rest of the game. This won't be a problem for a while, but the final sections of the game would rip Kitsune apart instantly. Keeping her alive through that is more of a bother than a challenge, since the only reasonable method is to cast invisibility on her for all the difficult battles. Mostly one would do it just for fun or to see a slightly different ending.







Kitsune's dialogue also tells us about Dark Blade, a group of vampires who are known to deal with the Jester Spirit. We get more information back at the Jagged Nails, including a humorous story from the manager that explains why the club only allows shadowrunners:





Borrowing the strobes is one of the many key items you need to complete the complicated Dark Blade quest; it's probably the most confusing quest in the game.

As long as we're at the Jagged Nails there's a couple more runners worth considering to round out our team. Spatter is a mage, and also vastly underappreciated. He is arguably the one of the better spell casters in the game since he carries a heavy pistol and actually has decent defense (better than Anders, even). He also has a high level shield spell and a mid level heal spell. Shield is practically the same as invisibility; both make you effectively invincible, and a high level version of either spell is very hard to find among shadowrunners. His main problem is that he will betray you at the 4th floor Drake's Tower. Still, Spatter makes a great two man team with Jake. Even if Jake was horribly under leveled, the two could easily clear difficult missions.





The runner we'll go with though is Steelflight, the elf decker. He's a tank with a whopping 100 hp, 4 armor and more damage output than Norbet. By far, he is the best runner for straight up fire fights and is the best decker you can hire for hacking the Matrix. An elf of his skills does not come cheap though - he costs a wallet breaking 5,000 nuyen. With the 3,000 nuyen that the Rat Shaman dropped we can just barely afford him and now we're flat broke.





The good news? Nuyen has a way of flowing into your pockets once you have the means to hack into the Matrix.

As we leave we take the time to level up a bit. We've been hoarding karma for a while, and now it's time to spend it. By negleticing body and firearms we have enough karma to up heal to level 3 and start pumping 'magic' to level 6 (the magic stat increases magic points). Since our body is so low, we won't need to upgrade heal any further this game and we'll pour all future karma into magic.

We're supposed to head over the Dark Blade club at this point, but Drake's Tower is right on the way. Since we have a stellar team of Norbet, Kitsune and Steelflight we'll end this segment by storming this building even though it is supposed to come several missions down the road. If you don't know already, office buildings in Shadowrun have a habit of turning into the bloodiest battlefields. Think Die Hard here... or Hong Kong action flicks.

Steelflight's decking skills are crucial since our cortex bomb is still ticking down and this prevents us from hacking computers. The computers here must be hacked to open the elevators, and you have to repeat the procedure every floor to get to the next. This tends to suck the fun as the Matrix sections of the game are really dull.





The enemies in the Matrix levels are hidden "ICE" (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics). The only degree of interactivity here is to press the attack button before stepping on each square to see if there is an ICE in front of you. If there isn't you take a small amount of damage and can move forward. If there is you attempt to attack the ICE. Success results in destroying the ICE and failure results in you taking damage. The goal is to reach CPU and/or data stores. Once there you turn off security systems, activate elevators, or download data files and bank accounts.





Luckily the first computer is extremely straightforward, and we can proceed to the second floor.





...and it's a freaking ambush. Drake's Tower is filled from top to bottom with uzi wielding street samurais and powerball throwing mages. We aren't as quick on the gun as the computer controlled enemies who start pounding away instantly, but our shadowrunners are just as quick so it's no problem. Amongst the confusion Kitsune lets off a summon spirit and the room is filled with screams as the dog spirit kills some enemies and our runners finish off weakened others.





There's two computers on this floor that we have Steelflight hack for us. One opens the elevators and the other cracks one of Drake's bank accounts:





score!

Every floor is basically the same frenzy as the first. As I've said before, only enemies on screen will actually shoot you, and really areas like Drake's Tower were designed around this limitation by putting lots of the enemies near the elevators where you come in. On some floors though there is a straight path from the elevator to a corner, and once there you can inch your way back through the room.





Speed is a priority so we mow through the bad guys as quickly as possible. You might think Kitsune would be in danger in a place like this (or Jake for that matter) but with 4 bodies to spread the damage around everyone is reasonably safe. The Matrix sections are identical from game to game, so with the data stores mapped out we can head straight for the elevator controls and bank accounts and skip lots of data files which are strictly nonessential. Mostly they just say how Drake really wants to kill us. And we kinda knew that already, so no loss.







By the sixth floor we've mopped the deck of enough bad guys to fill the morgue a couple times over. I know at least one member of our squad is having a good time though:





There is a video phone here, and one of the data files has Drake's phone number. You can call him up, but the number is just for kicks.





We'll have to put him on hold though, because we are planning to do the Dark Blade quest next time and a preparatory step is making a phone call to open the front gate. We call up the Talisman shop owner to learn the number for the Dark Blade club, and in a bit of foreshadowing he warns us that their words cannot be trusted. The Dark Blade number gets you in touch with Johan who isn't interested in anything you have to say until you mention the magic fetish. This is the item described as "an amulet engraved with a bat symbol", so no surprises that it is the key to the vampire quest.





- End of Segment 5 -
Time left before cortex bomb goes off: 18 hours
Time of the run so far: 41:31

Huh, I never knew the (horrible, wretched, filthy) elf was such a powerhouse; matrix stuff was always my favourite SR pasttime and I'd be damned if I was going to let someone else do it, even if it was pretty boring in this game. =p

Yea, but you still control your partners when they go into the net for you. I didn't realize how good Steelflight was either until I really sat down and compared all the runners.

Looks like a fox to me.


Man, it's a good thing Jake never takes off those shades.

Oh, octopus fight, thanks for never letting me take Shadowrun too seriously!

I never let Steelflight on my team, as I was far too busy pouring money down the drain on Norbert and Frogtongue. Also, I let Kitsune die like two minutes after she joined permanently. I was a shitty employer, I tell ya what.