Shadowrun (SNES) - Guest Post

A mysterious new guest poster called Kraed has appeared to temporarily hijack my site. But in a good way.

Ray Hardgrit is overworked and not managing to keep up with his schedule of posting games so I am posting for him. Hooray! What a lovely person I am. Here’s a game about running in the dark or something.

The game opens up with some Neo wannabe getting punked on the streets by a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons nerds carrying guns.

If that wasn’t bad enough, an anthropomorphic fox runs over to him and covers him with glitter. This event has not been captured on film as I couldn’t live with myself if I started posting pictures of furries on the internet, but I assure you it happens. I’d sure hate to be that guy.

Oh. I am that guy.

I don’t know what’s worse really: that the game is pulling the amnesia card, or that the main character gets revived by magical furry dust before the end of the introduction. It always amuses me when a game uses amnesia as an excuse to not have to worry about introducing the main character, and this game is no exception.

Also for some reason after the title screen the game has a border around it, and it seems to persist for the entirety of the game. It’s not that big a deal but it seems really weird.

I like that the morticians didn’t even check to see if I was dead before they put me away. A really nice touch here is that they actually recorded sound clips of people going AAAHHHHH as well. Shortly after they run into the next room and lock the door. I guess I’m meant to roleplay a zombie here so off to the next room to eat their brrraaaiiiins.

Oh. I guess there’s nothing in the room that the two men in the white coats ran into. Nothing except talking mice, which I guess given the anthropomorphic fox earlier is completely understandable. Time to move on.

Shortly after leaving the building I get accosted by this guy that I don’t know and he starts calling me a geek. How rude. I tried the talk option to see what he wanted and he told me he didn’t have time to talk to a corpse. Uh hello? You called me over and started talking to me, and now you don’t have time to talk? Someone is looking to get geeked…

This game has a rather clever conversation system in place for a SNES title; when talking to people you seem to learn special words, in this case hitmen (you can tell because it’s bold). You can then ask people about any of the words you’ve learned from previous conversations with anyone. I guess it’s kinda like Pokémon except instead of catching monsters I’m catching words.

I saw a man in the street labelled ‘A Busy Man’ and started talking to him. He then proceeded to tell me he was busy. I told you the conversation system was clever!

I love the portrait of this guy though. He looks like he’s about to get run over by a truck. (For the record the portraits don’t seem to have ANYTHING in common with the actual sprites of the people in the street).

Actually every single person in this area seems to be called ‘A Busy Man’, but all they do is walk in circles around the park or read the newspaper.

The newspaper guy claimed to be in a hurry so couldn’t talk, whilst he casually sat there reading the newspaper. Maybe he’s trying to finish the Sudoku puzzle during his lunch break or something.

Without any idea where I had to go I wandered into a random building and these guys started firing upon me for no reason. I mean come on, it’s a game! In every other game ever people are perfectly fine with strangers barging into their homes unannounced. Why would this game be any different?

I couldn’t actually find any way to fight back against them, but on the plus side they couldn’t seem to work out how to actually hit me with the bullets. Time to leave!

Okay I guess I REALLY pissed off those guys. After I left the building one of them stuck his gun out the window and started shooting me. Somehow he’s more accurate shooting at me out of a window than he is shooting me from point blank range inside when I’m not moving.

At this point I can only do the honourable thing and break into someone else’s house to escape.

Looks like someone beat me to this place. There’s a fat guy on the floor that seems familiar, even though I’ve never seen him before in the game. He’s still alive, but too injured to speak. Since this game seems to revolve around me being an amnesiac, I guess I should probably help him. I found a healing item earlier in the game so I guess it was meant to be used on him.

Oh okay. Since I can’t heal him, I stole a key off him instead and left him to die.

Back outside in the park I found a gate and opened it, releasing a random dog into the streets. Clearly this was too exciting for the dog as it promptly had a barking fit and ripped off its own collar, then ran away.

Collecting dog collars is a personal hobby of mine so I quickly whipped it up and pretended to not notice the missing stray dog.

Apparently the local community REALLY hates dog collar collectors and I got shot up even more. I hope this game is autosaving because I’m almost dead and haven’t actually found out how to save yet.

In the next building I broke into there was a video phone on the wall, but it didn’t work. I had a really witty comment about the phone in my head, but I can’t remember what it was, so you get a pointless picture of a broken phone.

A bit more wandering around and I found a place to use that key I stole. Not wanting my robbery to feel unfinished I promptly stole the man’s shades and put them on, then stole all his money as well. Then slept in his bed. Oooh yeah. I felt awesome until I saw how awful those glasses look now I wish I could take them off. At least resting in the bed fully healed me and gave me the option to save. Hooray!

On a small side note the music in the game gets quieter when the menu is open, which is a really nice touch. Since this is probably the only time I’m gonna comment on the music I should also mention it’s awesome.

WEAPON YES. Down another alley I found ANOTHER guy shooting the crap out of me. I’m slightly unnerved what I did to make the entire population of a city want to kill me but that’s not important because right now I can shoot back...

Or rather we can stand here facing each other missing 9 out of 10 shots. These guns are pathetically inaccurate and it took a good minute of randomly shooting to actually kill him.

The guns seem to have infinite ammo though, and the cursor tracks targets automatically as they move which is really useful. What’s more useful is the Orc had a sweet leather jacket on him when he died, which I promptly stole.

Then I got interrupted by a talking dog because, you know, anthropomorphic animals and all. Apparently dog controls my destiny.

Before I could collar the little flea-ridden mutt and claim him as my own he disappeared into the shadows. I guess the collar is one of his ‘favours’. Bonus points for using the proper English spelling of favour.

Of course, now I have a gun I immediately went back to that first house and murdered all of the occupants, like a Good Upstanding Citizen. I like how people dissolve into generic corpses when they die, and even have a voiced grunt or scream. Next stop: murder the innocent little ‘mice’ that buried me.

Apparently the world of Shadowrun operates under the laws of Scooby Doo, and by merely putting on a pair of shades the two morticians don’t seem to recognise me anymore. I can’t even kill them so I guess it’s time for boring talk.

My vision is augmented…. Heh heh heh.

Aside from a good way to slip in a reference to one of Ray’s favourite games there wasn’t any reason to come back here, so it’s off on more adventures.

Wow, even the hobos living in dumpsters want to kill me. What did I ever do to garner this much hate? I mean aside from stealing a dog collar, murdering a family and robbing a dying guy. I’m an Upstanding Citizen!

It was kind of annoying that the hobo in the dumpster had more money than me when I killed him. I wish he dropped his gun though, as it did waaay more damage than mine.

After wandering around for another couple of hours (whilst hopelessly stuck on what I was meant to do next) I stumbled upon a nearby graveyard. And got attacked by zombies. If there’s one way to make me want to stop playing a game, its zombies.

Next!

Shadowrun series:

1993 - Shadowrun (SNES)

1994 - Shadowrun (Genesis/Megadrive)