Started playing this game today, and with retro games I hate looking things up. So, if you’ve played this, could you be my friend at the lunch table and clarify a few things:

  • Am I imagining this games difficulty? I feel like I am making little progress and I’m always getting ganged up on.

  • Does this game require a lot of grinding or repeating tasks before moving on?

  • Should I be killing these innocents I see on the street? I try to get shadow runs but they seemingly always involve killing ghouls, which bend me over and spank my samurai butt. I’ve put my morals on hold and have been tediously murdering the population for the little nuyen and items they have.

  • is the samurai class the all-rounder character or should I just restart as a shaman or netrunner?

I really like the atmosphere of the game and despite my Initial confusions I’m having fun. Do you have any insights you could provide me? Do/did you like this game? How is it compared to the Snes version?

Thanks in advance chums.

  • Adderbox76English
    5•6 months ago

    One of my favourite games for the Genesis. It was my introduction to Shadowrun and to this day, I can’t begin to describe how it moulded my conception of cyberpunk and my own writing as a result. It’s one of three games that, in history, has legitimately changed my view of video games (Shadowrun for Genesis, Fallout 3, and XCom Enemy Unknown/Within)

    Now, for your questions:

    • You’re not imagining the difficulty. I too recently tried playing it on an emulator and found it more difficult than I remember. I think it’s because the slight lag on emulators between firing your pistol and it actually firing it is enough on the emulator that you simply can’t win a fight. This (I’m guessing) is because of modern displays rather than old CRTs that it was designed for, kind of like jumping with Mario feels just a little bit different.
    • It’s pretty grindy in some respect. But that’s kind of the reason that it felt so different to me back then. You’re a Shadowrunner. You’re doing jobs. Yes there’s a quest, but it’s one of the first games I remember where you could just ignore it for a while and punch a clock to go hack some corporation if you wanted to.
    • Killing innocents is entirely up to you, Chummer.
    • Samurai class is the all around’er. But I think Decker is the “canonical” way to play because decking is a fundamental part of the gameplay aesthetic.