Three weeks without internet access have led me to revisit many old video games, including the Shadowrun Genesis game. I have learned the following pieces of wisdom.


1. There are no streetcorner prostitutes or drug dealers in the barrens. These, I presume, rely on bulky 80s cell phones and matrix advertisements. In their place are grenade dealers who wander around pestering random people like a stereotypical drug dealer from an 80s After School Special.
For this reason, it is pretty easy to find grenades.

2. If a bunch of thugs are raping a woman in an alley, they're probably police officers.

3. The customary tip for emergency medical assistance by laypersons is 100 . Often, vampires will take advantage of this fact by pretending to be injured and attacking the greedy Samaritans who try to help them. If the wound isn't bleeding then shoot the guy.

4. All cabbies are orks but not all orks are cabbies.

5. Sixth World mental hospitals have very poor security.

6. "Take this package next door" and "walk this guy across the street" are perfectly valid shadowruns if you are in the Redmond barrens due to the extreme danger of attack by packs of roving thugs. A smart street level runner can rack up hundreds of karma and thousands of nuyen a day on such runs. This is how street level runners become Prime Runners.

7. Ghoul hunting in abandoned warehouses sounds a lot easier than it actually is.

8. The standard bribe for a weapons violation is 500 no matter what the weapon is. Lone Star refers to this an an "on the spot fine".

9. If you have the right contact, 10,000 will make a thousand dead cops go away.

10. Do deal with dragons.

11. Free Spirits with uncapped Force Drain can become very powerful.

12. Despite being the most powerful metahuman magician on Earth, Harlequin is kind of useless.

13. Native Americans in the NAN are kind of racist against white people.

14. If you can't pronounce your Johnson's name you should probably just kill him.

15. Elves are snooty.

16. Docwagon can and will break into high security extraterritorial facilities and fight off heavily armed security teams to fulfill their contracts.

17. Run alone. By the time you have 6 in every stat 12 in every skill other runners are liabilities that just slow you down.

18. Feral Hellhounds roam the streets of downtown Seattle. Watch out for them.

Considering the hell hounds only start appearing once you've progressed significantly through the game I always saw it more as someone following you around in Seattle and sicing them on you at an opportune moment.

19. Bugs taste good when properly prepared.

20. Feathered serpents must molt or something.

21. Random maged backed up by thugs will waylay you without warning in the streets.

22. The Halloweeners were weak, but some of the other gangs were dangerous.

That was a fun game. I wouldn't mind finding a version I could play on the PC since my Genesis long since gave up the ghost.

Dude, emulators.

Also, the rest of the world called it a Mega Drive...god knows why. It's taken me about 3 minutes to figure out which Shadowrun game you were on about.

Happily, I'm not actually old enough to remember it the first time round, but I've played the early stages a few times on an emulator...is it actually worth playing through all of it?

You could always try the Super Nintendo SR game, and be a shamadeckurai.

That game took WAY too long for leveling up. I fully recommend using GameShark to make your character unstoppable.

I did a search and found a few sites to choose from to download it. I'll probably stick with the Genesis version though.

Maxing out pistol skills was s good way to kill things fast. Shotguns worked too, but they you were always paying bribes to police to let you go.

The only real problem I ever had was that if you had wired reflexes, you were easy meat in hand to hand combat. That was really strange.

Ahhhh, I remember that game.


The RPG could stand to be a bit more like that CRPG, at least in terms of some of the cliches, such as cops so corrupt they'll let you walk down the street with an Ingram for 500

Oh, don't forget,

23. The right contact and 8,000 , or the wrong contact and 10,000 will buy you a Prestidental Carry Permit. One permit, any number of weapons, any number of companions with any number of weapons. No matter how illeagal.

24 - One can make a nice profit by hacking the same datastore again and again.

25 - There are phones hanging from trees out there.

26. The best way to run the Renraku Arcology is to enter via the front door, punch the receptionist in the solar plexus and shoot everyone in your way...

27. ... But you'd rather hack the same datastore again and again, it's more profitable.

7. Ghoul hunting in abandoned warehouses sounds a lot easier than it actually is.

I used to make tons of cash on those missions. 20 ghouls at 75Y a pop. 1500Y total.

Also for the Genesis. At the Game start screen. Enter the code ABBACAB and then press start. At th

Load your game, then check under the Save/Load menu, there will be a hidden menu under it with all kinds of checks, +250,000Y, +10 karma, etc. And you can use it multiple times.

I memorized that cheat for some reason. (I liked to earn my money, but the +10 karma was good for boosting up your buddies. it adds +10 to every one in your party.)

I want both of the versions (SNES and Genesis) to go up on the Wii Virtual Console ASAP.

Ain't gonna happen. One might depending on whether or not it would need FASA Studios to give permission, the other I'd be willing to put money behind never seeing the light of day, at least not until its copyright expires.

~J

Heh, was thinking pretty much the same thing lorechaser.

If you ever got desperate to earn some extra nuyen I always found the cellar of the Dark Blade Club to be most handy. Go down to the room where Vladimir was, climb up the stairs part way so the ghouls can't reach you and then kill the four of them for three or four karma points IIRC. Leave the room, come straight back in and then kill them again for another three or four karma and repeat ad nauseam. That racked up karma pretty damn fast from what I recall.

But then I'm the guy who earned enough karma in the Tenth Street area to raise all the available attributes and skills to their maximum before going to meet Glutman and being taken to the caryards. Certainly made fighting in the arena much easier.

The SNES game... I remember that. It was kinda fun, being a Shamadeckeruai. And your Ally Spirit carries a loaded Ares Ingram to back you up with. Oh yeah, and she's a foxgirl, too.

Fun times.

probably maxes at 255.

the code only works once before you have to save your game and reset. here's how to cheat quickly on an emulator: start the emulator, enter the code, save your state (not your game, your state--it's like an external savegame). load up your saved game, use the cheat menu to get whatever. save your game, reload your state, reload your saved game. use the cheat menu again, save your game, reload your state, wash, rinse, repeat.

Considering how different Shadowrun is in both the Genesis and SNES games, if the Shadowrun currently being made for the 360 came out back then, would people still be saying how bad it was, or remembering it with nostalgia as just another Shadowrun game with not-quite canon stuff in it?

The Genesis and SNES weren't exactly shining examples of the game if you've played either of them before playing the PnP game.

Currently playing both versions...

SNES - Getting my but handed to me in the arena but I made out ok.

Genesis -

"Why sure Mr. Johson. We'd love to extract your package for you. Just me and my two buds are going to Bust right into the highest security Renraku Facility in the land and take it!"

Had to do a lot of slipping past guards and fast talk before I managed to buy those corp badges. Whew. Get that charisma up ASAP.

Man running the Matrix is so fun. I always get a red alert just trying to snag one more RED file, then I have to bust up the main CPU and turn the alert down again. Crazy.

And that secret Data Fence in Downtown gives out insane money for decent files. 1,000Y to 12,000Y.

I love Roscoe. He's so funny.

"These Bank Account Numbers.... Are USELESS! I'll delete 'em off your deck, and I won't even charge you!"

"These Equipment Permits... Might be useful to the right people. I'd say they're worth, oohhh, 12,000. Waddya say?"

"Looks like we reached the big 'ol end-o'-file markah! Come back when you have somethin' for me!"

28. Megacorporations keep all their important and sensitive files on datastores accessable through the Matrix, with the CPU convienantly next door and as a choke point, so deckers who get to the DS can walk straight back to the CPU and cancel any alerts their noodling around trip.

29. No matter what you do in the system, you will never, ever, ever meet counter-deckers. They'll shut off the system before they send a decker into the Trix to get you.

30. You can access the 'Trix from convienantly-placed public terminals all over seattle, even on the front of abandoned buildings in the Barrens. These terminals are always in working order.

31. Nobody ever changes their security proceedures. No matter how many times they get broken into

32. Despite how effective it would be to simply wallpaper your Matrix with Tar Pit IC and have a squence of SAN and a sequence of five nodes which have no purpose other than to give intruding deckers more chances to screw up and lose their programs to Tar Pit IC, nobody ever does.

33. There is no such thing as spoofing a SuperAdmin account. Never. Not even a regular admin or even an authorized user.

34. People actually label files "Shadowrun information" and "Blackmail material" and "Prototype Blueprint".

35. Company Men are allowed to delete all copies of sensitive material and store them on their personal systems.

36. A Company Man's personal computer is as heavily-defended as the corp's system, featuring Black IC with underlaying Tar Pits running on Red-7 and up nodes.

37. Company meetings routinely go down at midrange downtown bars.

38. There's no such thing as offline storage. You lose a program to Tar Pit, and it's gone for good.

Ahh, good old Kitsune. She was a mite fragile and it was more trouble than it was really worth to tell her to cast her Summon Spirit spell in the middle of a gunfight.

But you know why the SNES game had the correct atmospehere? Because Kitsune was not the most powerful recruitable magician in the game but instead a woman wearing a formal kimono was. She was better by virtue of wearing asian clothing. And that demonstrates how the game designers realized it was really all about the 80s.

Those games were good fun, but challenging for me when I was a little kid. Also, I never knew about the pnp game at that time. So when my buddy showed up with the SR3 BBB I was like "woah! They made a book about those old games?"

Oh wow, I remember this one incident from the Genesis.

Ok once I was in an abandoned building for a long time, just meleeing with Ghouls and Gargolyes. But I was in there for a long time. But then this Gargolye appeared that was gold colored with sparkles around it. It took out my friends like in two hits so I ran. I cast my high level magical barrier spell. Which usually works.

This thing starts nudging it and slowly moves through the freaking barrier. I died in like two hits. And we were fairly high stated.(I beat they game once by punching the freespirit.) Still don’t know what that was.

Freaky!

Favorite Teammates (Genesis):

1.) Mars (Troll)
2.)Lady you bust out of Jail
3.) Elf Decker (Rhiana??) – If I was running a mage.
4.) Female Mage
5.)Your Native American friend
6.) Orc Shaman

I saw the SNES version once long ago on a game show where kids would play a game and the winner would get a copy of it and other prizes. I didn't even know it was Shadowrun, I only remembered that it was about some guy that wakes up in a morgue.

I never bothered with teammates; I found that if you hang around Redmond doing courier and babysitting runs for Gunderson until you max out every important stat they're more trouble than they are worth.

No you fool a bug would have had Chitin not sparkles!!!!