Is it me, or does the Sega Shadowrun lack balance of almost any kind? If you even try to follow the storyline by earning just enough to advance, you get wiped out the moment you leave the Barrens. If you stick around Redmond, you spend forever trying to get anywhere by doing Gunderson's horribly low-paying and tedious courier/escort tasks, or spend forever and a half karma-whoring it up by killing ghouls (who, by the way, will still tear you to shreds even after you've gotten the best armor and cyberware upgrades you can afford the time to invest in saving up for at this point.

The only other accessible Johnson at this point pays well but his runs are impossible at this level. I've even tried dicking around in the Matrix to see if I could just pickpocket a small time account, but there's no telling what you get into and I've yet to find a single set of nodes that I can get through.

I want to finish this game, but it's really starting to piss me off.

Games WERE HARD back then.

And seeing as I manged to beat it as a pre-teen, it couldn't have been that hard.

Seeing as I beat it when I was twenty six, it couldn't have been that hard. (I really don't recall any issues. I may have just grinded through those first stages, but I don't ever recall getting frustrated with the difficulty level.)

I played this game to death. It's not that hard. I do remember spending some time on Gunderson's missions in the beginning to grind, but as some commentators have pointed doing lots of Gunderson runs is about as time efficient as doing more advanced runs for the amount of karma you get.

The ghouls aren't too bad. Basically you have to run in a diamond shape to keep your distance and keep shooting them when you're far enough. Don't button mash. If there's a vampire kill him first because it kind of messes up your strategy if he jumps all over you while you're trying to do this. But I distinctly remember not having too much trouble with the ghouls. Maybe it's more about your gun than your 'ware or armor.

Sort of both if you're gunning it. You need a good gun but you also need the skill to hit them. I also recommend never starting as the sam because he starts with the ever useless hand razors which can screw up your essence enough (if memory serves me) to not be able to get WR3.

Double.

The SNES game also had this problem, where you really needed to grind up your Karma at certain points to be able to kill things and not get geeked yourself. Specifically, around the time you hit the pit fighting is when it crops up, because they seem to assume you're going to just want to grind through the arena anyway for an hour or two before getting back to the actual story.

~Umi

I feel like I'm the all time pit fighting champion, because every time I played Shadowrun SNES I'd level up to the point that I'd kill The King with the Beretta. After a few play throughs you knew to walk in with 6 frag grenades saved from earlier to spam The King with in order to make it a little easier.

Yeah, I was reminiscing about this this morning. I remember that the key was indeed a high Firearms skill and a reasonable gun. Most of the time I held off of buying any cyberware till the end of the game, choosing instead to invest my in game resources on software for decking, which is the real way to make money in the game. Agree that in the long term playing as the samurai is not as optimal as playing as the decker or shaman.

The other thing is that as long as you spend your time in the beginning of the game maxing out pistols, you can always choose to double down on pistols and run with a Ruger Super Warhawk at the end of the game instead of a SMG. In general the SMGs are usually better than pistols, BUT with a high skill and the Warhawk (and only the Warhawk, not the Predator) you can one-shot a lot of enemies, which makes you way cooler than your teammates who are spraying everywhere with SMGs. "Oh, look it's a hellhound." BANG. You're like Dirty Harry.

In the end, the way to be the ultimate badass was to be the anime-style revolver virtuoso and be equal to the guys with the expensive recoil compensated smartlinked SMGs.

Of course, due to "universal clips", running the Warhawk means your ammo costs, and the amount of "clips" you need to carry to avoid "going black" on a run is larger than for other pistols or most SMGs. Since Charisma is probably your dump stat, I guess this makes you a man of few words and fewer cartridges.

I've probably earned a total of 10,000 from grinding on ghouls and spent most of that on upgrades to weapons, armor, and cyberware. I guess at this point I'm bored with Gunderson but every other mission seems to require being an expert decker or being able to afford maglock bullshit, which costs about as much as I've earned over the entire course of the game so far after about two days of playing. It doesn't seem like there's any middle ground for Johnson runs.

So, this is kind of the Shadowrun Genesis Dialectic.

The game CAN almost be all about decking, and there's actually a secret ending (seriously) if you invest heavily in decking and basically find the super hard secret mission.

But, the game can ALSO have NO decking. You do NOT need a maglock passkey and I have never used one in all the times I have played. All that you really need is an Electronics Kit and a bunch of frag grenades. As I recall for every single locked door you always have the option to blow open the door with a frag grenade.

Basically, while you can get into decking and have that be a big rewarding part of the game and have that be your biggest nuyen sink, you can also be a brutal Rambo type character and Chuck Norris your way through everything corporate security can throw at you. Bring lots of ammo, lots of grenades, and use the Electronics skill and the Electronics Kit to disable the security when you get to a console.

And when it comes down to it most of the Johnson runs are pretty medium, but there is one Johnson that sends you on runs against Renraku, which are the hard ones. So basically you can run against all the corporations except for Renraku and they're all roughly equivalent difficulty level. I think the run against Lone Star is harder than most corp runs but easier than Renraku.

Really, I promise you it's not that hard. It's just not. Stockpile some ammo, medkits, and frag grenades and invest in either Decking OR Electronics, and have yourself a ball.

I do seem to recall, perhaps incorrectly, that having Wires improved your combat ability when decking.

Well the one thing that's a bit broken about SR Genesis is the Tar Pit IC, which permanently deletes your expensive programs. That's the one thing I'd really call broken because it defies common sense that you wouldn't have offline backup. But without cheating you CAN do an in-game save before decking and restore if you lose something really expensive.

There's a couple ways around that too. I think Tar Pit is A: only found on certain specific IC and B: only deletes the program last used against it. So keep around a low level slow program to eat the tar pit with.

I'd read somewhere to stay away from trying to use grenades on locks, but I'll give that a whirl and see if it will get me some decent recovery run nuyen from the higher-up Johsnon. I actually didn't seem to have that much problem with the actual security when I tried that run before, it was the locked doors that were holding me back from getting that sweet 4K from just the one run.

The only reason not to do it is it will raise the alarm. But if you're going in Brock Samson mode, who cares?

Yeah, I remember that trick. For the tar pit to destroy your program, your program must fail to run, and the tar pit goes away when it eats one program, so keep some level 1 crap around that will fail in order to bait it.

Of course then the system goes to active alert, but oh well.

What a bunch of monkey jizz... The low-paying corp runs are just as dangerous as the high-paying ones. Clearly the only choice I have is to keep whoring it up with ghouls until I've saved enough to buy what probably still won't be enough armor to keep my ass alive.

Pick up a mage who has improved invisibility. There's also a really good elven decker you can pick up in the arcology.

Interesting. And here I was starting to wonder whether or not even hiring Shadowrunners was going to turn out to be as pointless as it was for most of the SNES version. I'll give them a try!

So, I remember that when I played, beyond weapons, I had the best ROI from improving skills (i.e. being able to one shot a guard) moreso than equipment. This is because a lot of high end equipment is extremely expensive, i.e. the Light Security Armor that you get from a Yakuza (?) contact where you need to spend money on knowing a friend of a friend just to buy. Things get a lot easier as you max out skills and attributes, though.

I was thinking about this yesterday and remembered that there are 1 or 2 plot points where you need to do decking, but you can hire a decker to help you with this if you need to. I don't think any of the mandatory decking is too hard.

Also, hiring runners is good. They draw fire, they provide fire support...even cheap runners are OK to keep around for this purpose. If I remember right I think they earn karma, too, for being on runs?

I'm sure they do. Some of the game mechanics actually interest me - like having to face different kind of IC with different programs and not knowing what you're up against at any given juncture until you scan it or it reveals itself. I'm just having a really hard time finding the game's middle=ground, and I suspect that there isn't any. The level of difficulty in no way seems diminished from a high level of payout to a much lower one. All the things that are available to help a player upgrade are at a level of expense that seems like it would take suffering through the monotony of grinding through the ghouls or doing courier missions that don't pay much more than it costs to perform them.

I tried using the Rat shaman's invisibility spell during a run, but either I don't understand how to cast it or it didn't do me any good.

I hate that this is starting to feel like I'm using the forum as my own personal Nintendo Power hotline, but there aren't many helpful resources on this game that aren't direct walkthroughs, and I try to avoid those since they take pretty much every last ounce of the fun out of playing. Anyway, I really do appreciate you guys chiming in.

Invisibility is a very powerful spell. I basically abused it to complete some Renraku runs early on in the game.

If it works you turn invisible. If the guy does a casting animation but nothing happens the spell failed.

And you're gonna be doing a LOT of runs to save up for that Fairlight Excalibur. Also, when hiring other runners I think they have two prices - one for one run and another that is effectively indefinitely. And they will gain karma as well.

Of course if you paid for the indefinite runner, you lose your investment if he goes down and instead of reviving him you abandon him on a run. Whereas if that happens to a one off you don't care so much.

Hilariously that runner will re appear in the same place to be hired later, but will actually be mad at you, have a 'tude in the flavor text, and will charge you more.

I think one of the deckers throws a burnt optical chip at you. LOL.

I've given up entirely. The game was clearly made to keep the player five steps behind at every single point in the story. Even street sams get taken down by the random encounters right from the start of the game and are too slow to run away from them (or keep the attackers at bay). The kind of money you earn from the only runs you can physically accomplish at any moment is far too little to advance by the time I've gotten bored with them.

Hell, I maxed out all of my combat attributes and bought a 10,000 nuyen illegal armor suit and the security of low-level corp runs that only pay 1k each (and can be just as complicated and time-consuming as the Renraku runs since you never know what floor the target is going to be on unless the game randomly tells you) is still cooking the collective asses of myself and every runner I've tried bringing along with me.

I love the concepts, but either this is really shitty game design or I'm doing something ridiculously wrong.

I don't know what to tell you. I don't remember being it all that hard and I played through the game at least 3 times. I guess I'd have to watch you play. Having come this far, want to post a video on YouTube so we can all chime in and Monday morning quarterback?

Also, if you haven't done so already, I remember there being an excellent guide on gamefaqs.com.

Hah, that'll make for an interesting game session, pointing out all the things that are pissing me off...

It's sort of like how many campers stash a deck of cards in their go bag, so if they get truly lost in the wilderness you sit down and start playing Solitaire.

Because I guarantee no matter where you are, someone will turn up and tell you the best place to put that Red 7.

If you get really frustrated, go talk to Mortimer Reed over at the Big Rhino, and take aquisition runs against Lone Star. The lobby of that building has a safe you can crack and then walk out, which will reset the wall safe. Repeat as needed to fill your pockets, go sell off what you don't want, and do it again. It'll put some cash in your pocket.

Or just cheat. A B B A C A B Start at the title screen, it adds another blank line at the bottom of your pocket sec that opens a debug menu in-game.

I actually did wind up cheating instead. The number of runs of any level you'd have to do to make the nuyen to advance yourself to be able to start doing new kinds of runs is ridiculous. A 12-year-old in 1993 might have been content to spend weeks doing the same drek over and over again, but I'd lose my damn mind trying to finish this game without cheating. Hell, even with cheats I couldn't get myself in a position to finish the end-boss, and settled for watching someone else do it on YouTube.

The funny thing is I almost didn't use the cheats at all, because I thought they were overpowered the first time I saw how much nuyen it could give you. What an understatement that would have been to make... Getting that much money even from top-level runs would take forever, but you can blow through it all in just a simple purchase, and then turn right around and lose it all by making a single mistake in a Matrix run. Seriously... fuck that noise.

Tell me about it. I stopped playing a Shadowrun MU* because they did the same thing, and when I said "hey, why can't I just store a copy of my programs out of my deck in chips and load them back in once the intrusion is over," they said that would make deckers too OP and that tarpits were the only checks on their money-making powers.

My memory of the game is much more nuanced.

Decking is the way to get money, but decking is also potentially harder and more involved than just beating the damn game. Like, you can be tough on yourself and deck every system, but it's sort of beside the point of beating the game.

This is because the stuff you buy with money is less important than your skills and attributes. Since you get 1 karma per kill on a run, go on a slaughter fest while screaming "Get some!" at the screen.

If for some reason you're not an epic gunslinger with the final boss, he likes to eat like 6 frag grenades in a row.

The matrix is a whole thing...a whole thing separate from just going and killing the final boss.

Must have been after my time or a different MU. I always had copies on chips in offline storage.

To be fair, there are a very limited number of nodes in very high level servers that have tar pit.

Really? Which one do you play?

I remember that the one I had had a pretty nifty system wherein it didn't automatically serve you the name of anybody. You had to /mem them as whatever name you gave it. Ostensibly, this meant you would ask them their handle, they'd tell you their street name (or an alias, if they were feeling sneaky,) and you'd /mem them as that name.

In practice, well... I wonder how many people punched in /mem DOUCHEBAG and /mem BELLEND and whatever.



True, and on Gamefaqs you can find stupidly comprehensive guides, including the one by Eller, which has literal maps of the servers in the game, including where they have their nasty tar-pits and such. Armed with that information, you can pretty much just breeze through the easy-to-nail high-risk, low-reward servers. The best ones are the ones where the highest-value datastores are within a few (preferably one) hop of the CPU, so you can browse for those 60 Mp paydata files until you trigger an alert, zoom back to the CPU, reset the alert, and swish yourself right back into your node to go a-fishin'.

It's probably a little late now, but by far the fastest way to make money is to go the screen to the left of the one you start on when you go to Downtown Seattle (I think), where the guy who buys pay data is with the terminal next to his door. Hit up random systems, get data, sell data, upgrade deck, rinse and repeat until you have everything you want.

Aaaaaaand now I want to play it again.

Ah thought we were talking past tense. Spent alot of time on the Seattle and Detroit MUSHs/MUXs. But that was a looong time ago

Re: the SNES junkyard thing? Oh god, did I spend a week in there. Had flashbacks when it was mentioned, brrrr....





-Tir

That was the height of the SNES game for me. Grinding in the junkyard. Because it made you a badass for the rest of the game once you were able to kill the King with the Beretta.

No no - what was awesome was grinding that vampire and fraggin ghouls in the basement of the vampire club for cash and karma. Assualt cannon, wired and gun skill maxxed? Cash for jam.

Although I DID try and have Kitsune (?) with me on the final run, that leather jacket really didn't cover the damage being thrown at us. And I think the biggest gun she got was a 9mm.

But who didn't love the, "Opps!" when you went to the dodgy street doc?
Nonononononononooo, HOW many hours before my head explodes?!


-Tir.

The best part about the street doc was how if you asked him about something he didn't know he would say, "Sorry, sudden lapse in attention there..."