-karma

[edit: color added for emphasis]

Shadowrun for Genesis was good. I also liked Shadowrun for SNES for being fun and evocative even though it didn't follow all the rules.

That was actually my first exposure to shadowrun...

For a bit of nostalgia, I downloaded SPC (snes music) files from the game to run on winamp

Ding ding ding! We have a winner. You guys are thinking about copyrights. Trademarks are wholly different, and Microsoft is basically just making their (new) logo for a possibly upcoming game into a Registered Trademark.

It had pretty good music. I actually made a tape recording of it at one point.

If it were fun and involving and challenging, yes, in a heartbeat, no question about it.

Yeah, but... Okay, maybe I'm biased. But Mechwarrior 3 was great, faithful to the original rules AND a great game to boot. Mechwarrior 4 (the MS one) was a pile of console-based faeces that should have been boiled alive in hot vinegar and buried in the manure pile (explain to me, please how a COMPLETELY DESTROYED LEG still lets a Mech run around with little more than a limp?). MW4 was little more than a shooter reduced to the lowest common denominator of naffness (yes, I bought it. Yes, I played it. No, I didn't bother finishing the piece of crap. Yes, I'm bitter )

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Compared to their earlier releases, Halo was awful, and while an entertaining game was not anything special on the wider front. Marathon, Pathways into Darkness, Abuse, Minotaur, Myth and Myth II... all exceptional, all amazing. Then Halo comes along and it's ho-hum, what's next.

~J

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

I don't know HOW MANY times I've said that HALO was just a smoothed over Marathon game!
To make it worse. My roomate (a HUGE fan of HALO) realizes the other day that HALO's "world" of aliens, organizations, and plot lines are almost identical to those found in StarCraft.

HALO is neat...but um...come on. It's not THAT great.

As to the SR trademark.
They are simply stating that Shadowrun is a trademark of Microsoft in regards to video games.
Basicaly, no one from this point on is allowed to make a video game called Shadowrun without Microsofts say so.
That's it.

Movies do this now and then when doing adaptations of a story from another medium.
But mostly, movies don't bother if it's not adapted from another medium because it's insane to do that.

It creates the "We trademarked the term "double click"" problem in movies.

As opposed to the thousands of Battletech homebrews that are out there and never sued by Microsoft....


BTW Mech Commander and MC2 are great adaptations.

I ask myself that regularly. If you want I can give you a laundry list of everything wrong with the game when I get home. [this part removed until I can figure out a way to phrase it that doesn't sound insulting, because it isn't meant to be]

The AI is one of my biggest complaints, actually. Utterly predictable. A few randint()s would have gone a long way.

~J

Can I recommend Far Cry to you? The storyline is mediocre, but the AI is rather good - first time I actually saw the computerised opponents use cover to advance on your position with any degree of effectiveness. I'm no soldier, but "advance and flank in cover while your compatriots lay down covering fire and the occasional grenade" is convincing from a civilian standpoint

For SR, though, I don't think the FPS concept would work. There's just too much to squeeze into the skill base of a single character. Think about it - any single hero would have to cover all of the big three character areas: cyber, magic and decking (we'll leave rigging out of it, although with the increase in vehicle-based levels in FPS games it may fire up its ecm suite and sneak back in). The closest to a viable FPS Shadowrun I can think of would be something like the original Deus Ex (gameplay-wise, lightyears ahead of its pretty but ultimately bland sequel); a kind of cross between FPS and RPG. Even then, I don't think it would work too well (if I had to design it that way, I'd fudge the skill requirements some and have the player pick from Cyber or Magic as a base archetype, with Decking as a bolt-on to either, then have separate "power-up" locations available to buy either new cyberware or spells/foci).

Far better, I think, and more representative of the genre, would be a Knights of the Old Republic style party game. Or even a Neverwinter Nights PC-plus-sidekick isometric deal. But there's a lot to squeeze in to any SR game, and I don't hold out high hopes for it (you'd need a complete decking subgame, for starters).

EDIT: Oh - other single-player experience games not mentioned so far that i consider superior to Halo:

The Thief series. The new one didn't add anything revolutionary to the game licence, but the series remains a solid proposition with an immersive atmosphere (and the Asylum level from Thief 3 is hands down the scariest frickin' thing you will ever play. Screw Doom 3.)
System Shock 2 - there's your sci-fi cyberpunk, mate.
HL & HL2 (okay, so they have been mentioned, but it bears repeating that the original HL is one of the few games of its period still regularly played by a large chunk of the gaming fraternity.

While I think of it - whoever it was described Counter-strike as a bland deathmatch. The thing to remember here is that CS was a fan mod that hit it big. It wasn't designed from the ground up by paid professionals Although I don't quite get how it's bland, unless you mean it's not a frenetic rocket-powered chase around the arena. Whilst still twitchy, it's more cerebral than (say) Quake deathmatch.