So Good, I Forget All About Pie (Better Than Pie W/O)
Written: Jul 12 '02 (Updated Jul 12 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Addictive As All Get Out
Cons: Old School Graphics, Some Slowdown
The Bottom Line: You think you're old school? You don't know old school if you haven't played this!
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| tanta07's Full Review: Shadowrun for Super Nintendo |
Those who know me know that I value few things in this world above pie. Yes, pie holds a special place in my heart, as well as clogging it. So when ss3goku held a write-off about a game you like more than pie, it took me quite awhile to come up with anything. After all, there have been few games I’ve played that I wouldn’t put down long enough to sample some delicious pie. I spent the better part of two weeks thinking this one over, and then a magical thing happened: rader6795 returned to the world of Epinions. After a much-too-long vacation from writing for the site, he came back with a fantastic review of the old Super Nintendo game, Shadowrun.
Of course! Shadowrun! Why had this game not occurred to me until now? After all, it was one of the first games I could remember playing that I would skip sleep, food and bathing for. It’s a natural choice for being better than pie, mainly because I wouldn’t even look twice at a perfectly seared piece of filet mignon while this game held me in its addictive clutches. Thank you, rader6795, for kicking my memory in the rear, and making me look back on this fantastic game.
I was first introduced to this fantastic game through one my best friends in (I believe it was) middle school. I had played the pen-and-paper roleplaying game called Shadowrun, but I wasn’t aware that there was actually a console version of the game out there. My friend assured me that it was based off of the same world and play mechanics as the standard roleplaying game, so naturally, I was interested. We quickly scampered out to rent a copy of the game. Needless to say, after five straight days of playing through the game, we actually resorted to criminal activity in order to keep playing it. Yes, the game drove me to being a criminal. Those parents out there who think that video games are corrupting our youth, they may find some hard evidence in what I’m about to tell you. Knowing that the game would have to be returned the next day, and knowing that we still had some time before actually beating the game, we decided to pull the ol’ switch-a-roo. With my friend’s assistance, we cracked open the game, pulled out its innards, and swapped it with another, less valued Super Nintendo cartridge (Super Mario World, I believe). We then returned the Shadowrun casing to the store with the Super Mario World guts inside. It definitely wasn’t my finest hour, I assure you, but I had to finish this game.
Shadowrun drops you into the dark, depressing world of Seattle, 2050. The world is overrun with corruption and technology, making for a sick mix of hackers, mutants, and other less-than-friendly types. You are Jake Armitage, a guy whose world has seemingly ended, but in reality, is just beginning. Jake wakes up on a slab in the morgue, much to the chagrin of the coroners who were about to perform the autopsy on him. You’re not exactly who you are, or what in the hell is going on, but one thing’s for sure, other people know you, and they don’t like you much. After escaping from the morgue, you discover that there are people out there who want you dead, including a none-too-personable Orc who tries to cap you as soon as you hit the streets. It is just then that it might start to occur to Jake that this is not the friendliest of environments here. Jake is a Decker, or in the world of Shadowrun, a technologically-enhanced human who can jack straight into a computer matrix to access information. As you might expect, these types are highly sought after for jobs that are probably not on the right side of the law, seeing how he can access bank accounts, credit card information, etc. Jake quickly starts to find out that when you are a decker, you tend to make more than your fair share of enemies. Unfortunately for Jake, he is not sure who he has already cheesed off, and he tends to run into them with alarmingly regularity.
For its time, Shadowrun was incredibly deep and immersive. You are left free to explore a huge cyber-punk style world complete with ghettos (actually, most of Seattle is a ghetto in this game), gang territories, chic office buildings, and gloomy waterfront warehouses. To pick up extra cash, you can run missions, hiring other shady types with various skills, like Orcs and other deckers to help you out. They will stay with you for a price, and leave once they feel that you have gotten your money’s worth. It is up to you to reveal Jake’s past, and discover what lies ahead for him as he starts to unravel just who he was. There is a great sense of non-linearity to the game; you can follow the path set out before you, but you also have the option to run missions and increase your stats along the way, equipping yourself with all of the latest gear.
Graphics-wise, Shadowrun wasn’t even that impressive for its time, but they made up for it by making the environments so expansive. Through most of the game you are confined to a 3/4 overhead view as your character wanders the streets, and battles take place in real time, so there is no separate battle screen. The character art is pretty good; you won’t ever be confusing an Orc with your main character, but there’s no real eye candy to be found here, even for the Super Nintendo. When you are wandering through a data matrix, the graphics are fairly basic and bland. There is even some slowdown occurring when several enemies attack you at once, but nothing to really drag down the fun factor at all. In the grand scheme of things, this game could have looked like an Atari game and it wouldn’t have mattered, because the storyline and gameplay are so engrossing.
As far as sound and music goes, while I do still have a couple of the main tunes rumbling around in this head of mine, for the most part, there isn’t a lot to be said about it. There are a few choice little techno ditties that play while you are exploring, but for the most part, music does not factor into the game a great deal. The sound effects are also fairly straight forward - you get the usual “biffs” and “crunches” when you fire weapons and bombs explode. Again, just the simple fact that the in-game world is so huge for its time that other things had to be neglected a little bit. I honestly got so wrapped up in finding the next clue for looking for the next guy who could supply me with vital information that I never really concentrated on what was playing in the background.
The gameplay of Shadowrun is the real highlight of the experience. Like many games that I enjoy, it keeps things simple, and thereby stays out of your hair while you just have fun. Like I mentioned before, the battles in the game are woven right in to the normal gameplay. While you might be cruising the streets looking for the next clue or for a particular landmark, a mercenary will suddenly jump out of the shadows and start blasting. Maybe he is a hired assassin who’s after you specifically, maybe he is just a random thug and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way, he will come out with guns blazing, and you use a simple target system with crosshairs to zone in on him, and start firing. The crosshairs lock on and you just blast away with the weapon you have equipped. Sound simple? Well it is, but the devil is in the details. What makes most of the battles difficult is that you usually don’t only face one enemy at a time; you will usually find yourself in the crossfire of several guys at once. If you have a few hired shadowrunners along with you, they can help keep some of the heat off of you, but you must simultaneously dodge fire and lock on to various enemies. Later in the game, it can become extremely challenging, and at times frustrating.
Outside of the battles, you will find yourself doing the regular RPG stuff; collecting clues, talking to NPC’s, and progressing the plot. Usual investigation is pretty simple. Upon entering a new environment, you will want to scan the rooms with a “point and describe” system, featuring a little hand you pan around the room, clicking on objects of interest to get information on them. If something strikes your fancy, you can pick it up and examine it or pocket it for later use. When talking to NPC’s, anything of importance that will be of use to you later on will be highlighted as a “keyword,” and saved away for later reference. You will want to piece together all of the various keywords to figure out where you are supposed to go next, as well as figuring out just who Jake is.
Like other RPG’s Shadowrun does have character stats that affect how your characters will fare when faced with obstacles. You have hit points and magic points, as well as other key skills like weapons, leadership, negotiation and computer skills. You can up all of these attributes by collecting Karma points, which you gain through normal means, like completing certain tasks and offing certain bad guys. Once you have a few Karma points, you can choose which attribute to raise, and there actually is a subtle art to designing you characters. For instance, you want your deckers, the guys who navigate the matrix, to have high computer skills. The higher the skill, the better the chance they won’t blow themselves up while stealing you some information. Of course, weapons skills and high hit points are good for your mercenary type characters. Leadership and negotiation for good for your main character, because the higher the attributes, the better chance he has of talking other shadowrunners into coming along with him, and making their asking price cheaper to boot. There are a million different ways to customize your characters, and much like the non-linear flow of the rest of the game, there really isn’t a wrong way to design your guys.
As far as plot goes, Shadowrun is fairly unique, and keeps the pacing moving along nicely so that you will be glued to your console for days. While the amnesia angle is not totally new to the world of RPG’s, the game does a fairly fresh take on it by making the main point of the game discovering who you character is, and where he fits in in the grand scheme of things. For instance, it would be nice to know how he came back to life after being wasted by gang members, right? That should be, and is, a fairly large chunk of plot in the game, since resurrection isn’t an everyday occurrence, and more than a few people are unnerved to see Jake drawing breath. The gamer gets to start off with Jake at square one, putting all of the clues together piece by piece. As they start to come together, so does the main character, and the game gets deeper and deeper from there. As you might expect, there is a deeper purpose for Jake rising from the grave, and there is a larger evil looming at the fringes that he starts to slowly recognize. Really, a fantastic plot device that doesn’t get nearly as much credit as it deserves. You tend to hear about more well-known games when it comes to nifty plot devices, but Shadowrun is right up there with them with a story that will have you grinning as you start to put it together.
It’s certainly not pretty, and it is pretty dated by this point in time, but Shadowrun is a game that deserves a look from just about any RPG fan out there. It is not even your conventional RPG, really; it is more like an “action RPG,” since there aren’t turn-based battles, but it is just as engrossing as a Final Fantasy title. While it is spun off from a successful pen-and-paper RPG that it only shares classes and settings with, this game branched out to become its own thing, totally separate from the franchise that spawned it. It’s a real shame that sequels and spin-offs weren’t ever really made for this fantastic game, because it could have easily blossomed into a successful franchise if given its proper due. As it is, it will just now serve as a warm memory for a few lucky gamers out there who had a chance to give it a spin its first time around. For the rest of you, it is certainly worth the few bucks you can pick it up for at a local used game store, or off of Ebay. I’m sure there are ROMs floating out there as well, but I wouldn’t suggest anything illegal (::wink wink::).
Graphics - 3/5 - Definitely nothing pretty, but does the job. Some slowdown, especially during battles.
Sound/Music - 3/5 - Nothing really stands out too much. With an expansive world to cover, there just wasn’t that much attention given to this department.
Plot/Storyline - 5/5 - About as innovative and fun as you’re going to find in a Super Nintendo game. You start out at breakneck pace, and will have a ball unraveling the mystery.
Characters - 4/5 - Jake Armitage gets a HUGE amount of development and detail throughout the game, since most of the game is just learning about him. Other characters aren’t really developed that well, however.
Gameplay - 5/5 - Fun and simple. Collecting clues and gatting fools is the name of the game here. Half of the fun is just trying to stay alive while walking down the street.
I highly recommend Shadowrun for anyone out there who wants to have an old-school adventure that will suck them in as much as any newer game on the market. Sure, people will laugh at you when they see the bad graphics, but after they sit and watch the story unravel for a few minutes, you’ll probably find them up at 3 am playing the game, too. Believe me, I loves me some pie, but I would gladly give it up while playing Shadowrun.
Thanks for reading my submission to this write-off, now please check out these other participants:
ChromeKiller
32_Footsteps
Rock_On
xeno3998
pavona21
netnut746
jeremy1456
gorocco
skater6446
dark_cheeseboy
ss3goku
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tanta07
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Member: John
Location: Greeley, CO. USA
Reviews written: 212
Trusted by: 51 members
About Me:
The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
Chasing shadows, moonlight mystery.
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