Shadowrun

Once upon a time, I played a modest amount of paper-and-pencil Shadowrun. Recently, due to the magic of emulators, I had the opportunity to play (in a totally IP-respecting way, for sure!) both the Genesis and SNES 16-bit Shadowrun games. So here, 16- or 17-years late, some reviews for you.

SNES

The SNES game is alright, but it’s not particularly faithful to the Shadowrun ruleset. (The “Matrix” gameplay, in particular, has almost nothing to do with the Shadowrun rules.) Game balance is a little heavy-handed; your character grows in power largely by buying stuff, but there few places to do so, and much of it only becomes available once you pass certain checkpoints in the game. It looks like the devs couldn’t get things balanced so as to prevent players from grinding cash early, powering up, and then blowing through the mid- and end-game, so they just decided to lock up the goodies until late in the game. It’s not a bad way to pass the time, though.

Genesis

The Genesis game is much better. Not only is it the best-ever adaptation of the Shadowrun rules (2nd edition, I’d say) to a videogame, it’s probably one of the best adaptations of any paper-and-pencil RPG ruleset. Game balance is very good, but not quite perfect; there are certain hazards that you can’t do much to protect yourself from (random encounters with hellhound packs, Tarpits in the Matrix), and there’s really only one way to grind the money necessary to power up to those silly levels that we all love so much (downloading and selling files — which isn’t easy to stumble upon). It’s still worth any retrogamer’s time, and will likely appeal to any Shadowrun fan.