EatinOlives
Member
I got this bad boy in the mail today, slapped it on my SNES and got my ass handed to me within five minutes. It'll be one of those games, won't it?
A little background info: this game caught my eye because it's one of the few games that everyone recommends on the SNES that I still haven't played. I know very, very little about this game, other than the fact that it came from a tabletop RPG, this is the first game adaptation on it, and that it's damn good. I thought I had exhausted pretty much everything good on the system, and I thought it would be neat to go into a new, good SNES game as blind as possible, since I figure there's few other games on the system that'll do that for me now.
First thing I noticed is that controls very much like a PC game, but to my surprise this game is actually native to the SNES and not the PC. To my bigger surprise, the other versions like the Genesis one are completely different games. It made me feel better about jumping on the SNES version. For some strange reason I thought for a second I was getting some sub-par port of a game I could've gotten on the PC.
Now on to the game itself. I've only managed to get just a little bit into the game because it's so cryptic and difficult. I'm loving the fact that conversations are based on keywords, which then become conversation options for people, and asking certain people about the right topics leads to many things including the story advancing, more topics, and so on. I think it's pretty ambitious considering the context that it's a 1993 game. Hell, it's already a deeper system than the Mass Effect series <_<
Other stuff is a bit weird, particularly the controls. So the R button can bring up the cursor, which can then manipulate objects, but you can't talk to people that way. You have to press B, bring up the menu, and then talk to them. Combat is equally awkward, you have to bring out the weapon with A, aim manually at the enemy and fire away with the A button. It's doable, but I think it could've been better implemented. Regardless, it's not something that'll turn me off the game.
Difficulty = yikes. I died a couple of times just wandering around with no way to defend myself. Wasn't making progress until I figured I needed to follow the dude who ran into me as I escaped the morgue (pretty obvious in retrospect). He turns a corner, gets shot by a bigass dude (turned out to be an Orc, one of the many fantasy sci-fi elements Shadowrun is supposed to be famous for), and I have to run past him, fumble with the cursor controls as he's shooting me so I can pick up the gun of the dude I was following, equip it and bust caps on the Orc's ugly green ass until he makes a blue explosion indicated he's deed.
Then I get treated to probably the weirdest fucking hint I've seen in gaming in quite some time. A dog with glowing red eyes creeps out of the shadows and gives me a cryptic hint about how someone or something named "Dog" controls my destiny and I need to acquire three things for him/her/it and seek his/her/its "shrine". Anything I ask to the dog results in growling. I think this game is turning a little freaky here.
From there I don't know what to do. I haven't been able to save but I'm taking a break writing this up and I'm kind of debating using an internet guide to just get a hint. Then again this is one of the few SNES games that I'm going in blind so why ruin that element with a guide? Then again, I can't go anywhere without a small army shooting at me from rooftops, windows, or just thugs on the street and I've already played the intro like three times already with my deaths. What say you, GAF? Is it a game so cryptic I should really use a guide when I'm stuck or is it doable without one?
