Reasons To Return To Classic Shadowruns

Though FASA Interactive and Microsoft’s Shadowrun first-person shooter in 2007 was widely regarded as an awful idea, we still have the cyberpunk series’ previous three games to return to and enjoy.

In fact, the SNES, Genesis, and import Sega CD games (each separate experiences from different developers despite sharing identical titles) have all seen recent developments that might convince you to play them again even if you already ran through them a decade ago.

• The top-down, open world Genesis game has a new conversion mod that revises your starting races, characters, stats, inventories, and more. Programmer Magus77 also made lots of changes to the weapons and text/dialogue, though I haven’t tried it out myself to see if this improves or damages the game. Dragoon Zero’s Races mod is also worth trying, too.
• Someone unearthed a beta ROM of the European SNES game (I typically don’t like to direct link ROMs, but I’m making an exception since this wasn’t intended for retail release), which someone should investigate. There’s a similar beta ROM for the U.S. edition, and that revealed a few “censored” edits:

• As for the Japan-only Sega CD game (intro cinematic embedded above), someone put out a call for technical help to create an English patch several months ago. This isn’t the first time someone’s hinted at an upcoming translation for the text-heavy title, but I’m mentioning it anyway because maybe some kind-hearted ROM hacker will read this post and lend their talents to the project.

If it’s not obvious, I love the Shadowrun series and spend too much time following unofficial projects since the PC game killed any chances of future video games. Also, I wish there was a DS emulator that ran Shadowrun SNES without any issues so I could play this on a portable.

[Via Romhacking]

tags / shadowrun / fasa / snes / genesis / sega cd / blue sky software / beam software / compile / group sne / imports / translation / homebrew / ec