The Next Shadowrun Game

by ThomasNo Comments

I love Shadowrun.

See, there was an illustration of an elf hanging off a helicopter’s skids. The elf was shooting a submachine gun at someone. The guy looking at this illustration — Jordan Wiseman, if I recall correctly — said, “I want a game where I do that.” And Shadowrun was born.

That happened a few years after I discovered William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Max Headroom. This game was introduced to me when the in-game clock was 2056, and it hit me with the full force of a hurricane. This was the game I wanted to play. A future dystopia with a band of people working together to fight the system and get rich while trying. It’s twenty minutes into the future, but what a future it was: magic had returned. ((And it wasn’t that Vancian magic system that D&D and its clones ran. I hated the “you cast a spell and now you don’t know how to cast it again” systems. I never read those books Gary and his friends did.))

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Choose Your Astronaut’s Own Adventure: Lifeline

by ThomasNo Comments

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Mr Robot 1.51exfiltrait0n.apk, which is a fun, solidly-written game with some game-stopping programming issues. Today, it’s Lifeline, a game I saw tangentially mentioned in an article about Mr Robot.

Mechanically, Lifeline is similar to Mr Robot. You’re in contact with someone via a texting app. You have a limited number of responses (two instead of up to three). Because that person is doing things in the gameworld, their text conversations are spaced out: if it takes Taylor four hours to walk somewhere, he might contact you in four hours when he’s there. ((Or in two hours if he’s bored and wants to tell you what he’s seen so far.))

The setup for Lifeline is this: astronaut crashes on a moon, contacts you for help, you help him try to survive. I went in expecting The Martian. While the game starts off like that, it later turns into something like, oh… Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

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ChooseYourOwnAdv3nture.php: Mr Robot

by ThomasNo Comments

I’ve been playing the Mr Robot phone app game, 1.51exfiltrati0n.apk (.ipa on iOS), which would be fun if I wasn’t so worried that the damn thing crashed again. The game, from Night Sky Studio (partnered with Telltale Games) simulates a text messaging system.: you find a phone and start receiving texts on it. The gameplay is done through your responses to the texts. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book that way. A cool thing: although the game is called “Mr. Robot” on the app’s icon, the notifications on your actual phone come from “ECorp Messaging”, the faux-app inside the game.

While the game is described as a real time game, it’s actually just keyed off of timed events: you end a conversation with D, and then one hour later, E texts you. The frustrating thing is because these gaps exist, I don’t know if I’m waiting on the next message or if I’m in a strange game state where I can’t advance through the storyline.

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