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11 months ago
Distract the kids this Cyber Monday with Shadowrun’s old live-action promo
Much as wee Christmaseers watch The Snowman instead of Bad Santa, and diddy Star Warries watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars instead of The Star Wars Christmas Special, minuscule cyberpunks have something short and colourful to suit their attention spans as we celebrate Cyber Monday. FASA, the company behind Shadowrun (best known on PC for the crowdfunded Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Hong Kong) made a…
1 year ago
If you’ve been following all of our Cyberpunk 2077 coverage and thinking it could really do with some Orcs, you’re in luck. No, CD Projekt Red isn’t injecting magic into their sci-fi RPG, but some magical cyberpunk is free on the Humble store right now. Shadowrun Returns can be yours for nothing at all, as long as you snatch it up in the next day.…
Paradox Interactive have announced they are buying Harebrained Schemes, expanding their power as the heavyweight champ of traditional PC gaming. Y'know, Paradox, the Swedish mob who make games including Crusader Kings II and Stellaris as well as publishing loads more. And y'know, Harebrained Schemes, the American studio behind Shadowrun and BattleTech - and which was co-founded by a fella who helped create those tabletop worlds,…
3 years ago
Feature: The state of games on Kickstarter in 2016
At this year's Develop conference in Brighton, I grabbed an hour with keynote speaker Luke Crane, Head of Games at Kickstarter, to talk about the state of play of videogames on the crowdfunding platform in 2016. Discussed: what makes a good project now, the odds of making it, 'Kickstarter fatigue' and the question of glory days, Kickstarter's reaction to funded projects that are not then…
4 years ago
Hey, you! Yes, you in the plastic trenchcoat and plastic elf ears. You liked Shadowrun: Hong Kong [official site], right? Call it a hunch. Good news to you (and folks whose fondness for cyberpunk fantasy is perhaps more private): the RPG's Extended Edition is now out as a free update. Along with a good hour-and-a-half of director's commentary, the Extended Edition adds the new bonus…
You can hang up your cool leather jacket and grow out your sloppy neon haircut, oh I know, but part of you will always want to yell "HACK THE PLANET!" and stick it to the megacorps. Harebrained Schemes just can't stop slipping back out into the grimy streets of our cyberpunk future. They revisted Shadowrun: Dragonfall with a Director's Cut, and now they're returning to…
Harebrained Schemes don't only create remakes of olden meatspace games, you know. They only do that when they want to raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter. In between last year's Shadowrun: Hong Kong and next year's Battletech do-over, they're realising a 'procedural death labyrinth' (a roguelike, then) called Necropolis [official site], to which they've just announced the addition of four-player co-op. The thing's also due…
Shadowrun Returns Devs Bring Back BattleTech, Is Successfully Kickstarted Almost Immediately
Edit: now at over $800k after less than a day. Lawks! BattleTech is/was the setting for the beloved MechWarrior series, but began life as a 1984 tabletop wargame, long before it was a mech combat sim. Though MechWarrior pops up again now and then (usually involving some tortured development process), the BattleTech name itself didn't get a whole lot of use when it came to…
Feature: Flabby Cyberpunk
Shadowrun: Hong Kong [official site] is the third-and-a-half time around the block for this cyberpunk-but-with-elves roleplaying series, and by now there's a routine and a rhythm. You build a Shadowrunner, a secretive mercenary who can fight with technical or mystical powers (or a combination of the two), leading a team of fixed-spec allies with big personalities through real-time exploration and turn-based action. This time, the…
Feature: Tell Us Tell Us
Alice is on holiday, leaving it to me to ask us and you that timeless question: whatcha playin' there buddy?
Shadowrun: Hong Kong [official site] has finally got itself a fancy release date, so y'all can pencil this in: August 20th, which gives you a good month to crack those knuckles on the franchise's original Gera-Approved Pen & Paper Daddy for full preparation.
Feature: Gather party, venture forth
One of the most gratifying things about the recent-ish RPG revival is that they've almost all done well enough to warrant developer interest after release. (Oh, if only the adventure one had been as... no, no. Wrong column.) Call them Enhanced Editions, Director's Cuts or whatever else, they give their creators a second chance to fix mistakes or expand their worlds - and that's pretty…
5 years ago
Feature: Talking Hong Kong, avoiding stereotypes and less linearity
Last week I ran the first half of an interview with three-time Kickstarter winners Harebrained Schemes, in which they fielded my own questions about their upcoming cyberpunk-with-magic RPG sequel Shadowrun: Hong Kong. This time, they're fielding your questions - including what they've got planned for the future of the series, cyberpunk's Asian influences, how the stories are becoming increasingly less linear, avoiding Eastern stereotypes with…
Feature: Third time lucky. And first and second too.
Shadowrun just keeps on returning. The cyberpunk RPG has has various game adaptations over the last few decades, but it was the Kickstarted Shadowrun Returns which most nailed the concept. Narrative and choice expanded in excellent follow-up campaign Dragonfall, which then saw a further improved Director's Cut, and after all that devs Harebrained Schemes had a loyal enough fanbase to pull off their third successful…
They say lightning doesn't strike twice. But they weren't talking about one studio being able to pull off multiple successful Kickstarters when they said that, so it's irrelevant. What is relevant is that Harebrained Schemes join the likes of Double Fine and inXile in getting a second [edit - third, in fact: they also had Golem Arcana, which I think makes them the crowdfunding leader?]…
Shadowrun is returning. Again! I've already covered the basics of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Harebrained Schemes' next step into the world of fantastical cyberpunk, but the Kickstarter has just gone live so there are plenty of details to wrap that bundle of wires you call a brain around. The video below contains the first glimpse of the game's isometric interpretation of the setting, unless you count…
