Played on emulator (Kega Fusion v3.64). Uses a few glitches plus 4 intentional deaths to save time. Timing ends (arbitrarily so) when the dragon busts his head through the wall in the final battle.
*** Check out my improved run at https://youtu.be/JmCH2tiH990 ***
It's Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis, an RPG based on the pen-and-paper game, adhering to the 2e rules very closely (I think... So I'm told... I have no idea.) Quite different from the SNES game of the same name.
Here's the story: The year is 2058. You play as Joshua, who goes to Seattle to avenge his brother's death. Somewhere along the way, he saves the life of a guy named Stark who joins him in the cause. Stark is OP. End of story.
This game is very random. Lots of dice rolls and pop-up events. You can avoid some of the randomness if you're careful. More often than not, you'll just be hilariously steamrolled by hellhounds. Exhilarating!
Glitches Used
- If you crash any CPU in the Matrix, all doors in the game become unlocked permanently. It's not exactly a game-breaking glitch (you can hack doors or buy a key), but it saves plenty of time and money.
- In the Matrix, you can use the Retreat command to sneak into nodes. You can't really do this for two consecutive nodes, but used wisely it's very convenient.
- Not really a glitch, but casting Invisibility on the active character in the party effectively makes the whole party invisible. Invisibility means you avoid all random events and you cannot be seen by guards in corp buildings. However, you can still be detected by security cameras.
There are other various bugs in the game that pop up occasionally, but they usually just screw you over in dramatic fashion.
Random Time Losses
- When entering the Matrix through the search function, the game puts you in a randomly selected network (one of 14). Some networks are better/faster than others. Some are virtually impossible with baseline stats. I chose to jack out of two nets in this run instead of resetting, costing about 45 seconds.
- Spirit Eyes' trials have you hunting for gargoyles and hellhounds at separate times. These enemies (and most enemies in the game) only appear in random encounters. The strategy here is: stand in a particular building and hope for the right encounter. This is where most runs go to die. Thankfully, this run gets remarkable luck and doesn't lose any time here (odds of this are about 1 in 30). Could have been even several seconds faster because of how events are aligned.
- There's a security camera on the 5th floor of the Mitsuhama building that's completely unavoidable. When passing through its view box, there's a random chance it will see you and raise an alert. Normally, you have to get by it both coming and going. Instead, I make a detour to the 4th floor in order to shut off the cameras. Unfortunately, hacking the terminal to do this can randomly slow you up. Kinda bad terminal luck here, so overall the detour cost about 40 seconds.
