Frozen Synapse: Violent Cyber-Chess With Perfect Tactical Simulation.

I've got more than a few video games awaiting my attention at the moment, so noticing that there was yet another Humble Bundle being offered was not great, in terms of timing. A further glance revealed that the bundle consisted of just one game (though several days later a second game was added, and paying more than the average of about USD$4.75 also gets the Frozenbyte Bundle.) When I noticed what the single game was, however, I snapped it up immediately. The game in question is Frozen Synapse, indie developer Mode 7's simultaneous turn-based strategy game. I loved X-Com, it's spiritual descendent Laser Squad Nemesis and Jagged Alliance is still one of my favorite games of all time, setting a tactical plan and then letting the violent results play out is really a thrill, especially when your plans work as you think they will. In my experience, that is rarely, so I find myself saving a whole lot in this sort of game and grinding through the more difficult levels. Frozen Synapse solves the issues with these sorts of games that made me do that, and made that cheesy "strategy" impossible at the same time.

Happy, sunshiny, soul-crushing Dystopia. But the internet is not only high-speed,
it is literally everywhere.

Frozen Synapse is set in a complicated and somewhat confusing cyberpunk dystopia, the City of Markov Geist. In this city, a complicated network called the shape that has features of both augmented reality and virtual reality overlays the real, physical architecture of the buildings and streets. The city is ruled by the megacorporation Enyo: Nomad who own everything in both the real and the shape, including armies of "vatforms," cloned humans capable of noting more complicated than moving about and firing a weapon. The player is called only "Tactics," as giving orders through the shape is his specialty. Tactics has been hired by the splinter resistance movement Petrov's Shard, a group funded with technology and funds stolen from Enyo: Nomad when its founder left the conglomerate. The goal is to liberate the city, with the help of a rogue "shapeform" (A.I.,) several double agents and members of the unwashed fringes of humanity, as well as an army of your own vatform soldiers.

The game is played through a tactical display connected to the shape, giving buildings, units and cover a stylized "Matrix meets blueprints" look. Tactics is only called in at difficult "chokepoints" in various sections of the shape where things get rough. These chokepoints are procedurally generated, so the terrain and tactical possibilities are different with every time a mission is played or retried. Orders given to the vatforms can be micromanaged to an insane degree, and freely tweaked until the final order is committed. There is no "I go, then you go" as all orders execute simultaneously. The play feels like the tactical display and command found in the Rainbow Six games, but with one huge difference. Nothing is random. Depending on cover, aim, range of weapon and movement, a unit that has the advantage gets a kill. There are short range shotgunners, medium range riflemen, long range snipers and the terrain-destroying rocket launcher troops.

The interface shows everything you need to know to plan your next move.

Every move, shot, choice of aiming or hiding can be simulated before making orders final, and if you can guess where your opponent will move to counter you, you can give that order and see what happens if you are right. Simulate several possibilities and see which plan gives the maximum advantage, commit the order and see if you were right. The single player campaign offers escort missions, traditional "kill all the guys" scenarios, objective defense and many other scenarios. However, the true replay value in this game is the multiplayer. All the same tools and possibilities used against the AI can be used against a human opponent in a tense game that resembles a version of chess where pieces are heavily armed psychopaths that all move at the same time. Multiplayer games play like an online version of a "Play by e-mail" as you submit your next moves whenever you are ready, even if your opponent is not, and get a notification when the system is ready to display results of the last turn and accept new orders.

The developers set up an excellent lobby/matchmaking system with advanced tracking of statistics and the ability to watch games in progress or archived replays of past games. Particularly good matches are easy to export to YouTube with a click of a button and though the graphics are stylized with blue walls, red opponents and green friendlies (with yellow NPC allies in single-player missions,) the violence of headshots or rocket launcher explosions is almost more graphic in how it has been abstracted. There is a wide variety of multiplayer scenarios, each with "light" and "dark" variations depending on whether both sides can see all units at all times, or if an opponent is only on your screen if one of your units has line of sight. I particularly like the scenario where players "bid" on how much terrain they can keep their opponent out of based on the random tactical situation presented by the procedurally-generated map.

A strategic view of the fight for Markov Geist.

This game is well worth the normal price of USD$25, but through October 12, 2011 the game can be downloaded for whatever price you choose at the Humble Bundle Site. Like other bundles, you choose what to pay and how much goes to the developers, the guys running the hosting site and to charity. You also get the soundtrack to the game (the music is quite good) and a Flash adventure game about a woman recovering in a hospital named Trauma. Both games work on PC, Mac and UNIX, and can be redeemed with Steam or Desura if you like, all DRM-Free. If you want to try before deciding what the game is worth, it is easy to pay a price low as $0.01 and then go back later and increase your donation to whatever you feel is appropriate.

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Shadowrun - A cybernetic dwarf and a corporate elven mage walk into a bar...

The year is 20XX, the world is changed, some say Awakened. Besides changing the specific number of the year from 2050 to 2072 with the passage of time, that line is the traditional introduction to the world of Shadowrun. Shadowrun has taken many forms since 1989, from its roots as a tabletop RPG (which is what I'll focus on) to a card game, many different computer and video games, and even a line of action figures meant to be used in a sort of giant-sized miniatures game. At the heart of the game is a simple concept. You take the genre of cyberpunk with street-based warriors fighting in the shadow of corporations with machine guns and cybernetic enhancements implanted in a near-future dystopia, and add in magic and traditional fantasy races. The concept has the potential to be ridiculous. The style that emerged from the successful blend of swords and sorcery elements with cyberpunk action resulted in one of the most popular roleplaying games of all time.

Classic cover, used for the first two editions of the rules.

How did two genres that are so fundamentally different combine in a manner that wasn't... well... silly? The foundation of stories in Shadowrun is a conflict between magic and technology. The setting says that magic rises and falls away in natural cycles, and these cycles could be predicted by ancient people, including the Mayans. The “end of the world” in 2012 (actually 2011 in the backstory of the game) was the prediction of the passing away of the last mundane cycle, and the start of a new Awakened world. The slow and steady progression of the natural return of magic was disrupted by an event known as the Great Ghost Dance. A group of oppressed Native Americans, disenfranchised for centuries, organized a sort of shamanic ritual in protest, and with magic returning, to everyone's surprise... it worked. It had the unexpected effect of “spiking” magic's return with some unusual side effects.

One of these side effects directly impacts what sorts of characters can be created in Shadowrun. Base races are human, dwarf, elf, ork and troll, with later supplements introducing more exotic races or variants on these basics. Humans, dwarves and elves are very similar to their equivalents in any other roleplaying game in terms of physical and mental qualities. Dwarves and Elves were born to human parents through UGE (Unexplained Genetic Expression) right around the time of the Great Ghost Dance. Orks and trolls are bestial, brutish and often discriminated against, trolls in particular frequently growing to over 8 feet tall, and with bony calcified abrasions poking through the skin. Near the beginning of the Awakening, these unfortunate souls may have been born human, but near puberty, they “goblinized” into their true forms, though most trolls and orks are born to parents of the same race now.

Something about this lineup seems off...

The rise of a Tribal Native American movement led by firebrands wielding magical powers that they never really stopped practicing, coupled with increasing corporate power and a series of natural (and unnatural) disasters and plagues spelled the beginning of the end for the United States as it once was. Dragons returned from long slumbers and people reeled as nations fell, resulting in much of the US splintering into smaller countries. Native American Nations, the Confederated American States, the United Canadian and American States and the California Free State among many others in North America. Europe fared better in terms of stability, with the exception of changes in Ireland. Ireland had an unexpectedly high elven birth rate (over 40%) and by the 2050s, political turmoil was stabilized in the region by elves consolidating power and declaring independence as the nation of Tir na Nog.

Corporations moved to consolidate power in times of chaos, buying each other until most businesses were run by multi-national conglomerates called “megacorps” with private armies and sovereignty as if corporate property was foreign soil. The rise of the internet into a augmented/virtual reality network called “The Matrix”, and cybernetic body part replacements/enhancements regulated and produced by the megacorps further changed the world of Shadowrun. Corporate espionage, theft of corporate property and “liberation” (whether that means defection or kidnap) of corporate personnel began a quiet war in the shadows between the corporate arcologies that attracted the services of hackers, mercenaries... and mages.

This is pretty much how I imagine the average CEO's day goes anyway.

This is where the characters come in, as shamans, mages, cybered-out snipers or martial artists, vehicle specialists capable of running combat drones and getaway cars (called riggers) and computer infiltration specialists (called deckers.) These Shadowrunners might work for corporations, organized crime, any number of governments or organizations to infiltrate or otherwise oppose any number of targets. The characters operate as a team assembled to do quasi-legal or illegal things, and are frequently betrayed and sold out, shot up, left for dead. Many action movie stories with a “magic meets cybernetics and big guns” twist can be told in this world, and people seem to love it.

Most skill resolution is handled by rolling a pool of six sided dice that starts out fairly reasonable (between 6 and 12 dice) to get a target number and count the number of successes. Dice rolling is open-ended, with Karma points used for rerolls under certain conditions. Shadowrun is currently in its Fourth Edition, having originally been published by FASA in 1989, now in the capable hands of Catalyst Game Labs. The setting itself has advanced its own timeline one year for every year that has passed since publication, and currently in the year 2072, we've seen a complete reboot of The Matrix, the fall of the City of Chicago, and a dragon elected President of the UCAS (and subsequently assassinated... sort of.)

As characters get more powerful... dice pools get bigger.

In the early to mid-1990s, I ran and played almost nothing but Shadowrun in (and immediately post-) college. I played and GMed mostly 2^nd edition, buying a few books for 3^rd, and I'd moved on to other things (mostly back to D&D with the 3^rd ed revolution) well before 4^th edition came out. More recently, I've started to make a character for a local trial run of the “Shadowrun Missions” campaigns, going to re-familiarize ourselves with the first season, running SR3e, and then move on into newer campaigns using the gorgeous 4^th edition Shadowrun books. Anyone else have experience with Shadowrun, tabletop, maybe only on the Super NES or Xbox 360? (Hell, the Sega Genesis game was awesome, and to date the most faithful re-creation.) Let me know in the comments.

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