If you frequented the official Shadowrun forums, they are planning a new place where people can meet in an off-Microsoft type property. Honestly, given that most games have digressed to a chaotic free-for-all (with a fair share of team killing to boot), and troll katana has become absurdly unbalanced, it pains me to say that you might be better off just saying bye for good.

Announcement: Forums Closing Soon [via n4g]

We're not quite ready to announce our plans for each property, but please be assured that our goal is to surprise and delight old fans, while welcoming new fans to these fantastic worlds.

Smith & Tinker's License Procurement Announcement [Smith & Tinker via Gamasutra]

Rumors about the studio's closure surfaced in March of this year, well before Shadowrun shipped, when a former FASA worker wrote of an employee exodus and that decision makers would "cut the tumor that is FASA Studio from the body of Microsoft."

Gitelman wrote that hardcore Shadowrun players needn't worry about being abandoned as "We have kept our Community Manager and Technical Support Manager on the job to aid and support you and will continue to do so while people continue to play our game."

We're waiting to hear back from Microsoft PR to learn more about the situation. Mitch's full statement is linked below.

FASA Studio has closed its doors [Official Shadowrun Community Forum]

"Bad Game turned out to be one of our favorite projects so far," said Sarcastic Gamer's Creative Director, Jeromy "Doc" Adams. "We got to use a cartoon voice for this song, because it seemed to fit the subject... Well, that and none of us could sing as high as Daniel Powter."

Bad Game: The Shadowrun Song [Sarcastic Gamer]

SARCASTIC GAMER 'TAKES AIM' AT SHADOWRUN Releases New Parody Song: "Bad Game"

Monday at 12:01am (central), Sarcastic Gamer readers discovered a new parody song.

Bad Game (The Shadowrun Song), is a parody of Daniel Powter's Bad Day and offers listeners an abrasively funny review of Fasa's Shadowrun. The Song also takes aim at several other titles that have been less-than-successful so far this year. It was co-written by Jeromy "Doc" Adams and "Lono".

"Bad Game turned out to be one of our favorite projects so far," said Sarcastic Gamer's Creative Director, Jeromy "Doc" Adams. "We got to use a cartoon voice for this song, because it seemed to fit the subject... Well, that and none of us could sing as high as Daniel Powter."

The song is available as a 128 kbps mp3 at the following URL:

http://www.sarcasticgamer.com/2007/08/bad-game-shadowrun-song.html

In addition to the song itself, Sarcastic Gamer is also offering fans the chance to compete for prizes, by creating their own video for Bad Game. "The winner's video will become The Official Bad Game Video, plus the winner will receive their choice of a free copy of Shadowrun, or a box of granola bars," said Adams. "Given the nature of the game, our money's on Nature Valley."

Title Update 3 Contains:

Gameplay

Dwarves can no longer be unawared with the katana or Artifact.
Elves' regeneration ability has been tweaked:

Increased time before Elf begins to heal by a quarter second.
Increased essence cost of healing by ~15%.

Audio

Enemy footstep audio will now be easier to hear in Live games.

Bots

Bot difficulty will scale with players' average Trueskill in Public Match games.

UI

Added "Advanced Settings" screen when setting up a Private Game, which contains the following options:

Max players - Ability to determine the maximum number of players that can join the game
Preferences - Ability to use the preferences of all players to determine the map rotation
Handicapping - Ability to turn Karma on or off

Fixed "stop" functionality for when a game-start countdown has begun in the lobby.
Improved messaging for when your party is split or rejoined due to team balance.
Improved messaging about Artifact clearing bodies in Attrition.

Network

Improved server reliability.
Dedicated Server
Improved voting reliability.
Improved network reliability.
Improved error messaging.

General

Local Match games can now be played without a profile.
Fixed numerous crashes.
Fixed numerous exploits and glitches.
Improved Vista multi-monitor functionality.

Still, there are a handful of options we'd still like to see implemented in a currently nonexistent, future patch:

1. Even if I set my options to only find one map, I often cannot play that map. Why, after no suitable game is found with my preference, can't I have the option to begin my own?

2. Server connection losses can be common when server players quit. How about a clear notification when you are server, with the option to be like, "Hey, I'm just playing this one round and I don't want to screw 16 people so don't make me server this time, ok?"

3. DLC DLC DLC DLC DLC

4. UPDATE: Splitting parties. Yeah. What's up with that?

I've been digging Shadowrun. And while there aren't 1,000 levels, the only downside I've seen to the design is that character models are limited, sometimes confusing identity of attackers by repeating skins (and cutting my bloodlust as I mow over endless streams of pitiful katana elves.

In summary: New patch works. Pick up the game. Lose to me often.

Play reports that Shadowrun will be getting a patch on Xbox Live early next week and the Vista version soon after.

The patch will include a major reduction in matchmaking waiting times, cheat fixes, some gamemode tweaks and minor adjustments to both the games AI and HUD.

Shadowrun improvements in-bound [Play]

Circuit City Shadowrun Deal [Circuit City]

We'll just see about that.

Where console players will be at a disadvantage, however, is when they'll get their hands on the game. The PC version is due to ship this calendar year, with the 360 version arriving in early 2008. You console boys are gonna get your strategic asses handed to you.

PC, 360 at War [IGN]

The report from The Inquirer also states that the crack is rather simple, requiring only a few files to be rewritten to get the game working under the older Windows OS. Michael McWhertor

Vista-only game cracked [The Inquirer]

He told OXM, "There's repercussions here for the gamer. We're shooting our own people in the foot by not recognizing what these developers are doing. I worry about that. I'm not happy with the reviews either because I don't think they're comparing us apples to apples."

The OXM podcast staff asked Gitelman whether he had any input on the game's $60 price for a multiplayer only title to which Gitelman responded that Shadowrun has legs that could last for years. He first responded "I make games. I don't set prices in games. It's not part of my job nor is it my call."

He then followed up with:

The most important thing is the value of what you're getting, I think there is value there at the $60 price point. If you play just about any first person, next-generation shooter that's come out recently, you're looking at the single player game being about 10 hours. I've been playing Shadowrun for three years... You can see this game truly has legs. So, ten hours of gameplay for sixty bucks, plus some probably lame multiplayer they tacked on, versus Shadowrun that you can play, lets say, for years.

Obviously, Mitch has a point here, in that many of the games that have the best perceived value in the long term, may not be readily apparent after just a few days or weeks of gameplay. I continue to play plenty of games based on their skillfully honed multiplayer or more open-ended modes, titles like Advance Wars, Diablo II, Half-Life's various multiplayer mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, and StarCraft. Another Xbox game, Halo 2, was most widely well received not for its brief and (some say) disappointing single-player campaign, but for its strong multiplayer modes—the ratio of single-player to multiplayer enjoyment for most is heavily skewed toward the latter.

However, the precedent has been set by many of these games that a solid single-player mode, while not the most memorable feature, is still included. With Shadowrun at a new-gen premium price of $60 (or $50 for the Windows Vista version) many gamers will expect the precedent to be followed.

Unfortunately, most game reviews don't have an accommodation for publishing executive pricing blunders. Perhaps they should be held accountable for any failure at long term success FASA's shooter will have. I won't hold my breath.

What do you think? Are games unfairly scored on a scale related to their price point? Have any Shadowrun players out there felt that they've already "justified" their $60 purchases? Michael McWhertor

KOXM Episode 70 [OXM Podcast]

The preview provides further details on the game's classes—their skills, weapons and attributes—as well as touching on the specifics of Valve's new dynamic map system. The only bad news to come out of the preview is that Team Fortress 2 will ship with an anemic map count. Only six maps will be available at launch, making even Shadowrun look content heavy. Valve's justification for the low map count, that gamers tend to stick to a handful of familiar maps, rings true but still doesn't sit well.

Regardless, this bonus multiplayer game included with the Half-Life 2: Orange Box still looks amazing, with the new screenshots cementing my opinion that TF2 is the best looking game ever. Michael McWhertor

Team Fortress 2 Preview [Shacknews]

Over a game site Next Generation, Tim Rogers has the rundown of this week's Famitsu scores. For the unfamiliar, magazine Famitsu has four editors rate games on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best. Here are the noteworthy mentions:

• Saints Row: 9, 8, 8, 9 Comments include "Gives the player a good sense of freedom" and "It's like GTA, with awesome graphics!"
• Folkssoul AKA (Folk Lore): 8, 9, 8, 8 Comments include that the game handles atmosphere and game play excellently.
• Shadowrun: 7, 7, 7, 7 Comments include "Sense of cooperation in the online mode is excellent".

This Week In Japan [Next-Gen]

If you have been procrastinating about that Halo 3 Beta, you better get a move on. The beta ends today so make sure to get in your last few hours of repeatedly killing new players who don't really know what their doing, thus making the experience completely un-enjoyable for them. But never fear, you can still get your kill on with the new demo of Shadowrun which will be coming to the XBLM just in time to take your mind of the loss of your beloved Halo 3. Sure, it won't be the same but at least it will fill the lonely hours with some good old fashioned gun toting, magic wielding, ass kicking. Flynn De Marco

"We went to E3 with our most neutral environment, which was only meant to be neutral. We didn't have our lighting working right...the characters blended into the background, so we quickly learned our lesson on that and everything we've done is about making the characters come forward. " -Evan Hirsch, Art Director, FASA Studios

When I visited FASA a few months ago for an early look at Shadowrun, I talked for a long time to Art Director Evan Hirsch about E3—and more specifically the royal spanking that the game's graphics design had received at the event. He was clearly humbled by the situation—not just the negative response from fans—but from his own peers in the business.

At the time, Hirsch was retooling characters while testers played a game full of trolls running around in red and blue footie pajamas. Given my long infatuation with footie pajamas, I just had to see how this story turned out. So I set a date to talk more around the game's release. Hirsch and I, along with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman, talked for nearly 45 minutes as I baked in a hot car under Texas sun (a necessity for a quiet interview on the road). Still, I enjoyed the conversation and Hirsch's blunt explanation of Shadowrun's art design.

In other words, yes, this article is long as hell. Yes, Hirsch said a lot of interesting stuff. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures for those too lazy to read.

Characters In Differing Environments: Making them Shootable

"Our characters are effectively a studied signal to noise...The problem is, the more realistic you make [them], if you go with, say, Gears of War, the signal to noise is really hard. That works in a Gears space but it doesn't work in a wicked-fast, twitchy space," Hirsch explained. "We didn't want to make them cartoony, because we know how people thought about that... For me it was about finding that balance point - how do you make it very different and very visible?"

Easy: Profiles, Color Pallet and Lighting (I may have been given the answers.)

Racial profiling may be frowned upon in real life, but it's essential in Shadowrun. Knowing a troll from a dwarf is relatively simple to design, but what about knowing an RNA (corporate) troll from a Lineage (native) troll—just from their profiles? A solution was found through symmetry. The RNA is symmetrical, from the characters to their monolithic environments. Meanwhile, the Lineage assets are equally asymmetrical, breaking the corporate mold, so to speak.

Color Pallets are organized in a similar fashion, with cold tones (blues) denoting RNA and warm tones (reds) denoting Lineage.

"Why'd we go with blue [for RNA]? If we went with green then it's the military in the Tom Clancy games...Why don't we go with brown? Then it's Smokey and the Bandit and the forest service," Hirsch said. "But we had to explore all this, because we wanted them to look like mercenaries. Blue is really the only color that made them look like mercenaries without being the army."

Using lighting, Hirsch and his team solidified the color palletes of both the characters and the maps. Since these environments (in essence) match either red or blue color palletes, lighting clarifies any potential blending issues that may crop, and allow fine tweaking on the "moving target" factor. Note: I just made that term up and have no clue why I put it in quotes.

Ultimately, these decisions combine to a relatively unconscious gaming experience in which a player simply feels like their character does or does not belong on a certain map or alongside a certain team, adding a sense of story and identity to a game that technically has no story other than that in the manual.

Or as Gitelman put it, "whether or not anyone reads the story or not, they know that one's there."

Creating Drama on a Budget

"The biggest challenge of Shadowrun for me - as an art director - was I had 16 characters on screen that could, at any given time, each spawn three characters. Each one of our characters is carrying roughly 65 bones," said Hirsch. "That means I've got 3,072 collision detection calculations potentially in every frame...And I've got 30 bullets a second per character."

So disagreements can become petty slap fights easily.

"John (lead designer) and I had many screaming matches over whether or not I could have weeds in hallways," said Hirsch. "Because if I draw weeds, is that gonna cost him bullets and frames? Everything on that screen costs you something."

Hirsch also gave me the example of rails on stairways. He needed them to invoke a sense of speed, but those working on gameplay could use those resources for any number of other things. In very few cases designers had to compromise hugely to squeeze them in: like by omitting collision detection.

Another price of the online game environment was that the entire map had to be loaded into the 512MB of RAM at all times, since buffering simply isn't an option when you can teleport indoors to outdoors or up 5 stories of a building in a manner of seconds.

To make the game work, Hirsch had to "rob" the RNA level's development time to give the team a longer window to make the complex Lineage and slum levels possible. And by choosing International Style Architecture for the RNA, the art team was able to create a look that wouldn't require painstaking technical compromises at every turn.

"They're a simple form, but they actually, to your eye, don't look like simple extrusions like they normally would in a hallway shooter because these buildings have been around for hundreds of years, you understand that style of architecture...We just add texture and color and lighting to mess with your eye, but that was it."

And Hirsch is right: the ultra-sterile RNA maps are simple without making you feel cheated. The non-RNA levels, as we talked about before, fall back on the property of asymmetry to create identity and tension.

"One of the big goals for me and John was that in the slums maps, you always feel like you're being closed in on, you always feel like you're in a Alfred Hitchcock film."

"All the angles are odd angles, nothing is perfectly linear, everything is off. All The buildings if you look up are coming in over your head more than they're going away. And we do all that on purpose to make you feel more anxious and uncomfortable," Hirsch said. "In the corporate spaces they're much more ordered, and actually you have a different problem that in some cases they're so symmetrical that you get lost."

So What's Missing?
Every developer has things they wanted in a game but just couldn't make happen. Here are Evan Hirsch's top three:

More Effects/Shaders
"The look we came up for the magic like teleport, smoke and resurrect, all had this wonderful unique look. What I wish I could have done more was getting more of a tech look to work on the tech effects... we hired in a new guy who comes from the film industry and wrote his own shaders, and it wasn't until the last month of the project that he figured out how to work it within our engine. The shaders he wrote for something like the minion are just stunning. The minion's hot shit... I really wish we had gotten our head around it much earlier."

Female Elves
"The biggest compromise was the female elves. We had a whole set of female elves that we just loved, but...we agreed that to bring females in we'd need to have them move differently, and we just didn't have the time to get that done. We had the models built and the skeleton built and we just couldn't get it in on our date."

Various 3D Atmospherics
"The last one is, and this was a conscious decision, we had to cut a lot of the real 3D atmospherics that we had in. If you see in the intro video there's a waterfall. That waterfall was actually in the game. It was the waterfall or the minions - guess who won."

Too bad...that waterfall was "hot shit".

The only thing worse than tech support is Shadowrun tech support. I hope Rooster Teeth pump out as many vids for 1800-MAGIC as they have for Red V. Blue. Brian Crecente

1-800-Magic [Rooster Teeth]

Hushed Casket has a great piece up about all of the issues with Games for Windows Live. The service, I think many of us thought, was meant to be as robust and easy to use as the 360 version of Live, but instead it's just sort of an awkward appendage.

Once you're in a game you can use it like you would Live on the 360, but if you're not in the only two games that currently support it, then you're out of luck. There is no desktop application for the service. Worse still, as Hushed Casket points out, a lot of the little things that make Live sparkle on the 360 are completely missing from the Vista version.

You can't download movies or games, you can't use it to listen to music, you can't customize the user interface. The service doesn't even alert you to achievements.

It looks like GFW-Live has a long way to go before they catch up with their 360 counterparts. Brian Crecente

Top ten things that are wrong with Games for Windows - Live [Hushed Casket]

So, I've been playing quite a bit of Shadowrun lately so I can review it. I spent a chunk of time earlier this week playing, before it came out, in rooms peopled entirely by FASA studio developers who took great pleasure in grenading my body around the map.

Something struck me as odd though, right when a match started someone would say: You got the fever? I got the fever. And this would go on as we ran to the relic or toward each other. It seemed odd, but I didn't know what it was about... until now.

Apparently, one of Shadowrun's achievements is the Shadowrun Fever, something you get, I've been told, by tea-bagging someone who already has the fever. That's right, it's an achievement and a venereal disease, but unlike the kind that blinds you or slowly drives you insane this one just awards a batch of points, 25 I suspect.

I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect the only people who currently have the fever are the developers. I'd like to add that I am a great big idiot, because despite playing with them for hours over several days, I never managed to dip my coin purse. Brian Crecente

As I depart the Big Apple (where I've been reporting from all weekend) I leave you with this list of games coming out this week. Mario Party looks like it might be some fun with the addition of the Wii remote mechanic and I'd like to see how the 2d to 3d Crush is for the PSP. Other than that, I can satisfy myself with finishing up Silent Hill 2 which for some reason I decided to haul out of the mothballs. Anyone going to round out a holiday weekend by picking one or two of these up? Flynn De Marco

• Mario Party 8 (WII) It's the video game that's a board game with mini-games.
• Halo 2 (PC)
  Now with less ass.
• Forza Motorsport 2 (X360)
  The Xbox 360 gets it's dose of Forza racing.
• Shadowrun (X360, PC)
  Magic and guns, 360s and PCs join together for a new multiplayer experience
• Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (WII)
  Nintendo brings Mortal Kombat to their console marking the beginning of the Wii bloodletting game parade.
• Crush (PSP)
  It's like Super Paper Mario on the PSP just without the paper or the Mario. The super remains to be seen.
• Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm (PS2)
  A little 2D old school PRG action. I really, really hope this has that silver ball that puts spikes in your brain.
• Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia (X360, PC)
  Fight for control of the suburbs against monster hordes. No, not soccer moms, actual monsters.