Cyberpunk

I’m in a cyberpunk state of mind these days.

What mostly kickstarted it was me finally getting my copy of the Android: Netrunner core set, something I had been excitedly waiting on for months. An update of the classic collectible card gamefrom the nineties, and designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, it pits a “runner” against” a “corp,” in a battle that sees the corporation trying to protect its assets from hacking intrusions. The game is fantastic, and I’ve had a blast playing so far.

My cyberpunk journeys are also currently enhanced by Deux Ex: Human Revolution on the Xbox 360. I picked up the game a couple of months ago — I’ve been getting a lot of games this year on Play-Asiathrough their weekly sales, getting great deals (I pretty much wait until a game is $20 or less), which has given me a bit of a backlog — and have finally gotten around to playing it. I’m only a few hours in, but I’m head-over-heels in love with this game right now. I love the setting, the way the game offers up multiple paths to your objectives, and the cool cybernetic upgrades I can unlock for my character.

And if that wasn’t enough, I’m also considering starting a cyberpunk-related RPG campaign — and here, I’m talking about an old-school pen-and-paper RPG. At first I was considering playing theCyberpunk 2020 game, which I had always been interested in but never played, but a friend of mine — Jon Swanson, who has been my Netrunner adversary, and who will be participating in the campaign — brought up the idea of playing a new game called Eclipse Phase, and from what I’ve read so far, I’m currently leaning towards that. It’s also interesting to note that Eclipse Phase is released under a Creative Commons license, and although you can purchase print editions or PDFs, you can alsodownload all of the manuals for free.

Jack in, begin transfer.