«

Great hints from JeremyB.

I played this when I was about 12 and again a couple of years ago under an emulator. The plot was great, and the original box had a sealed envelope you were only supposed to open after breaking into some guy's office in the game. Sweet

I really enjoyed building up my characters, starting with beating on kids (?!) and working my way up through the thugs and the cocky cops that were always giving me the hairy eyeball. The first time you can defeat a team of bounty hunters: sheer satisfaction. The team recruitment system is very cool as well in this game. You can sign people up in bars, barracks, etc. and the types of people available depend on the locale.

Here's my tip to making the game less of a slog if you want to focus on the (very cool) plot. Some strategic approaches to your team will doom you to having to play every battle by hand, or to counting on hoping that the enemy doesn't concentrate their fire on some weak or slow character.

1. Ditch the main character.
2. Stat priorites: You need to max out agility on everyone so you go first in battle. Crucially important. You need to be able to get medical high enough for the best medkit. The rest is window dressing, really. Oh, and go for younger people with relevant skills (education, agility) over older dudes. Younger characters seem to have higher fixed stat gain limits (physical and skill).
2. You can autorun combat, but also autorun one or more characters during manual combat, or tell them "do what I told you to do last turn". Use this to your advantage.
3. Set up every member of your team with the best medkit (medkit C, if I recall correctly) -- this way, on auto, the character will automatically heal themselves (or a nearby teammate) if you need it. Once you get your team set up, you can basically put everyone on auto all the time until the last boss fight.
4. Specialize in RIFLES. This is because 1) battles go was faster than if you use "duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUHN" auto weapons, and 2) because the best gun in the game (Reaver rifle) is a rifle. This will also let you focus your "learning points" by not wasting them on multiple weapon types.

Also, if I didn't want to grind for cash (medical and hacking school is expensive!) I shamelessly recruited legions of med students and let them wander into friendly fire as per Jeremy's suggestion.

Bottom line: this game is one of my favourites of all time.