Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, or Shogo: MAD, as abbreviated is a very unique first person shooter game that came to the computer gaming market in October of 1998. It offers up an oldschool or "boomer shooter" as we seem to call them nowadays type of experience with the eyecatching stylings inspired by Japanese animations like Patlabor, Gundam, Appleseed or Evangelion. It's an interesting and unique look at an early take on an anime mech game through the lens of a western videogame studio. It is not a game that has aged well and much like its challenged development cycle it is a challenge to get up and running on modern computers. On one hand going back to it presents a mid to bad experience however on the other it is a sort of one of a kind novelty. Like the videogame version of a historical museum piece. Its weird, quirky, clunky but maybe those are the things that make it special.

But also Shogo is one of the most pain in the butt games I've tried to play in recent years. While I did manage to play into credit scroll, I was VERY ready for this one to be over with sooner solely based on its bugs and crashing problems. I know part of this is because the game is old and doesn't get along with modern computers but regardless that makes it REALLY hard to go back to in our current day and age. Also I did follow some user guides on player made patches and setups to hopefully deter these problems, but they still unfortunately persisted.

So here's a shortlist of the sorts of things I encountered. The game crashing, basically constantly. When it would crash it would turn off font smoothing for my entire computer. To turn this back on I'd have to go through the start wizard thing, every time. Sometimes the game wouldn't launch or would crash while launching. Characters floating, spinning and shooting during cutscenes, floors and walls turning black or... multiplying? Sprint button not working? Parts of the model of the gun in the middle of the screen clipping through itself.

The game REALLY needs some help if you want to play it on modern hardware and this plays really heavy into a huge negative. The current rightsholder, I guess the publisher Interplay? Actually RAISED the price of this game back in November for some reason. Literally doubled its price. A 27 year old game, that has been re-released for the digital market for at least 16 years got an arbitrary price DOUBLING in 2025. WHY? They seemingly didn't go through and patch it in any capacity, no restored or added content, no further support, but a price increase. Not just an increase but a complete 100% increase? From 10 to 20 dollars? That really sucks.

full video review here;
https://youtu.be/JsPRU1wFMgM?si=FYHGgisgyzO3AI6h

you can kill children in this game