Based on the cyberpunk novel by William Gibson. In a grimy future, you play Case, a cyberspace cowboy who finds himself broke in Chiba City. Find yourself a laptop and the right software for it so you can hack into databases around the city to regain your access to cyberspace. Buy and upgrade brain implant chips to augment your computer skills, and sell your body parts to afford new technologies. When you get to cyberspace, you'll take on the nasty AIs that guard the most important databases. Within all this information is the bizarre secret of this world of inbred corporations.

Although initially there are not many locations for you to visit in the game, there is a great deal to find out and cyberspace locations ("WELLs") you can visit. For instance, you have a special connector attached to your head that allows you to insert silicon chips. These chips contain various ?skills? which will enable you to achieve certain objectives that would otherwise remain beyond your grasp. The skills, which include subjects like Psychanalysis, Sophistry, Evasion and even Cop talk, can also be upgraded, so while you might have the Cryptology skill chip, it may not decipher an encrypted code word until you find a way of upgrading it to version 2.0 or even 3.0. You will generally acquire skills and upgrades by talking to other characters within the game, and this brings us to the game's weakness: the specificity of its parser. Neuromancer unfortunately falls into the guess- the-word category, particularly when you're presented with the option to ask a character, ?WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT .................?. The word you type in may be one of several descriptions for a particular person or organization, and the parser will not accept anything less than the exact word the designer had in mind. It can be misleading because if your word isn`t exactly what is required, you`ll get a, ?I DON`T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT.? type reply, which can throw you off track, when infact you need to keep hammering away with every variation of the name you can think of.

A notepad is absolutely essential for playing Neuromancer, as there is a lot of information and WELL addresses to keep track of. Neuromancer is undoubtedly the best "hacking" game in existence, as the thrill of hacking into forbidden sites, editing databases to further your cause, and generally finding things out is exhilarating (and harmless, as opposed to real life ). Overall, no cyberpunk fan should pass up this overlooked classic. Two thumbs up!