Oddly enough, playing the SNES Shadowrun game was what first got me into Shadowrun as a PnP game back then. I played the Snes game maybe a few months after it came out and spent a ridiculous number of hours playing it side-by-side with a friend of mine in early 1994 (I think....). He and I often used to "team-play" RPG style game back then. Whomever hadn't been playing at the time was tasked with reading the manual and trying to think of anything the person play wasn't doing at the time. All interspersed with shouting, drinking and various other distractions. You'd be surprised just how much it can help having another perspective involved that has been along for the ride most/all of the time you've been playing.
That being said, I beat the game without any kind of walkthrough but it did take a ton of saving and reloading when everything went wonky/everyone started dying.
The main thing is, most console game back then didn't give you many hints as to what you had to do and were typically rather merciless with your survivability. Miss one of the Code Words (or whatever the game called them)...go back around, to every area you've been to, talk to each and every person with each and every other Word you've learned in order to find the one you missed. Ugh, that sort of needle-in-a-haystack type search was utter tedious and annoying, but you certainly felt like you accomplished something once you beat the game.
The Sega Shadowrun game, OTOH....egads. Awesome game...but such a task to take on.
