The best part of hacking has to be all the panicked angry screaming. Suddenly sensing that they’ve been hacked, victims get desperate and begin to taunt you out of hiding; -“Come out pussy!” one yells. They scatter and try to hide but, it’s almost impossible. Hacks let you pull, taunt, scare and distract them out of hiding. You can even set break room microwave ovens to explode in their face. If the hacking damage persists without pinpointing your location, some go into full hysterics, shrieking and accusing you of being -“A fucking coward bitch…”. They also talk big about the things they’ll enjoy doing to your corpse. It’s a singular pleasure to electrocute them from afar mid-sentence. With a little patience hacking can completely decimate a criminal hideout. I especially like that hacking allows me to gain great wealth and power without wearing any unflattering bullet-proof clothes. As with all things, it’s important to look good.
The gym goon gang called “The Animals” have the most aggressively sexist taunts but Militech and corporate Arasaka police also call me a -“Fucking whore…” countless times. They seem to greatly look forward to ravaging my “pretty” face. When I’m finished and casually looting their intact unconscious corpses, a headshot with a silencer-equipped pistol gives me “headshot” kill points without alerting the NCPD and of course, that much-needed “street cred”. With these “street cred” points I equip better decks. A “legendary” deck has tons of RAM and lets me fry multiple victims at once, which really elevates the shrieking. How “realistic” is the hacking? Not at all. But, as far as amusement goes, this type of science-fiction game hacking is a ton of fun. Judging from the rarity of hack-related trophies like “Christmas Tree Attack” (complete a breach protocol with a minimum of three daemons uploaded) it looks like few players have had the patience to hack exclusively. That’s understandable – it takes patience, defensive sacrifice and glass-canon nerves of steel to devote yourself to maximum hacker damage.
Note: According to forums most Cyberpunk 2077 players use external software to cheat their way to hacker trophies like “Christmas Tree Attack” instead of accomplishing it with in-game skill. It’s difficult to describe the dumbfounded look on my face when I realized that wannabe skids actually cheated this way. They effectively couldn’t pull off the simplistic script kiddy pretend hack of this deliciously silly pretend hacker game. This bit of disappointing game news coincidentally arrived at the end of an exhausting week of real-life log4j revelations and their ensuing patch stupidities. I could only laugh. We’re so fucked, as a civilization and as a species, so thoroughly lazy, stupid and fucked – it’s really quite hilarious.
