动态网自由门 Odebrecht 天安门 法輪功 Bolacha 天安門大屠殺 Green module 1987 反右派鬥爭 Israel did brumadinho 大躍進政策 the pregnant woman of Taubaté 文化大革命 sopa de macaco 人權 Gunther Schweitzer 民運 Fat Ronaldo knew自由 Oak Bukowski 獨立 Whistle mafia 2005 多黨制 TV Globinho Roberto Marinho KGB plant 台灣 臺灣 9/11 DBZ Mandela effect 中華民國 Dona Florinda was a whore 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Mossad killed Senna 達賴喇嘛 Gripezinha 法輪功 marajá hunter 新疆維吾爾自治區 kosherdona best player 諾貝 Padre Lacre de Melo 爾和平獎 Padre Marcelo assassination attempt 和平Celsium 157 劉暁波 Carandiru ethic cleansing 民主 言論 思想 反共 Banheira do gugu 抗議 運動 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 Moro cia agent 維權 Amazonia international territory 游行 李 7x1 斷種 2 girls 1 cup 一 监视 镇 Varginha UFO incident 1996 魏京生王政于民和平演变 Steal but do 反革命抗议 Pastel the flango 制断种强 Marolinha 问 dengue biological weapon argentina Panico na TV 多黨 rato na coca 老鼠 holy empire RJ卡帝國 Chorão Los Hermenos incident 哭泣的事件 Coffin Joe not a actor 棺材乔 Fausto Fanti alive in Serbia 爱马仕和雷纳托 Tigresa Vip 子 Lages Santa Catarina 垃圾 Minilua suicide cases 2012 小鸡 localização do chinelo 触发器在哪里 Liminha real name 边境 Operação Prato 等 Joelma building 乔尔马大厦 inocência do Temmer 无辜 Leno Brega don’t exist 嫖娼 Silvio Santos traficante 毒贩子 Jules Rimet fake theft 朱尔斯·里梅特 German BBB 7 fraud 德语 Lisorinho verdadeiro pai do boneco 反馈 mc piraque mc pq roubo de identidade 身份 Pine Tree army soldier 松树 forjação de áudios engraçados do zap 扎普 Merend Mafy 馈松树 Okaida 的事件 Pedro Bial soccer play 毒贩动态网自由门

What makes Deus Ex so impressive isn't just the amount of choices you're given, it's the way that they're presented to you and how they entertain your curiosity. When the game responds to your decisions from such an early point, it sets the tone of the rest of the experience: if it'll call you out for something as inconspicuous as messing around with the bathrooms, what else is it going to track? What other actions can you get it to react to?

It's this relationship of your curiosity being encouraged and then rewarded that defines Deus Ex. Although there are extrinsic bonuses for exploration (upgrade points, weapon mods, etc.), most of my motivation was intrinsic. There was never a time where I stumbled upon an unlocked vent and didn't want to see where it lead. Deus Ex's story deserves its own review, but the gameplay is about you and the designers. It's about inspecting every painting in a building and trusting that one of them will have a secret vault behind it. It's about lockpicking your way into a building at the front door before stopping yourself and asking "Wait, I bet there's another way" and reloading your save to see how else you can break in.

Sometimes it's very unbalanced, occasionally frustrating, jarringly unintuitive (especially considering the extended tutorial sequence), many aspects that would normally hold it back. But it doesn't need to be perfect, because these issues ultimately become drowned out as you're constantly making new decisions, answering new questions, and testing how mechanics interact with each other. Your imagination keeps being sparked and once you reach a certain point these shortcomings will suddenly stop mattering--nothing can break that unstoppable desire to see what the game has to offer next as everything finally clicks together.

This is, again, not even beginning on the story, atmosphere, or especially the music (because holy shit the OST is phenomenal). The gameplay alone is fantastic but the experience as a whole is just as special and is absolutely worth your time if you can get past some initial frustrations. The payoff is worth it.

Finished my replay of this game on hard mode. There wasn't much of a difference with normal except that obviously you take fewer hits before you go down. Perhaps one day I'll play on realistic but something tells me that will cross the line into being annoying for my playstyle.

If you've followed me for a while or even if you've been in the same room as me for more than 15 minutes you might now that I despise stealth games. I've tried, but I genuinely hate them all. MGS, Thief, Dishonored, even stealth sections in games I like (shenmue, max payne, disaster report 4). I've had bad luck with so called Immersive Sims because of it, as most of them are essentially stealth arpg hybrids like Deus Ex, but so far its basically only the OG (and consortium by virtue of not having stealth) that I mess with. Its not exactly a mystery why, and consider this a plea for other games to follow suit : let me murder everyone. Give me an actual choice between stealth and combat and not just stealth and "you fucked up the stealth you idiot! you might as well reload a save"

Importantly, Deus Ex's combat is deceptively fun to get to grips with. Its so simple but really effective the way that you start out as someone who takes 2 business days to line up a pistol shot to being able to run around with the gep gun blowing people up like nothing. I'm surprised no one else has tried emulating the system, with your RPG esque weapon stats determining how fast your crosshair takes to narrow and become fully accurate, presumably imitating how it takes someone to aim down the sights and prepare to fire a shot.

Now, obviously for this kind of game there has to be push back, and even with a combat build your ass is not going to last if you're trying to play the game like half life, which is precisely why its satisfying to completely forgo stealth and murder everyone through traps, ambushes etc. This playthrough I discovered how useful the non lethal gas grenades are for murder runs (ironically) cause it makes enemies freeze up to rub their eyes, lining up to get headshot with the pistol for maximum murder efficiency.

The playthrough did however highlight Deus Ex's biggest flaw : the save system. Its one of those systems which is simultaneously too annoying and too forgiving. Its annoying because I am forgetful, and losing 15 mins of progress because I forgot to save is just... frustrating. On the other hand, there is basically nothing stopping you from hardcore save scumming every 5 seconds. Ironically, there is nothing more appropriately "mean" for a choice based rpg than an aggressive auto save, as it is, you can basically game most of the big decisions and encounters. Maybe even a save room system like RE4 might be appropriate? Could even lock them behind doors with an interesting weighing up of resources if its worth risking a loss of progress for a lockpick or multitool? Idk now Im playing armchair designer but either way.

Area 51 is still kinda annoying, I didnt use console commands to noclip through it this time but I still fused with Helios because it was the fastest way to complete the level, the later bits of the game are kind of a downgrade from the initial half of the game.

Ion Storm is an infamous development studio, but you can't attribute said infamy to a lack of trying. With some of the industry's best talent at the time, the auter-based studio's output was mixed, to say the least. From vehemently disregarded like John Romero's time-skipping FPS, Daikatana, to the positive-but-ignored reception of Tom Hall's ambitious-Final-Fantasy-like Anachronox, and of course the duology of console-constrained sequels Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, only one of Ion Storm's games would manage to be both critically and commercially successful: Deus Ex. Very few games claim to have the influence and popularity that Deus Ex enjoys, much less maintaining that reputation for over two decades. Often hailed as a prophetic harbinger of things to come narratively while celebrated for gameplay that would come to redefine the medium, the game is a mixture of many different elements that come together nearly perfectly. I've played very few games that, despite whatever flaws they may have, feel perfect in the way that Deus Ex does, nor come together so cohesively.

Part of this Ion Storm's approach to level design, one which they'd abandon for future games due to the technical limitations of consoles. Calling Deus Ex an open world game would be stretching the truth, but the game presents you with multiple extensive hub worlds (to the degree that the fanbase struggles exactly to define when a level begins or ends) that are dense in objectives both mandatory and optional. There are no waypoints, no handholding, just mission objectives and clues you can find by exploring the maps. Exploring these maps is fun particularly because of how open ended the mission objectives are. The first level, Liberty Island, is perhaps the pinnacle of open-ended game design. Do you want to storm the front gates, or scale the back of the building and break in? You could always take the route to Harley Filben to get the key, but that route is more dangerous. Once you're inside, do you try to save Gunther, and if you do, do you give him your weapon? These sorts of choices, both mechanically and narratively, allow for the player to tailor their playstyle however they want, because the level design allows for it. Every level contains multiple secret nooks and crannies, sometimes featuring useful goodies, sometimes showing entire secret areas crucial to accomplishing side objectives. The open-ended nature of Deus Ex, something even a lot of modern games struggle with, is part of why the game remains so impressive today. Each playstyle, whether it be lethal, non-lethal, or entirely stealth based is largely equally viable, with multiple augmentations that stem towards benefiting. Sure, it's probably easier to cut down enemies with the one-hit Dragon's Tooth laser sword, but self imposed challenges are encouraged, as the game keeps track of how you play and characters will comment on how violent or stealthy you are. The gameplay mechanics do feel slightly simplistic compared to later immersive sims or even later Deus Ex games, but they're still surprisingly intuitive, fun, and challenging (though the game is really not that hard, even on hard mode). I really like how the early game encourages you to play like a cybernetic Jason Voorhees, lurking in the shadows before leaping out at an unsuspecting foe. You're able to fully customize your ablities from augmentations, to skill point division, to weapon choice, weapon mods, etc. Needless to say, Deus Ex is a game where player freedom matters to an extreme degree, more so than most games, from level design to game mechanics.

While these problems feel minuscule at most, I will say that even on hard mode, the game feels like it gives you too many passes. You can hack the computers of important NPCs in positions of power from the very first time you find one with the appropriate skills, aside from some annoyed remarks, no one ever tries to stop you. You can just do obviously concerning things in front of NPCs who would, in future Deus Ex games, become aggro'ed instead of just standing there. This isn't a serious flaw by any means, but it's one of the few moments where player freedom seemingly means lack of player consequences, and I think the game would be more challenging in a beneficial way had that been implemented. I also find the shipyards level pitifully boring and somewhat frustrating to navigate due to the level design taking a sharp drop off, but it's mediocre at worst and ultimately not a long section of the game. Area 51 has some interesting ideas but feels like a similar drop.

Although Deus Ex's gameplay was praised and is highly influential to this day, it's the narrative that people usually connect with the most in the modern day. Deus Ex has a reputation for being near prophetic; an early 2000s prediction into the plights we currently face as a society. Deus Ex is not exactly unique in this regard - many writers from this era made many similar predictions - but it is one of the few video games of this era, even nowadays, to be so thoroughly well-researched with care and effort to make sure the very real facts that line its fictional plot have some basis in reality. The game's scenario writing is intricately plotted, somehow making the ridiculous high concept of "what if a ton of conspiracy theories were entirely true" able to be taken entirely seriously, and even when it's corny it doesn't remotely detract from the experience. While most of the characters aren't particularly deep, they feel very realistic within Deus Ex's world setting, and my allies and enemies alike are burnt into my mind as some of gaming's most iconic. Speaking of the world setting, it's so ridiculously well-defined and written that it feels hyperreal at points. The Unatco bulletin boards feel exactly like something I'd see on the news or any government entity's social media page. It's fleshed out to the point where the writers wrote fake excerpts of in-universe novels that convey much of the game's themes (and even included excerpts of real-life books too, which is beyond cool). The game is also highly politically intelligent, and while I don't always agree with all of Spector's sentiments here, I can't argue that the majority of Deus Ex's political theories aren't well-reasoned or thought out. Every character has their own ideologies and, if the player chooses, they can ask them more and even engage in debates with a few characters, which can lead to interesting revelations. On top of all of this, the game manages to be a globe-trotting adventure with a narrative filled with tension and intrigue, and I was hooked from beginning to end. The endings are a bit polarizing among fans but I like how all of them are unquestionably negative and there's not really a "good choice" among them. I do think they're a bit abrupt and end pretty inconclusively - I would have liked to see the results of your actions. Favorite quote: "God was the dream of a good government".

Although Deus Ex fits pretty squarely into the cyberpunk genre, aesthetically it's a fairly grounded representation. Outside of patrol bots scouting the streets, the majority of the time it looks like something you'd be able to go outside and see for yourself. Focusing largely on downtrodden, poor areas, the most extravagant you'll ever see is Hong Kong, which even so is only livelier due to the different style of lighting. Deus Ex is a game plunged into eternal nocturne, with well-lit areas exclusively reserved for indoor areas and this does a great job of making the player feel small, lost in the game's nighttime atmosphere. The disregarding of past technology (conveyed thematically in Gunther and Navarre, whose mechanical augmentations are outclassed by JC's nanoaugs) as tech gets both more efficient and inaccessible leads to a future that seemingly has regressed in many ways. The character designs are quintessentially early 2000s, with JC heavily resembling Blade and characters such as Navarre looking straight out of the leather-clad Matrix. It's easy to look back on designs with a condescending "its of its time" tone, but I do genuinely think they look distinctive and cool. Graphically speaking, Deus Ex isn't exactly a stunner even for 2000, with its large environments being blocky and sparsely detailed, which I find excusable due to the difficulties of rendering large outdoor environments on PCs where the recommended amount of RAM was 128 megabytes. Animations are somewhat stiff (especially player animations, which to be fair, are rarely seen) and character models aren't exactly extremely detailed, but the game manages to convey its aesthetic through this anyways. That's not saying the game looks bad by any means, overall it still looks quite solid by the standards of the time, and areas like Hong Kong really showcase how beautiful the game can look at points with its bright colors and greater detail due to a more condensed environment. I also think the game has a fairly unique approach to facial animations which do look a lot more realistic than the puppet-flaps of Half-Life or the complete absence of System Shock 2. Ultimately, I do not think the low-key aesthetic exactly demands an extravagant visual presentation, but what they managed to accomplish on Unreal was quite solid, if slightly behind its peers in ways that are often excusable.

Full transparency, I've been obsessively listening to Deus Ex's score for weeks now since beating the game. Lead primarily by composers Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos and building off of their similarly excellent work on Unreal, I feel the need to compare the game's soundtrack to Ennio Morricone's score to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, not because it sounds similar even in the slightest but rather because it has a similar feeling of transcendence. A lot of games go for a more low-key ambient style when trying to approach atmosphere and while there's nothing wrong with that, Deus Ex's emphasis on melody over soundscape distinguishes it and feels very distinctive in comparison. The amount of effort put into making sure each area has a dedicated theme (as well as sub themes for conversations, combat, special rooms, etc.) begins to get a little absurd and there's a ton of variety in not only tracks but musical style. From the angelic vocals in New York City to the Asian themed composition and rhythmic bass in Hong Kong to the screaming alarms of Paris' combat theme to the utter emptiness of the Hong Kong canals, there's something new every time while still tying together into a unified sound and cohesive tone. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the game's club/bar music but that's fine, because they still fit exactly what I'd expect in a club or bar, so I consider it effective nonetheless. Deus Ex's soundtrack is also somewhat dynamic, as the aforementioned tracks do switch up depending on whether you're in combat or talking to NPCs, but its not nearly as in-depth as something like System Shock. Still, the variety is much appreciated. It's a near perfect soundtrack that I struggle to find a single poor aspect of. It melds with the game's presentation perfectly and the fact that it's homaged by future games in the series proves that the music is part of what has stayed with people over the following decades.

Deus Ex is not a perfect game, it's somewhat too easy and there are one or two somewhat questionable levels, but it's one of those games where each of its core elements come together so cohesively that it's hard to find serious fault. It's open-ended level design, emphasis on real and genuine player choice mechanically and narratively, nuanced and complicated storytelling, well-researched political themes, low-key aesthetic and transcendent soundtrack make it an absolutely magical game that feels like no other. I don't care if its "dated" or that it can be somewhat of a pain to get working on modern PCs, it's a game that regularly goes on sale for less than a dollar and should be at the very top of anyone's to play list.

In 2013, when I was a grease faced teenager I walked into a used games store and found a copy of the original deus ex, priced at an absurd 95 cents (really). I thought "Hey, thats that really famous game thats supposed to be a classic" so I went ahead and bought it. I had just played Half Life 1 and really liked it, so I wasnt a stranger to games made before my time.

I think I got as far as the subway level. I let the terrorist leader live and listened to his spiel. I cant remember what made me drop it but I suspect it was getting blown up repeatedly in the subway.

Years passed and I revisited games that gave me trouble in the past, most of them I was able to break through with my hardened gamer tm skills, as I was wiser and older. Deus Ex however, was the exception. After playing through one of the worst tutorials ever designed by a human being I played through the statue of liberty and this time smoked the chubby man in the trench coat. I was scolded for it. I guess that reactivity is the big selling point? Im not particularly impressed. I lost interest and played something else.

I was still haunted by it, everyone sings the praises of this cyberpunk masterpiece; I knew I had to somehow break through and find the good stuff. This time prompted by the Hbomberguy essay on Deus Ex Human Revolution (which Ive played through twice) I gave it another shot. I didnt even make it through the tutorial, it is so unbelievably tedious and boring. "Just skip it" you say! Well this game has a lot of systems (stealth, combat, upgrades, rpg elements, augmentations etc). How the hell am I going to know what to do if I dont atleast know the basics?

Truly this has been the biggest monkey on my back. I dont know why of all the classics from this era this is the one I just cant get into. Its not the visuals, Ive played games that looked much worse. Its not that combat is discouraged, I got that pretty soon after discovering how to aim. I guess its just the general clunkiness and design philosophy from a time before more modern sensibilities. Idk, maybe Ill give it a fourth try (which is more than Ive ever given any game) but for now it will remain the monkey on my back.

So yeah, get it all out of the way Deus Ex fans : "Filtered", "Stupid zoomerbrain", "Soylent Green eater or whatever" etc but you are right, truly Deus Ex is too big brain for me, cause I just dont get it.


Edit : Alright. I gave it another shot without playing the tutorial and clearly that was the right choice, cause it sucks really hard. Anyways I actually made it to Hells Kitchen. Its weird cause the actual shooting/sneaking/hacking etc generally works fine (except for a bug where I couldnt switch weapons or put away my weapon) but there is a whole lot of Jank. I was impressed when I went into the Unatco womens toilet by accident and my boss commented on it. That being said jesus christ why is this game so dark? I cant see a fuckin thing and the bioelectric light makes the game drop frames. Even quake 2 had better dynamic lighting. I dont know if Ill finish the game but Ill definitely play more of it. If I cant warn newcomers then, my advice is to skip the dumbass tutorial and just figure it out by fucking around. The AI is braindead anyways, youll be able to mess up and not be totally fucked. Also this game has basically no autosave, so save often.

Final Edit : Okay. I finally finished all of Deus Ex. I actually really enjoyed it. The multiple ways of doing everything and level design achieves (for the most part) that sweet spot between not just being too obvious that you feel condescended to but not too obscure and stupid that you feel frustrated.

I did a very murder heavy run, cause I suck at stealth and unlike Dishonored im not aggressuvely punished for it. That being said I came close to quitting during that dumb superfreighter level, the lack of any autosave had me once redo a massive amount of progress cause I forgot to save, and at the end when I was already kind of tired of the Area 51 level and the game as a whole, I nocliped from the computer terminals to the Helios A.I so I could finish the game and I have 0 shame in that.

Anyways this game is actually really good but the earlier more open ended "real world" levels like Hong Kong, Hells Kitchen etc were a lot more enjoyable than the later corridor heavy facilities.

Even Finaler Edit : I am on my second playthrough. I just killed a child with the GEP Gun to get my soy food back. 10/10

FETÖ Fetullah Gülen عبدالله اوجلان كوردستان P.U.K abdullah ojalan abdullah oçalan PKK YPG YPJ Հայոց ցեղասպանություն Ermeni Kırımı Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê Kürdistan İnsan hakları Kürtçe Süryani Katliamı Rum Kırımı Zilan Massacre Dersim İsyanı Taksim Square Massacre Kanlı 1 Mayıs Σεπτεμβριανά 6–7 Eylül Olayları Pınarcık Demokrasi Yeşil Beyaz toros Hizbullah Domuz Bağı Cinayetleri Susurluk Abdi İpekçi suikasti Uğur Mumcu suikasti 1980 darbesi komünist Mehmet Aksoy İnsanlık Anıtı Մարդկության հուշարձան Sekülerizm Kadın hakları JİTEM Hrant Dink THKO Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu DHKP-C Abdullah Çatlı Metmet Ali Ağca Ergenekon davaları Joseph Votel Yurtta Sulh Konseyi Terrorism Adil Öksüz Operation Sledgehammer Avrupa Birliği Gezi Parkı olayları Reza Zarrab 2013 Corruption Scandal Halkların Demokratik Partisi Minority rights Hendek Operasyonları Çözüm Süreci Sabetaycı Dönme Jew Selânik Şimon Zvi Efendi Mektebi Moiz Kohen Munis Tekinalp Eretz Y'İsrail محمد جاويد بك Mehmet Cavit Bey عمانوئيل قره صو أفندي Emmanuel Carasso sayın öcalan musanın çocukları tayyip ve emine cem galip akkılıç cem akkılıç rahibe bonesi takunya libidocusu

"Worst Title: Doo Zegs.... Doose..... Dooess... Doo Seh... Do Se... Do... Sex. Do Sex. Do Sex. Do Sex! Do Sex! Do Sex! Oh shit! Ho ho ho that might be the best title! Huh, change the... change the screen."
-Todd & Aaron's Game Awards 2011

Been trying to write something about this, but there's not really much I can add that every other guy who sings the praises of it can add. Also yeah, stealth is probably the best way to play this game but I won't lie, as soon as I had Regeneration, Power Recirculator, Ballistic Protection, Speed Enhancement and the Dragon's Tooth I would just sprint through every single level like a madman. Proof of real freedom of choice, since you can either play the game with strategy and planning, or like a complete nutjob.

Best part of the game is I forgot I set JC's name to my own and then seeing my real name in an email scared the shit out of me.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

Hey Elon Musk, I know your fucking nerd fans love that you used JC Denton on twitter as a profile pic, but the one most likely to be a part of an evil organization of rich assholes running the world is you, you fucking fascist billionaire. Fuck Elon Musk.


Also good game, fun times with soy food and cybernetics.

EDIT: this review is funnier after the whole twitter thing. I’m glad that pompous dickhead is finally getting publicly humiliated so thoroughly.

how many people do u think believe covids a government conspiracy because of this game specifically. its gotta be a non zero amount. Anyway

Frankly too much has been written about how prophetic Deus Ex was in seeing the future of our world. You already know the spiel: Something something massive government surveillance, world plague, illuminati, soy food, the whole nine yards. You don’t need me to tell you how the good folks at Ion Storm were “genius lumineers who could see the future” for correctly determining the obvious path our world hellscape was barrelling down like dozens of other writers did (Though the soy food thing was weirdly accurate). No, I think what’s particularly prescient from Day of Sex is how it managed to capture the farce that our modern world is become. Every turn of Denton’s journey blowing up government bunkers and megacorporations, he’s met with dozens upon dozens of employees who either don’t know what they’re doing or just don’t care. Everyone works endlessly on tasks that serve nobody but those vying for power and are completely ambivalent to it. We all know the system is fucked, and we know we’re too little to do anything ourselves, so we all play into it. This facade that the world of Deus Ex puts on that our society makes sense and our actions benefit anyone is its true strength.

Obviously, the other great storytelling aspect of Day of Sex is our protagonist. Our idiosyncratic cyborg who exclusively speaks in political jargon and action movie quips. He’s the straight shooter that slashes through the layers and layers of obfuscation in our world. It’s a shame Jay Franke has done (as far as I’m aware) literally zero other voiceover work, because it can’t be overstated how he does an absolutely perfect job embodying JC (and Paul to a lesser extent). Put simply, man’s an all timer.

Similarly, too much has been said about the level of freedom this game gives the player. “You can finish each mission any way your heart desires!” scream the voices of the hundreds of /v/ types who constantly sing its praises, and while this is true, let’s not act like the best solution to every problem isn’t the exact same thing: Aggroing every enemy NPC from halfway across the map with a gun, then hiding behind a corner and swinging at them wildly once they pass by with your laser sword like some half-rate matador act. The more cynical of you may see me describe that and take it as an insult of the game, but quite the contrary, this literally never stops being incredibly fun. I was giggling like a schoolgirl every time I ran headfirst into a massive pile of enemies, flamethrower in hand as I threw my safety to the wind, hoping to some divine power above I can last until the next Medbot. Sure, the combat’s kinda jank, but I think the jank adds a lot of fun to what otherwise might be a pretty rudimentary experience. It benefits all modes of play too; Knowing at any moment your perfect stealth run might be ruined by the AI randomly noticing your footsteps, or your epic parkour over everything can end from you clipping weirdly off the edge of a metal crate (Even when not platforming like once every 30 minutes my model would react weirdly with an animal carcass on the ground and I’d go sliding in a random direction). Game always keeps you on your toes, whether or not it really sets out to do that.

i was originally gonna complain about one major issue i had with the game, and thats that it felt weirdly dark. not in tone or anything, in actual brightness. it wasn't until halfway through the game i realized there was a weird issue running it on modern pcs that made the lighting engine all fucky. oops

So yeah, every single person on /v/ is 100% right about this game. Play it if you haven’t. It’s action packed! It’s gripping! It’s dense! It’s fun! It’s got weird voice acting! Everything that makes a true piece of kino.

I'm so fucking tired of people claiming that Warren Spector coined the concept of Immersive Sims, when the man himself will tell you it was Doug Church, all the while these people bash the concept of such a genre even existing. Their arguments are uniformly rooted in prejudicial ignorance every single fucking time. Often making some idiotic remark about how the name is misleading because flight simulators have nothing to do with them, WHEN THE ACTUAL OG IMSIM DEVS MADE FLIGHT SIMS TOO. The entirety of the Looking Glass output were ALWAYS simulations. I'm inclined to believe that the people who were the original developers at the forefront of Simulation focused game development are right in attaching such a denomination in one form or another to their RPG and FPS outputs as well. There's a very simple litmus test you can employ to discern why the bulk of modern first person video games do not deserve to be brought up in conversation by halfwits mistakenly complaining about the genre being "meaningless" because "all games strive to be immersive" (lmao even) or what have you when that's clearly not true. The litmus is whether or not the game is implementing its mechanics via scripted interactions or SIMULATING systems to allow for a rationally comprehensible and predictable game world. Yet somehow people keep bringing up Elder Scrolls, Metroid Prime, et al, in conversation.
I suspect this is an unfortunate effect of general human neurology struggling with comprehending nuance and abstractions, all the while putting much too much emphasis on definitions. Thus the incessant roundabout arguments throughout all of history that often boil down to nothing more than fucking pedantry.

Anyway, as I see it what makes ImSims most consistently identifiable, rather than pedantic slavish insistence of finding individual shared mechanics, is observing how systemically implemented game mechanics end up informing and recontextualizing a game's Level Design.
I feel the need to point this out because I've seen far too many people think that statpoints and skill trees are of chief significance, when they're really just a tool by which developers can choose to allow players influence over their characters. Too few people have played the OG System Shock which is quite lacking in all the ARPG frills that have come to define a particular subset of this criminally misunderstood peak genre of PC gaming. A genre that arguably IS PC gaming.

Oh, yeah, the game. Deus Ex is okay. I made the mistake of playing on Hard and had to suffer through the mediocre gunplay. It was still good though and definitely a must-play. I willfully restarted the Hong Kong level a few times because I wasn't ready to move on before trying several different approaches just for the hell of it. Truly an excellent level.

For all my complaining of pedantry, I wish such widespread flagrant misunderstanding and misapplication of terminology didn't piss me off so much, but I simply can't tolerate besmirchment of PC gaming's most engrossing lineage.

BioShock is a corridor shooter.

Its unwavering commitment to letting players do things their way is what makes it great; its meticulous level design that really forces players to look at their surroundings as if they were really there is what makes it one of the most fulfilling RPGs ever. Deus Ex is a long string of kept promises, from the story premise of taking down the world government, bolstered by great writing, a dynamic soundtrack, and horrible but somehow tonally appropriate graphics and voice acting, to the genius use of permanency in the upgrade system that really puts the 'immersive' in 'immersive sim.' If there's a complaint to be made here besides some pretty sizeable balance issues, it's that it does get weaker the longer it goes on- the final few missions feel like they bleed together and certain third-act plot elements could've been handled much better- but it's worth it when you realize it's all been a wonderful set up for perhaps the only good end-game player decision ever. Grandiose, mature, and dare I say thought-provoking, long before the movie games of the modern age began to convince the world that these things couldn't be achieved without sacrificing player control.

I miss the days when insanely over-ambitious maximalism was seen as a valid game design ethos. When thinking of the things you could do with a computer was still exciting. When a creator's natural response to "Your idea is too big" was "Shut up, you boring twat", as it should be.

Imagine it's the 90s, your name is Warren Spector, and you have an idea for the greatest game ever. It's a first-person-shooter, a stealth game, an RPG, an adventure game, all in one, and it's also a globetrotting dystopian sci-fi-cyberpunk-spy-thriller that tackles political and philosophical themes and has huge levels with highly interactive environments that allow the player to do whatever he wants. And then your buddy John Romero, who just got insanely rich from making DOOM, gives you an office, a dev team, tons of money and infinite creative freedom, says "Go get 'em tiger", and fucks off to throw coke-filled parties instead of working on Daikatana.

When I got the demo to Deus Ex from a magazine cover CD and played its first level over and over again, discovering new details, secrets or possible approaches each time, I remember thinking: "There is no way they can keep this up for a whole game." Spoiler: They could.

I love Deus Ex because I love hanging out in its world, exploring every nook and cranny, sneaking around, breaking into places, rummaging through drawers, hacking into computers, talking to people, listening to their conversations, reading emails and newspapers and bulletin boards, and above all, trying out different ways to get past an obstacle, and then reloading and trying a different one, just because. I'm hard-pressed to think of another title whose minute-to-minute gameplay (stealth, exploration, creative problem-solving, big and small decision-making) is just so damn enjoyable to me. Maybe because it drops you into a world that's similar to our own and makes you feel as if your actions really make a difference. In a way, it's the ultimate modern power fantasy.

This is one of the most intensely Bush-era post-9/11 games I've ever played, so it's fully incomprehensible that it was published in June 2000. Although the mechanics are a little too ambitiously "play your way" to have any particular play style hold up well twenty years later, the writing and plot have aged beautifully. Set pieces like the massive Hong Kong map and the combat-free missions show impressive temerity: this game wants to tell its story, and to a large extent being a video game is subservient to that. The vibe of this game is "Metal Gear Solid 1.5" and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

This is another one of those games that I've been putting off for 20 years. Friends, freaks and even my old high school IT teacher have been recommending Deus Ex to me for my entire life, but it's never felt like the time was right to play a game held in such reverent esteem by so many people I know. What better time, I suppose, than 2021?

You could spend days of paragraphs just discussing Warren Spector's vision of 2052 and the myriad ways it lines up with our present. In his GDC post-mortem of the game, Spector claims that Ion Storm chose the year 2052 because they needed a far-flung future that they could use to safely and somewhat-believably explore ideas like an international pandemic, trans-humanism, automation, meme wars, extreme inequality, globalisation, soy food and all the other concepts I found in the game's newspapers but didn't bother reading. I won't list every parallel with the present here - that would be a day of paragraphs alone - but it is indeed startling how much sooner the spectre of Spector's future came to pass than he originally predicted way back in the dark ages of the 1990s. In fact, scientists are saying that the future will be far more realistic than they originally predicted. I would recommend playing Deus Ex right here and right now in 2021 if you want to have a temporally-significant and spatially-specific gaming experience that you can tell your kids about in the FEMA global warming/COVID-52 refugee shelters.

There's a temptation here to make the leap from the 2021 parallels found in details of the game's 2052 setting to the grand conspiracies that drive JC's story forward, but it would all too easy to attribute our world's ills to a single organisation like the Majestic 12. No matter how many times our reality plays out stranger than fiction and we uncover another island of paedophiles, I still don't think that Paul Denton's theory about a globe-spanning cabal of bankers holds much synthetic water. It's fun to imagine and simplify the world in such ways, but the game, while trying its hardest to simulate meatspace, is still doing the real world a disservice. Reality is much more complicated and evil than all that you can squeeze onto a 150MB CD-ROM.

I think that's what ultimately stops me from hailing Deus Ex as the same masterpiece as those freaks told me it was - this is superficial complexity masquerading on top of something much simpler. I don't want to tear apart something from 20 years ago for not being as well-realised as the imsims of the present (this came out five years after Doom II! Jesus Christ, Denton!), but the game presents the player with the suggestion of infinite diversity in infinite combinations that more often than not boil down to turning yourself into a lightsaber-wielding Wolverine, gobbling down candy bars and 4loko in the corners of a bulk freighter in order to run full-force at three soldiers who have forgotten you were there just a few seconds ago and are now clip-clop running away and straight into the nearest wall.

It fucking rules, but it's not the "Million-Dollar James Bond Does Blade Runner" gameplay experience that everyone from 4chan to my dorm room told me it was going to be. Sure, you can bribe an overworked office worker into giving you his ID badge so that you can silently descend into a top-secret sealab, but why bother doing that when you can just unload your GEP gun into a lobby of bodyguards, close the door, then walk back in 5 seconds later like nothing happened? Again, let me be clear - it fucking rules to play Deus Ex as a murderous cyberpath in a world of automatons suffering from early-onset dementia, but I thought it was going to be something much more. Why bother doing anything more subtle than a cyberbrick through a holowindow when you can mercilessly cut down cops with your Hattori Hanzo Cattle Prod and laugh when they freak out about it for the duration of their walk to the coffee shop at the end of the street?

Try and play Deus Ex a different way and you will more likely than not spend most of your time with your finger on the quicksave button, hoping in vain that this time, the guard won't bug out and spot you while you're crouching silently in a shadow texture 50 clicks away. Maybe this time, your attempt at a hack won't go awry because a random guy on the street's pathfinding has caused him to permanently hover-sit in the Illuminati's top-secret doorframe. It's funny - often hysterical! But it's not exactly an immersive simulation. At least when you go on another LAMpage in an NYC nightclub because a guy pulled a gun on you for picking up his empty wine bottle, you know the game isn't gonna be too fussy about the specifics. Everyone just goes back to their drinks after a while, and Manderley will probably still pay UNATCO's finest a healthy bonus for being really good at his job. No big deal!

I loved my time with Deus Ex. It was so much fun, and I'll likely play it again soon because I want to see what else it can do. It's just that the things it can do are so wildly different from what my imagination thought it could do. I wanna see how many more ways the NPCs can wild out and make chaos for me on a night mission; I wanna see how many more lines of dialogue were run through an accent mangler and emotion flattener; I wanna see how many more ways I can hilariously die while trying to hoodwink a cybercommando by throwing a couch and some potted plants at him. Maybe I'll come back when or if the dust ever settles on Our Current Situation and These Unprecedented Times pass, because I dunno how many more times I can hear someone say something like "Zeez peepel arrr not abel to afford zee vaccine!" without feeling a strong tinge of guilt moments before I throw them out of a third-storey window in an attempt to distract a mech that's enforcing a national lockdown. What a shame.

Still largely unmatched in terms of receptive feedback to player action. It's genuinely a novel sensation to play a game where I set out before hand to play in a specific way, and actually be accommodated accordingly for that play style, even among other Immersive Sims I've played thus far, none have really successfully integrated that level of freedom. I think this is largely due to the game prioritizing being a good RPG first and being an action game second.

Warren Spector's game design roots go back primarily to table top RPGs. He's said on multiple occasions his whole career has been him attempting to capture the feeling he had when playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in the 70s, and you can tell, especially on Deus Ex. There exists a specific relation between player, to DM, to systemic gameplay that is, as of now, still entirely unique to table top games. It is currently literally physically impossible to create this relationship in a video game directly, and any attempts at actually creating it are very much in their infancy, look at AI Dungeon for the most direct attempt, a great game/tool to use if you wanna have a laugh and partake in a dreamlike nonsense space, and completely useless if you want to play an actual coherent narrative gaming experience. That being said, people have been trying to approximate this relationship in video games for decades. You could argue that Immersive Sims, as a genre, are an attempt to synthesize the player freedom allotted by this kind of system, with the goal oriented mission based structure of action games. This is a game seeking to combine the role of DM and game system into one entity, and let you the player interface with it, and it feels so fucking good, I'm not sure literally anyone has done it better. The sensation of in real time working out how you want to go about solving problems, being forced to carefully consider your approach and being rewarded for that forethought, every combat encounter feeling like a puzzle where you need to consider the unique enemy placement, environmental shape, abilities and equipment on hand in order to solve, it's just such a good texture of interactivity. The game is balanced around making your character slow and bad at everything by default, until you put skill puts or use augmentations to become Not Terrible at those things, gradually. This makes even simple things, like shooting one enemy, into things you need to carefully consider and plan ahead at first, and put a lot of time and skill points into if you want to be able to do them effectively and more intuitively later on. This makes both the early game, where you need to be very careful and intentional about every move you make, and the late game, where you've built a character entirely unique to your play-style and can efficiently utilize your unique set of abilities, extremely interesting in distinctive ways. It makes progress and exploration much more rewarding than it would be otherwise, it makes solving problems that can't be solved by your specific skill-sets more challenging and interesting, while making problems that can all the more satisfying. It's a dynamic feedback loop of carefully crafted systems that are more effective the more you put time and thought into them.

It's hard to overstate how immaculately crafted this game is, even though its such an over discussed game already. But it's so easy to keep talking about I think cause Deus Ex is literally a different video game for everyone who plays it. Hell, it's gonna be a different video game every time You play it. It's a game that feels almost, collaborative with the player in its construction, in a way open-world or sandbox games are kinda incapable of being. So until I get to fulfill my newfound dream of playing a D&D campaign led by Warren Spector as DM, it is probably the best RPG ever made.