Apocalypse Evolved: a Fallout rant

No surprise that i'm writing this since Fallout 3 went live several days ago, so i'm gonna cut it short on the intro. This is both a review, and an old gamer's perspective on Fallout 3 versus its predecessor.
Let's chill out a bit and go way back, to the era of games that didn't have million-dollar budgets, when consoles didn't each have their own code and when people made games because they had a passion for it rather than to gain popularity. That was the era in which i started gaming, and the time when i experienced some of the best moments of my life. Let's go back to when a tiny little company called Interplay got it into their heads to make a game about a post-nuclear dystopia where everything was ruined, desecrated and basically fucked up. But they did more than that: they added 2 of the most basic yet defining elements a game can have: violence and humor.
So take a really violent game with lots of humor set in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic universe, and you have something that kinda follows the idea of Fallout. Make that game have one of the best atmospheres, settings and feelings that ever graced the history of gaming and you have Fallout. Now i didn't play the first Fallout, and this is why i won't be talking about it here and now. However, its sequel, Fallout 2, i have finished a total of 4 times and still consider the best game ever made for the PC. Let's get this straight: it was not perfect. It was far from perfect, in fact it had craploads of bugs, the story wasn't the size of Legacy of Kain or even Baldur's Gate, but the game flowed on through all its problems. The bugs were more game-making than game-breaking(well if you saved a lot), to the point where you actually used some of them to have fun. The story was not the best there could be for its setting, but because of that very setting it was perfectly balanced. And the universe sucked you in, it dragged you down to the point that it was no longer a game. It was beyond a game. And that oppinion has been shared by countless people who have waited for a sequel ever since.
Enter Fallout 3. At first, everyone was dismayed that Interplay had dropped its own F3 project, but people continued to hope. Not until the license was brought by Bethesda did people start to fear: fear that Fallout would not in fact be Fallout, but rather a cheap Elder Scrolls copy. But you know what, The Elder Scrolls was a nice series, which proves they aren't totally idiots when it comes to games, and if they keep the Fallout essence intact, there's a nice chance it will be Fallout. So up until i finally got to play it, there was this burning question in my gut: will it, or will it not be Fallout?
So is it a cheap Elder Scrolls copy, in the end? Yes, and no. More like an incredibly well-done Elder Scrolls copy, because it's better than Oblivion, but NOT better than Fallout.
Let's start with the basics of what makes Fallout Fallout: mechanics. I think everyone who's played Fallout 1 or 2 remembers the interface's ease of use (when you mastered it) and the useful, fun options you had to customize your char. Well, how about Fallout 3? I can't possibly explain this without writing a wall of text so let's make a list.
Fallout 2:

1. Skills can be raised up to 300% and get more expensive to raise starting at 100%
   
2. Skills can be used frequently in a variety of unconventional situations
3. Tag skills get raised twice as fast and a tag increases the base skill by 20 points.
4. Background traits can drastically modify the way you play
5. Each point in a stat contributes to a very important aspect
6. Perks are gained once every 3 levels (by default) and offer unique, powerful and game-changing bonuses
7. There is no maximum level, and you can still play the game as you like after finishing the main quest
8. Weapons/armor don't degrade, and you can get your own travelling "stash" in the form of a car.
   

Fallout 3:

1. Skills can be raised to 100, after that, fuck you.
2. Skills are rarely used in dialogue, and very rarely used outside of dialogue with the exception of using them exactly for what they're supposed to do. If Fallout 3 was Fallout 2, you could not repair the well in the first village.
3. Tag skills are a 15 point bonus for that particular skill and nothing else.
4. Background traits do not exist
5. Each point in a stat gives a measly contribution to 2 or 3 skills and a non-skill feature (like weight limit)
   
6. Perks are gained every level and 90% of them offer either a skill bonus, stat bonus, exp bonus, more dialogue options, accuracy bonus, money bonus, damage bonus (both situational and usual), action point bonus or a combination/variation of the above. The only truly unique perk is Explorer, but getting that means throwing away other good perks.
7. The maximum level is 20 and it's only attainable if you stray far, far away from the main quest for a long time and no apparent reason. After the game ends, you can go fuck yourself because you're not going back, no matter what ending you chose.
8. Weapons break themselves like you were hammering them with a super sledge instead of pulling a trigger. Not much different from Oblivion, that is. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need copies of the same weapon to repair them. The car is gone, replaced by Oblivion's fast travel. Surprisingly, fast travel doesn't have a fucking trunk.

There are lots more i could add, but we're talking about game mechanics here. Bethesda has changed Fallout's skill and stat system to a state which would have been unrecognisable if the game didn't throw the word S.P.E.C.I.A.L. on our heads every fucking time, and if the game didn't make use of the same names for perks/skills. Which leads me to the next bit: if you ever play F3 after F2, you'll clearly see that Bethesda has tried hard to keep the Fallout humor and atmosphere. Sometimes, i think, too hard. First off, F2 never told us anything about SPECIAL, i remember discovering that the stats make up that word by myself. Second, some things seem exaggerated. For instance, the sound. Fallout 1 and 2 each had (if i'm not mistaken) ONE single old-school Jazz song attached to them. One GOOD song, which made sense in their given setting and were right on the spot where they should have been: the intro. In Fallout 3, you can choose to listen to a radio station that plays a crapload of these songs. And while i've been watching the Fallout 2 intro over and over just to listen to Armstrong's "a kiss to build a dream on" one more time, there's only SO many raiders i can kill while i'm "hackin' and whackin' and smackin'". So eventually i really feel the need to turn that shit off because it actually cripples the atmosphere instead of making it more integrating. And that's just an example... there's vaults everywhere, you use the same drugs (even though Jet was invented by the Mordino family far away on the west coast), but it just doesn't do it as good as Fallout did.
Then there's VATS. Vault-tec Automated blah blah. Basically, a very cheap re-enactment of the old turn-based action-point-based system. It's overpowered enough to make you use it (how i was able to shoot a gun 16 fucking times with pinpoint accuracy in what could qualify as half a second is beyond me), it feels awkward, it looks awkward, and it pretty much takes you away from the FPS experience and into the RPG. It completely eliminates all idea of tactics and using your action points in a smart way, making the game a "click the body part and shoot" thing, but at least it's entertaining in the form of violent slow-motion deaths.
I remember one particular pattern i used to follow in Oblivion: ride around, find dungeon, enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. Then i played Fallout 3: walk around, find dungeon (cave/factory/office building), enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. To the point where it's becoming pretty clear that they only put those dungeons there to extend the playtime. There's only 3 vaults of any significance in this game, the 3-4 remaining ones don't have any story to them and aren't related to the main story in ANY way. Sure, one is full of clones while the other is messing with your brain but overall it's just the same sequence i outlined earlier.
Which makes it kinda sad since that was the element that alienated me from Oblivion in the first place, and it's coincidentally also why i got bored of Mass Effect. Are people losing inspiration so much that they have to take simplistic MMORPG elements (aka the dungeon with no soul) and insert them into single player games as a way of extending playtime? Well, wake the fuck up and stop calling yourself game designers. Get a new name, like FAIL designers.
Ok, i've nitpicked the bad parts of the game long enough, and i think we can all agree that it ain't Fallout by now. Yet the fact that it ain't Fallout doesn't mean it can't be a good game, all things considered. Let's start with the obvious: the game is gorgeous. I've looked closely at the details and they've recreated the game pretty close to its predecessor. The first-person view is fine when you get used to it, and it doesn't obstruct the morbid beauty of the Wasteland. The soundtrack is good despite what i said about the old songs (well, as good as depressing music can get, i guess). The dialogue is nothing compared to Fallout 2, but it's vastly improved over Oblivion, as is much of the storyline and many of the quests. I finished the game, but reloaded and went back into the waste to see what i've missed, and i'm still not bored with it yet. At one point while i was exploding ghoul heads with my shitgun, i suddenly realised something: i was actually having fun. And i had as much fun during the robot sequence near the end of the game: you know what i'm talking about if you got there, and i dare say it's one of the most exhilarating experiences ever felt in gaming. So as non-fallout as it is, the game will still be worth a shot, especially if you have no idea what fallout is and/or played fallout but didn't like it (in which case i welcome you to the museum of rare people). So that's mostly it... i hope they don't decide to push the franchise further because i really don't want a Fallout 4 now. And if they do make Fallout 4, then let it be this. Take a look at it and see what the true Fallout 3 looked like. This, with all its ancient and fucked up graphics, is Fallout.
And despite what's happened to the game, it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Fallout, no matter what happens, will still live on in our hearts and in our minds as the game that gave us one of the best adventures in gaming. Because even if Fallout itself may change, we all know war... war never changes.

Respect the superior race

SPORE, the one, the only, the evolutionary game. The game which can make you smile, make you laugh, and can even tuck you to bed.
A highly anticipated game, Spore started out just fine, great even with a few glitches however, but the game managed to overcome it`s not so nice parts with state of the art possibilities, the illusion of freedom, and a strong hunger for creativity. One of the things i liked most about Spore is that no matter how big or how ugly you are, there will always a creature stronger and another one weaker. Also there are three ways of going through the game : herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. The herbivore part clearly suggests a strong amount of "EMO-l33tness" having to go peaceful on just about every other species or you end up dead. As for the carnivore part, the game just gets easier, you kill everything, you eat their corpses for hit points, and all that stuff until you end up dominating the world. The omnivores tend to be more industrious, and unlike the others, they prefer to buy their opponents.
The game lets you start at the EMO stage, in a small or big pond on a selected planet, you appear. Small enough to eat and ugly enough to be avoided. The first stage of Spore can be compared to a PacMan game, meaning that the only thing you can do is eat shit and/or die.Trying to somewhat represent a "cell`s" life in the real world, but here, the more shit you eat the bigger you get, the bigger you get the more dangerous you are. The way you build your creature isn`t as important as it should be, because you can morph it into a dick, literary, and back at any time you want. Sure the number of legs, teeth, horns and other mutant parts are important, but where and how you place them simply does not matter.
After reaching a certain level, a brain spawns on your creature, somewhere where the head is supposed to be, congratulations, you reached the creature stage. In this stage things tend to be a little more complex, but sadly, they are not. There is only one rule : Only the strongest/richest survive. After the creature stage i climbed on a ladder and reached the conclusion that the fun just ended, and i mean it. Up to the creature stage you create the creature, after that, you dress it up. The tribal stage turns into a RTS, a bad RTS ofcourse, it is short and hardly worth playing. Few moments after and voila, i got to build my own city, fact which sounds good in theory but sucks ball in practice. Designing buildings and pleasuring my Penises, C`OMMON. Here, the goals is simple : kill/buy/convert other cities, in other words, become "the biggest, the best".
Despite the fact that i tried playing it on all possible methods: religious, economic, military; at the last stage it all ends up the same way, an RPG, a BAD rpg to be exact. While the first four stage are short and fun, the last stage involves a series of shitty missions, involving planet coloring, collecting EMO`s from all over the galaxy and blowing up would-be enemies.
It`s hard to believe though, this game promised a lot, but what it really did is quite simple, it put together 5 types of games and the result is clear : BULLSHIT. The fun stages are short and the fucked up ones are long and full of shit.

I guess i should say more about SPORE, more about the "Sporepedia", but when i think that the creator of spore made his money by creating girl-games like The Sims, I rather cut my tongue out. Who knows, maybe Will Wright only wanted to show the world that there`s a little Hitler in all of us.

The little engine that could

After months of brainless MMO`ing i finally got the guts to step up and play the game which was supposed to be the best of the best, the game which defined the new generation : Crysis

From the first day when i heard about Crysis i was simply stunned by it`s requirements, sure the game was promising some interesting stuff, like the so called freedom and some neat gameplay but all these just can`t be compared to the graphics. So i recently bought just about the best pieces of hardware money can handle and what better way to test it`s power but to install Crysis.
Starting the game i was somewhat impressed with it, the weapons were standardishly nice, the whole island was looking fantasticly good and with the abience, it almost seemed real. That ultil i started the mission. Let me just put it this way : all the graphics in the world cannot, just cannot compensate for the flaws in the gameplay and the AI, i`m not saying that the graphics aren`t fantastic, but let`s be real here. In order to take down an enemy lots of bullets are required, 2-3 shotgun shells to the head or a well placed grenade. But the strangest part is that you can actually go through the game, untill the part where you get out of the alien ship, only with your fists. As far as the enemies will go, i`ve lived to see two strange situations : at one point the emos were shooting at me from an impressive distance with damn good acuracy, in other situations the tards could land a bullet on me thanks to the gimp tree who kept me cover.
The game offers a short, yet interesting amount of weapons. For starters some are good some are useless and all of them can be modified with either a scope, flashlight laser pointer etc. The main character, "Nomad" can cary two weapons a few grenades and a potential RocketLauncher. The rockets will follow the pointer the grenades will prove useful, but the other ones, they just run out of bullets too fast.

Next to the graphics this game was supposed to show off it`s "freedom". Though such things are always limited, the player must do some quests ( go there, kill that, come here, blow me, and stuff like that), and the only "freedom" existing is represented by the vast ways to accomplish a mission. From charging in to stealth or by simply running. Let me just say that the game promised more, a lot more.
Another interesting thing in this game is the nano-suit. Crytek gets a nice piece of candy for this one. Other shooters have power-ups usable only when picked up or when some fanatic score is achieved, Crysis however puts the suit on you, and the only thing you have to do is to switch from one power-up to the other. Fantasticly when the player uses a power-up the suits power is drained, but no problem here you easy mode player fucks, the suits energy is restored at a high rate.
Sadly i expected more from Crysis, a lot more, tons more even. After finishing the game and going through that /fail ending this is the conclusion : Crysis = ultra pro graphics + imba nanosuit + idiotic AI + EMO enemies + mediocre weapons + a shit for a storyline.
Crysis isn`t the game it suposed to be, it`s below average. Worth giving it a try but, like is said before, all the graphics in the world cannot compensate for the flaws in the game.

Gaming Masterpieces: Half-life

Half-life. The name should be enough to spark a certain feeling in your mind. If it isn't, then you are not a gamer. Half-life: you should know it without me telling you that it's one of the better first-person shooters that has ever hit the market.
Whenever i think of Half-life, i can't really think of anything that was bad about it, or that i didn't like about it. Not to say that the game didn't have SOME flaws, just that everything it stands for tends to dim that to the point that they're not recognisable anymore.
At first glance, Half-life was just a normal FPS with some guy who shoots aliens and soldiers. But there's something about it... something in the way it's done that says "you're here" in a way that no other shooter can, because it heavily exploits the features based on human emotions: the feeling and setting. Until now, no other game has managed to get me so intrigued in the exploration of a top-secret science facility which destroys itself as you go deeper and deeper down its dark corridors. The feeling is amplified by the way the story is told, i.e. only through the eyes of the main character, which is given a name but not a face: Gordon Freeman. You know how he looks like through the loading screen and the game box's cover, but there is a lack of mirrors or mirror-like surfaces in this game, and we never see the game from any point of view other than Freeman's eyes. There are no cutscenes, and the intro and outro consist of trips seen in real-time through Freeman's eyes. This gives the game a measure of integration, in that you become Freeman, and whatever happens to him has a greater impact upon you than when, say, the guy in Quake died or something. Even though people talk to you, Freeman never says a word, which in Half-life 2 is exploited further by making people feel uncomfortable when they, for example, make a joke and you don't laugh.
The thing that sets you apart from the local NPCs and also the thing that tries to explain why you are able to kill 43753874 monsters without dying (if you've read my Crysis review, you'd know i consider that kind of explanation something that every FPS should have) is the HEV suit, an enviroment suit which protects you from damage received (i.e. your "armor") and offers you an interface with which you can monitor your health, ammo and so forth. You take it for experimental purposes, and you end up keeping it.
Marked with a degree of guilt from the fact that it was you who started the alien invasion of the Black Mesa Research Facility (you are lead through a series of events at the start in which you need to push a crystal inside a beam, starting a "resonance cascade" which rips apart the fabrics of dimension and invites aliens into our world), you are encouraged to explore, survive and fight your way through many diverse, interesting and challenging levels. The story also deviates, special ops marines start to appear and contrary to the belief that they're there to rescue you, start shooting everyone, including the scientists. You are taken prisoner and left to die, you escape and have to fight your way to the facility's Lambda Complex in which the scientists are devising a solution for the current situation. There are no objectives, the game doesn't feature much interface other than your normal suit's health, ammo, armor, light gauges and weapon icons, this is only what the scientists you find along the way tell you. At the Lambda Complex, you are teleported to an alien world called Xen, on which you will eventually finish the game, by killing a huge ugly... thing. This is the point when you are faced with another of the game's original elements: the G-man. The game is made to make you think that this man is always following and observing you, always appearing on a ledge, platform or level which you cannot reach (and usually cannot shoot), and as soon as you look at him, he casually and enigmatically strolls off. G-man stands for government man, because of the fact that he wears an office suit and always carries a briefcase with him. He finally faces you at the end, when you can see that he is indeed powerful, as you are without weapons and cannot do anything to harm him. He talks to you and congratulates you, saying that certain... people (although the term "people" is not used) have taken interest in your abilities, and offers you "further employment". Meanwhile, you and him are teleported through several alien scenes, ending with the tram that you rode in the intro, but that now seems to be flying through space. At the end, you can accept the G-man's proposal and exit the tram (the door opens and a teleporter light appears), or wait until the door closes, at which point you will be teleported in front of a huge army of aliens, the screen will darken and Freeman will be presumed dead. Note that Half-life 2 is designed with the first ending in mind.
Going back to the feeling, i mentioned that this game has no cutscenes. That would usually make a game dull and boring, but Half-life succeedes to become an exception to this through its wide use of scripted events. Laboratory equipment that explodes in your face, trams that explode with you in them halfway to your destination point, taking you somewhere else entirely, ambushes set up by the millitary, alien monsters knocking doors apart, all of these take the place of cutscenes, and all of them are happening in real-time, with you having not just a front-row seat, but a role in them as well. The puzzles are easy enough to not be an inconvenience and hard enough to matter. All in all, Half-life is one of the games that shouldn't be missing from a gamer's repertoire.
Following the great success of Half-life, 2 expansion packs were released: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. The former takes place through the eyes of a millitary soldier named Adrian Shepard, which appears to talk (by how the drill instructor is talking to you in boot camp), but we can't really hear what he's saying. The one thing Shepard and Freeman have in common is that they're followed around by the same man in an office suit. The ending of Opposing Force takes you face-to-face with the G-man again, and you can now see the full conclusion of the Black Mesa incident: the whole facility is nuked and wiped from the face of the world. After which, the G-man takes you into custody again. Shepard has yet to make an appearance in any of the Half-life sequels.
Blue Shift is a short expansion featuring the lab security guard Barney Calhoun, and is the only one of the Half-Life games featuring a happy ending. Barney never goes to Xen and never uses alien weapons, but sets things in motion for Half-life's sequel (such as the teleporting sequence), eventually escaping Black Mesa with a group of scientists.
The expansions didn't have the same success that Half-life originally did, but are considered worthy descendants nonetheless.
In conclusion, as long as i remain a gamer, Half-life will always have a special place in my heart as an example for how future games should be. A masterpiece in itself.

Gaming History: Deus Ex 2

Ah, at last, i get to play the sequel to one of the games which marked my life as a gamer. Obviously, i was waiting for this since the game appeared, dreaming of the days when i was going to grab my sniper rifle and once again wage war on power-hungry beauraucrats with a taste for world domination. What i got was...
Well, it's pretty hard to describe, but i'll try to make a comparison: what do you get when you eat a really tasty, creamy cake, so tasty and unimaginately delicious that you order another slice, and just as you're happily munching the first bits of it, you realise that the second slice is full of SHIT? You get Deus Ex 2.
Honestly, this game is so retardedly different and simplified from the first, that it left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that i felt like vomiting over the first few hours. Remember how you used to memorize door codes? Not anymore. Inventory management? Not anymore. Every item occupies one slot now, so a nice small can of soda weighs and has the same size as a rocket launcher. Skills? Nonexistant. IFF? Comlink? No mention of them. They're still there, but they don't show up in your augmentations list (which are now called Nanomods). Notes window? Not anymore. HP related to specific bodyparts? Hell no, you now have 1 HP bar (which doesn't even show numbers, or even a percent) and 1 "mana" bar (the old energy bar, but bastardized now so that each energy item you get recharges it to full). More than one type of ammo!? GOD FORBID! There is only one type of ammunition in the whole game. The only difference is that some guns take more ammo to shoot. Lockpicks? Hell no! Multitools can open doors now, so your retarded console-gaming mind doesn't have to grasp the complexity of carrying 2 security-bypass objects at once. A log window? What's that? Needing a medbot to install augs? Pfft, that's old school.
And many, many more... it's hard to describe how i felt when i saw this weak attempt at a game before my eyes, beaten down, bludgeoned, mutilated, sawed-off, ripped apart, teared to pieces, hacked open and trimmed to a dim, retarded shell of its former self. It felt like Thor's hammer suddenly dropped at maximum velocity down on my balls. Not even the music managed to get me, aside from a few songs played in bars by some chick, the soundtrack didn't stand out one bit. Where was that corporate tune, those songs that made you feel like you were an agent of the state, strolling through office buildings in some hi-tech world... gone. All gone. The game went down before my eyes like the Titanic, so much that i was ashamed to even play it. But i did... and i finished it, gathering what little respect i had left for the first title in the series. It felt shallow... i wasn't "there", i felt like some prick shooting his way through tight corridors without having any idea what the hell's going on. I mean, the game doesn't even tell you... you're dropped off at some facility, with some doctors and shit, and stuff starts blowing up in your face as some guys in hoods infiltrate it and manage to get past the ARMORED guards with the greatest of ease. Then people start suddenly acting like you were the one, and somehow you were really, really special. At least they don't ask you to save the world, though i kinda wonder why.
I'll admit, once i got past the first few hours of the game, it started to suck a bit less. Either i got used to it and stopped giving it the title "deus ex" and playing it like i'd play some other retarded shooter (focusing on the gameplay elements that ARE there more than on the ones that aren't), or the developers started to suck a bit less at level design, i don't know. It's possible that i also became a little more retarded due to my brain not being able to take all the virtual kicks to the balls. Meh, whatever... the game still has dialogue, though you never get too attached to any character (like you did in deus ex 1 with paul, for instance, or even Alex Jacobson and the crew at UNATCO), not even JC Denton himself, which appears in the game like some enlightened AI consciousness merged with human mind, capable of freezing entire oceans but unable to stop a bullet coming his way. What's "new" about the sequel is that you're not forced into doing what other people tell you now, you are given a set of objectives from different factions which often collide with eachother, so you have to choose who to piss off and whose ass to kiss. The beginning major factions are either the WTO (don't ask me what it stands for) or the Order (order of what? beats me), and you have to do stuff for them throughout 80% of the game. Now choosing a side is like choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwitch: one seeks financial domination and optimisation of the world (no matter how many people they step on by doing it), the others are a bunch of mumbo-jumbo tree-huggers who want me to get in touch with my "spiritual self". Right. Moving along, the game still tries to integrate stealth into what seems like an action shooter, and make it a bit more dynamic by adding canisters (nanomods) that give you certain abilities once installed, most of which are taken from the first game, but with some new ones like emp damage on melee attacks, or even first-person control of enemy bots. You now need to choose between 3 nanomods in each slot, the slots being considerably fewer. Concerning this: WHY IN THE NAME OF FUCK CAN'T I GET BOTH REGENERATION AND OPTICAL ENHANCEMENT AT THE SAME TIME!? These were my 2 most favorite augs back in the first game, and now i have to choose between them. Gah.
So to close this, if you like first-person shooters with a tint of stealth, and (most importantly) have never played deus ex before, give this game a try. Then go play deus ex 1, just to raise your standards. If you have played deus ex 1, then don't bother.

Crysis

Crysis. That name should say so much.... anxiety, disappointment, fascination, disgust, and so on and so forth. You all know it, and if you don't, suffice to say it is one of the most controversial games of the year 2007 and 2008. And at the same time, THE most graphically advanced game ever made. A review to it is pretty much beating a dead horse, since i don't think there's a magazine on the planet which hasn't reviewed this thing. But at the same time, not reviewing it would be like saying Doom never existed. So here's my review to probably the most anticipated game of 2007.
I said before that i got a brand new pc, and it didn't let me down when i tried to run crysis on it: basically, 64bit, vista, directx10, all settings to very high, 30 fps. Playing the game like this got me a pretty nice experience with the game, so apart for a few words at the beginning, i'll try to review this thing without saying a single word about the graphics. Now, to get them out of the way:
This game is absolutely STUNNING, the graphics often causing you to stop and just STARE at the thing for like 2 minutes before moving on. They really make you forget about the game entirely and just see it like the closest thing to a CG movie you've ever seen. I swear, not even Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (cg movie if you never seen it) looked THIS good. Incredible. Wow.

AHEM. Now that that's out of the way, let's get on with the real review. The story is pretty thin and nothing spectacular, predictable, but not so shallow. Not shallow because it at least manages to explain why you end up being the single person who kills 2394287423458 korean troops single-handedly (something that few FPS games actually care to explain, it's usually because you rock so much or something like that). Basically, there's a new thing in town, and it's called the nano-suit. This prototype nanotech exoskeleton is the one you and your squad will wear during an operation in one of the (unknown) islands in the... i forgot what ocean it was. The operation involves saving some researchers from the mean korean army guys who now have control of that island. But of course, something goes wrong. Your squad starts to get horribly butchered as your team-mates get killed and/or kidnapped by some huge weird alien ship things, and in the end there's only you and your fellow scottish nanosuit-wearing bloke who happens to have better luck than the others and not get himself killed, or disappear. Meanwhile, you fight half of the korean armada. Fun!
Of course, that's only until about halfway through the game, when you accidentally stumble upon an alien spaceship (or whatever it was, seemed more like a base to me) buried deep within the mountain, which was awakened by the idiot archeologists and the koreans who were poking their noses where they shouldn't have. From this point on, bye-bye koreans, hello aliens. The spaceship itself is a brief encounter (about one level), you get thrown out of it pretty fast, then the fun begins. Basically, that's where the game turns from tactical, headshot-filled shooter to "give'em all you got and then some" as you can't possibly headshot the aliens' ships.
But i'm getting ahead of myself. Your suit is a flexible thing, having several "modes" you can switch between (sharing its regenerative energy between each of them) such as having your suit's energy act as armor, battery for a cloaking device (i.e. you can turn invisible, predator-like), increased strength or speed. This basically gives you several options to go through the game with, as the increased strength function makes it easy to kill enemies in melee and jump about 3 times as high, the cloak function makes getting near enemies or getting to better positions easier, and if it's too hard for you, you can always switch to speed and run through them. Switching to another mode is instant and doesn't cost anything, but uses the same energy, so your cloak will be pretty short if you're low. Normally, energy recharges pretty fast (unless it's draining), and the suit also recharges your health, meaning the game has no ways to restore hp other than the natural way. Weapons are also customisable, supporting many enhancements such as a grenade launcher or various types of scopes. You can also carry only 2 weapons besides the pistol, the rocket launcher and grenades (and another special weapon in the last level). Those weapons are conventional, such as assault rifles, shotguns, SMGs, a minigun, and there's an alien weapon in the later levels with unlimited ammo. What i liked about this game was the diverse ways you can finish it: for instance, i can skip about half of the first level by swimming (although that doesn't really happen later on) and just killing the guys in the boats (which may also be harder than killing the enemies, since the boats have miniguns attached). You can enter any vehicle and drive it, there's even a tank level later on which i really hated (i mean, i'm supposed to kill 10 tanks with one which is exactly as good as they are). Most buildings are destroyable, the physics in the game behaving very life-like (especially if you're running with the settings on very high), making you want to throw another grenade inside a house just to see how it blows up again. You have a map and a radar (you can use the binoculars to "tag" the enemies so they appear on it), the primary objectives being a green dot, secondary are yellow dots. All in all, great liberty in playing it, basically no matter how much you play it, you'll never do everything exactly the same thanks to the wonderful physics and the many ways you can kill your enemies. Now what i didn't like about the game was that those damn koreans need about half of my cartridge to die if i don't get a headshot in... which isn't very realistic since that's about the same amount of bullets I need to die, and i'm the one wearing the fucking exoskeleton. So the enemies die painfully slow if you don't headshot them... that isn't SO bad, until you find the koreans wearing nanosuits (yes, you'll find those too). Those motherfuckers are so freakin' hard to kill that after i wasted my entire minigun clip on them, i just quit and punched them to death with maximum strength (for some reason, they're awfully slow). At least the aliens aren't so hard... you know you're gonna need about half a clip, or even a full clip to kill them (i found it awfully easy to miss in this game), but at least you don't get pissed when you missed the headshot. So the game is basically headshot hunt until the alien level (yes, you do have a sniper rifle, but there's about 3 times as many enemies as bullets for it). Still, a well-placed grenade will usually give you a measure of satisfaction... sometimes. Oh, and another thing - how come a guy with a fucking machinegun emplacement can shoot and HIT me from a mile away? Aren't those things supposed to be inaccurate from that distance? I can say the same for the enemies, who must have went to Legolas's School of Heavenly Sharpshooting or something, since whenever they see you, they start firing those assault rifles in burst mode and ALWAYS hit no matter what distance there is between you and them. Gets frustrating after a while, but if you do it right, you probably shouldn't get hit at all.
So, to sum it up: good gameplay, great physics (occasional bug here and there, but that can't be helped i guess), average storyline (major cliffhanger at the end, has potential for the second game of the intended trilogy). Not the best game, once you take out the graphics. But even so, it's a game to be played, even if only for the freedom given by the modes you can choose from. Add the graphics and it becomes a must-have. Almost.
Multiplayer's already hot and running, and has promise. Won't beat counter-strike, but i find it a lot better than Halo's, for instance. Good game, all in all. A must-play if you're a gamer, since it's a staple of next generation hardware.
Until next time, i bid you farewell.

Gaming Masterpieces: Deus Ex

This is the first in a long series of re-reviews dedicated to some games who deserve the title of "masterpiece". Games that occupied our childhood spare time, made us think about them at school, made us waste countless hours of our lives with good, quality enternainment. These games serve as examples of what the simple human mind is truly capable of, and in my opinion, are as worthy of being called "works of art" as any Rembrandt or Van Gogh painting.
The idea came to me after i saw the recent teaser trailer for Deus Ex 3, and somehow ended up listening to the old Wan Chai theme of the first game. It's funny how much nostalgia came to me while i listened.
Deus Ex (literally translated "God From") is the first game in a series of two, with the third coming up somewhere in 2009, and unlike its sequel, it features impressive bits of philosophy about life, ideas and society, while maintaining a "corporate" atmosphere which is felt about everywhere. I've finished this game nine times (the last try was on the hardest difficulty), not counting the times when i just started it without finishing, and to this day, i still want to pop my CD in and reinstall it to play it some more, at times. Because it's not about the graphics, the gameplay or even the soundtracks: it's about the FEELING. That little tingle you get when you really feel like you're there, like the world transcends into the game and you take the role of the main character, "living" the game as nothing you've ever felt before. Deus Ex can do that.
The game is all about conspiracies: the intro presents 2 obscure characters talking about a new world order, and their role in it. The game takes place somewhere in the future, where the internet (most likely wireless internet) has covered the globe and everything is now much more dependant on it. It is a more technological era, but not much different from what it is now: an unbalanced urban-centered society slowly becoming a dystopia, while anti-terrorist forces struggle continuously to maintain law and order. You arrive in this landscape as the new special agent of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), and know yourself as having had several bionic implants and "upgrades" to your internal structure to support the use of what the game calls "augmentations", special upgrades which can be used to increase your effectiveness in the field. You have 3 at the start (though 2 of them are passive and always turned on), and will aquire more as the game progresses. The storyline focuses at first on you and the other operatives trying to put a stop to a terrorist movement called the NCR (New California Republic) but the game's many plot twists eventually put you through world-wide conspiracies, secret governments and world domination schemes, through places such as NYC, Hong Kong, and evenntually arriving at Area 51 where you will have a choice of 3 endings, neither of which is good or bad: they only depend on how you view them.
The depth of the storyline is amazing, there are several characters which you can choose to help or not, this will have no overall effect on how the game ends (i.e. the story is linear), but they are your choices, and will eventually leave a mark as you finish the game. The game's storyline vaguely reminds me of the general idea behind V for Vendetta (in it: "ideas are bulletproof"; in Deus Ex: "you can't fight ideas with bullets"), which in spite of having a different storyline entirely, focuses on the same general aspects: government, society, and one man making a difference.
Onward to the game mechanics: the game is a crossover between FPS and RPG, with a lot of elements previously found in System Shock 2: the brackets around objects which you can interact with, move around, or blow up, the general idea of having special "powers" which you can use with your special "energy", which once depleted needs to be recharged through special powerups that you can hold in your inventory. About the inventory, it also looks like system shock, meaning you can hold almost everything in it (even cigars and drinks), the size of an object requiring more or less space. There's also a skill point system which you can spend on general abilities (hacking proficiency, lockpicking, and increasing effectiveness with light weapons, to name a few). Once you have enough skill points, you can spend them immediately and without any requirements. Skill points come from exploring new areas, completing main and secondary objectives, or obtaining information. Speaking of information, the game is also heavily centered on dialogues between the main character and others, some of which require you to make choices in what to say (which affects the immediate future). The main character is JC Denton (the game lets you customise your nickname, with which you will be adressed in several e-mails and documents, and also lets you choose between a small variety of male skin and hair colors) the second of a new line of special "nano-augmented" agents (the first being your brother, Paul). The augmentations are special powers which you can aquire as the game progresses (they are also optional, the game never forces you to take one, and some are even hidden) and consume your bioelectrical energy when activated, letting you do things such as swim longer, become more resistant, regenerate, see enemies through walls or become invisible for a short time. For each augmentation canister you aquire, you are forced to choose between 2 augs (you may find them at more than one point in the game, but they're useless if you already made your choice) when you install it at a medical bot. You can upgrade the augs up to level 4 once you've installed them using special upgrade canisters, but they're rare so keep an eye out.
The game has a ton of secret areas, some being easy to spot, others not - i was surprised to find something new even on the 8th time i finished the game. I can very well say that i found them all, but... who knows.
Deus Ex holds a special place for me, being the first serious game i completed entirely without using cheat codes: after trying to finish it twice by using cheats, i found that i couldn't do it. The third time, i tried without cheats... it was much more fun, challenging and also, by the time i got to the area where i couldn't pass before, i was so used to searching dark corners and finding exits that i immediately knew where to go. As ironic as it sounds, this game is harder to beat by cheating than by normal means. Since then, i never used cheats in a game again.
I won't say anything about the graphics, those aren't the point of this article. The soundtrack is awesome however, and helps maintain that elitist "corporate" feel of the game.
So if you don't mind old graphics and haven't played this yet, go ahead and honor it by giving it some hours of your life. It certainly deserves it.