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.

Gaming History: Prince of Persia

You're probably wondering what "gaming history" is all about. Well, i'll keep it simple: during the past years, i've been missing on newer games very much because my PC was so crappy that it couldn't even run games which required Pixel Shader 1.0. So now that i got a monster of a PC, i decided to play and finish all the games which i feel i've been missing out on. I started with the PoP series.
Now i haven't been a total stranger to the series, playing a bit of each of them at a friend's house a long time ago, but i didn't quite get to feel the whole of them either. This is changing.
I started with Sands of Time. Most of you probably know the story, since this game isn't a stranger to most people (and if it is, you should be damn well ashamed), so i'll get you the short version: you're a prince who steals an artifact called the Dagger of Time from some conquered kingdom and gets tricked by the vizier to stab it into a huge hourglass (another conquered relic) therefore unleashing madness the likes of which the world has never seen since ol' man Freeman pushed the crystal into the beam back in Half-Life 1. The game(s) is an(are) action platform games, which rely on the main character (the prince) doing spectacular gymnast feats as he maneuvers through destroyed and soon-to-be-destroyed buildings. Most of the puzzles in the game are requiring you to get from point A to point B like this, and if you see a big, missing bridge connecting the entrance and exit from the room, you know full well that you're going to slide along that ledge, jump from it to another ruined ledge, then to a column, then to another column, then to another ledge, then run along the wall jumping at the last moment only to grab hold of a wooden beam you can walk on, then do another 2342847 feats, circling the room 3 times before you get to the other fucking end of the bridge. But that's fine, the puzzles aren't repetitive nor are they boring (to some extent), and the prince's infinite stamina and flawless grabbing of ledges is something you get used to quite fast.
The other part of the game is fighting. Sands of time had a nice, yet relatively simple fighting system in which you can block, do combo attacks, jump on enemies and even jump from walls in powerful lunge attacks. Yet it was flawed because it could be abused. Most enemies could be easily killed by jumping over them and hitting them mid-air (meanwhile, they couldn't hit you because you were a bit out of reach) over and over again, and the ones who were immune to that (swinging their swords at you the moment you wanted to climb them and jump over their shoulder, resulting in you falling and taking damage) were easily killed by another abusable trick: the wall lunge i mentioned earlier. You basically jumped backwards toward the wall, then hit the attack button and it would be an instant 1-shot-kill. Well not really kill, since the enemies just laid on the ground waiting for you to impale them with the dagger of time (getting up again if you didn't), but it was the closest thing to a 1-shot kill you could ever see in PoP. Basically, wall was my friend. When enemies were near, i looked around for the nearest wall and hugged it tighter than druids hugging a tree. The battles are made a bit more complicated by you having a sidekick for more than half of the game, which is an indian princess (or whatever she was) who shoots arrows. And it's a bit difficult in keeping her from dying when she's surrounded by 4 enemies and the only thing little miss Sitting Duck can do is shoot. I mean, i've never seen her dodge or move AN INCH in combat... i guess she's too retarded. Of course, the game also follows a little childish love story with miss sitting duck, resulting in some amusing dialogues here and there, but the end is a bit disappointing for the poor prince since you get to turn back time before the pincess even meets you, thus getting you into the awkward position of being asked who the hell you are after you spent the whole game with her. I kinda like that since it deviates from the whole "good defeats evil, the guy gets the girl, everybody fornicates and the universe is happier" type of endings you usually see in games.
The other bad thing about combat is the targetting system: the game basically chooses your current target (the monster you turn and face) based on who it THINKS you want to hit, and it's not always right, resulting in the situation of trying to finish off a downed mob only to have him get up moments later when you find yourself frantically pressing E on the wrong enemy. A manual targetting system would have fixed that, but there is none.
The special part about the game is the prince's ability to use the dagger of time to do some nice stunts based on manipulating it, such as slowing down time, rewinding time (which you'll find yourself doing very often, since in PoP it's awfully easy to find yourself falling to your doom), getting visions into the future (basically shows you fractions of the prince doing puzzles and jumpin' around), combine slowing time with rapidly teleporting from one monster to the other, killing them (loved this one) and a big, stupid AoE attack which i don't quite get: how the hell do you make sand "explode"? But i guess it HAD to be there, action platform games with intense combat sequences wouldn't be complete without a big area of effect explosion after all.
Finishing Sands of Time, i couldn't wait to move on to the next one on the series, thinking it would solve lots of problems and knowing the combat system to be better and improved.
So i ventured into Warrior Within, only to put on my "wtf" face when i found a completely different atmosphere from the other game. Whereas Sands of Time was mostly childish and non-dramatic (except in some cases), Warrior Within was... well the opposite. The prince dyes his hair black (either that or his hair starts growing as black as fucking tar), puts on black leather clothes, adopts a "i wanna kill you right now" type of look in his eyes, starts cursing and turns into the most determined motherfucker this side of Faerun. Basically, whoever opened the sands of time is supposed to die, but the prince turned back time before the sands were opened, so he didn't die. But he's still supposed to die. So now a huge, invulnerable, ugly... thing (see right) chases him around and tries to make him meet his destiny. So the prince goes to the island where the sands were first created in an attempt to... honestly i don't know what he meant to find there, the place was obviously deserted. But still, he's in luck as his ship gets sunk by some bitch (pretty much the biggest whore-antagonist you'll ever see) and he follows her trough some time-portal going back before the sands were created.
First thing that i liked was the music. Warrior Within has one of the best soundtracks ever made for a game, hands down. The music fits the atmosphere perfectly, the songs comprising almost entirely of heavy-rythm rock songs, most of which are bad-ass. Hell, while the big bad black ugly thing (game calls it the Dahaka) is chasing you, you can even hear the instrumental of I Stand Alone, by Godsmack, and all the other songs are similar to it too.
Moving on... well, the combat system was improved, i.e. it had more combos and animations built into it. I had faith that Ubisoft would learn from their past mistakes... but they didn't. The targeting system was the same, the enemies still would attack you when they weren't supposed to (did i mention that?), and the number of times you would die just because you had bad luck was still the same. Well maybe the number of nice combat moves and stuff makes up for it... barely. They removed the visions and the slow time + teleport maneuver (why?), introducing a gay-er version of it (i.e. you turned into a sword-machinegun while your enemies stood still), the sand bomb is still there though, and it's improved too.
The difficulty curve on this one was pretty rough for me, as i was at one point supposed to activate two towers which were full levels in their own right, so i chose a random one of the two and ended up choosing the HARDER (the game never tells you the sequence in which you're supposed to do them), and after much sweat and annoyance in finishing that level, i found the other tower to be easy as piss.
The bosses are a little bit harder here, and the game even has 2 endings, one being available only if you got all the secret health powerups. Speaking of health, i found it pretty dumb to not have any health items in the game, or even more spots with water (your normal healing point), sometimes finding myself with only 3 enemies until i hit the next save point but only 10% health left (save points are 90% of the spots in this game where you get full health). This made the game feel more like survival than fun, instead of "choosing my own combat style" (like ubisoft bragged in one of their movies), i had to choose the one which killed the enemies with the least damage to me (usually being the "jump-over" technique from PoP1). I still hoped this would be remedied in the next game.
About 3/4 though the game, the prince turns into a ragged Raziel-like creature called a Sand Wraith, in one last attempt to change his fate. Doing that makes sand regenerate (sand being the ammunition for the time feats you can make), but health drops at a steady pace. Needless to say, i usually spent 1/4 of the way from save point to the other save point with 5% health (the minimum hp at which the health ceases to degenerate while in sand wraith mode), due to the fact that i actually had to spend time planning a route through the thick layer of traps and puzzles. The game was finished in a bit of a rush, since i really didn't have the patience to go through the huge number of traps and just wished it would be over sooner. Still, overall the nice soundtrack, the storyline, the main antagonist (did i mention she was also a chick) and the moments when the combat was pretty cool outweighed the bad parts, and the overlooked flaws.
Finally, The Two Thrones. This time, the prince puts on some white(r) clothes and stops being so pissed off at the world. He's got the chick, he didn't die, the Dahaka stopped chasing after him, and...
And his whole kingdom is being raped by a merciless army of armored goons at the command of the Vizier, who was now alive since the prince prevented the making of the sands of time back in the second game. So the Vizier takes his kingdom, and soon manages (by a weird coincidence) to take his girl as well. And he throws the prince off a cliff. But hey, at least the prince gets the dagger of time back.
Well all this screwing around with the poor prince can't possibly have a good impact on him, so he develops... a double personality, which talks to you through the whole game. And with this, he also becomes some sort of sand monster which is like the Return of the Sand Wraith, but even more annoying: your health decreases like crazy, you kill enemies like you were a hot knife and they were butter, sand replenishes your life (coincidentally, most enemies you kill will leave a drop of sand behind, giving you full hp), you die if you wait too long, and whenever you see water, you turn back into the prince again (turning into the sand monster guy seems to happen only in fortunate circumstances, when you can benefit from his chain-swinging abilities). Somewhere around here is a picture of him, courtesy of google.
Now Two Thrones introduces a new combat system, named Speed Kill. Basically it tries to introduce some stealth into the game by sneaking up on enemies and killing them with a sequence in which you need to click the mouse button at certain (short) periods of time. If you miss one, the enemy suddenly kicks you off or something. This also introduces positioning, as you will need to jump some more ledges before you place yourself behind and above an unsuspecting enemy, in order to initiate a speed kill. It's fun, and a nice touch, but the combat system STILL is as flawed as the other games. Still no manual target. Still abusable, perhaps even more abusable as now most enemies will not resist the jump-on technique. So you basically do that 20 times, and voila, dead enemies. To not get bored, might as well do some 2-weapon combos in the meantime.
The fights get outright stupid at the end of the game, when you get the greatest ultimate offhand weapon the world has ever seen and every off-hand swing with that weapon causes instant death to all except the last boss. Speaking of boss fights, they introduced another new element to Two Thrones: boss fights + jumping puzzles. It's not enough that you need to wallrun, jump and swing on poles the whole freakin' game, you need to do that in some boss fights too now. Still, it's surprisingly fun when you do it and position yourself nicely enough to get a speed kill on the boss.
Far from the dramatic moments of the first, Two Thrones has much more depth and many moments where the prince needs to question his thoughts and actions.... obviously enough, he sorts them out in the end, therefore gaining the strength required to defeat the vizier and bla bla bla, we heard it all before. The chick in the second one dies, and you meet the princess whatsherface again. This time you don't need to protect her (thankfully) since you don't really travel at the same height. At the end, we come full-circle to the past, the prince starting to tell his story of how he owned stuff back in Sands of Time (which was narrated by him), therefore giving you that "oh, so that's when he told it" feeling.
Final thought... if you haven't played any of these 3 games, then go and play them. They're not the best you'll ever encounter, but if you want to call yourself a gamer, you should at least go through them once. They offer new experiences (the slow and rewind time features, the speed kill) combined with an interesting story and a pretty acceptable fighting system (did i mention the awesome soundtrack in pop2?) which no true gamer should miss.

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.