Deus Ex: The Final Review

Deus Ex is the first game where I’ve been disappointed due to the writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since Portal was the first game where I loved it almost entirely because of the writing, but you have to remember: I’m an Atari 2600 kid, back when videogames were just blocks and bleeps and bloops.  It’s odd, to see how videogames have evolved to the point where the gameplay can be 80% satisfying and yet the experience falls critically flat because I just don’t care about the characters.
The problem with Deus Ex is that 90% of its story is told via hacked emails, which – as I’ve bitched about before – are in low-contrast fonts that are too small to read comfortably on my screen.  So I wound up skimming them, even though I’m usually the guy who reads everything.  And if you don’t do the homework, then the plot becomes a barrage of OMG PLOT TWISTS where characters you barely know interact with story arcs you really haven’t been introduced to.
The fatal flaw here is that you don’t really interact with the main characters – or, rather, you have one or two conversations, but they’re not characters so much as transparent mouthpieces for the three core philosophies of the game (ZOMG MECHANICAL AUGMENTATION IS BAD!!! vs TECHNOLOGY IS THE LULZ!!!! vs CHOICE! CHOICE! CHOICE!).  It’s like a live-action Matrix: Reloaded game where you don’t talk, you just exchange diatribes.
To make things worse, you never encounter the lead characters doing anything interesting: they’re always off on the side between missions, talking to you about what they didn’t do. It’s like if James Bond encountered Goldfinger in between action sequences and Goldfinger just stood there, helplessly, denying everything he did and never actually tying you up or killing all his competitors on-screen or even showing off his spiffy new chapeau-wielding henchman.
That’s not a cool villain.  It’s a shadowy manipulator, sure, but it’s not satisfying.
So I knew nothing about them except what they represented.  And the guys I was actually supposed to beat up, the boss villains?  I knew less than nothing about, so I didn’t care when I beat them.  A particularly egregious example: From Wikipedia, I learn that one of the main villains is supposedly paranoid, since “being one of few women in a male-dominated profession has strongly influenced her worldview, making her cautious of everything around her.”
That would have been interesting to see.  Too bad Deus Ex didn’t bother to tell me.
As such, I didn’t have any real stake in the plot.  This is a game where the cut-scenes annoyed me, because the characters were all like, “OH MY GOD, YOU REALIZE THIS MEANS – ” and I was all like “Yes, yes, can you just drop me in the next room of crates so I can kick some ass?”
This “Philosophy over action” applies to, sadly, the end credits.  You have four choices you can make at the end, and they all seem cool…. except you don’t actually find out what happened.  Instead, you get a big windy speech justifying why it was so great you pushed the RAH TECHNOLOGY button, and never see whether pushing humanity towards cyborgization had any effect, positive or negative.  Look, fuckers, I don’t care about proposing augmentation, I care about knowing whether I made a difference. Like, you know, happened in the first Deus Ex.
(Also, the speech makes a big deal about how you’re a moral man who cares about people.  That makes sense for me, since I spent much of the game going out of my way to knock people out and not kill anyone.  Those who went through the game as a buzz saw through guard-skulls, however, will find a monologue that is laughably and provably wrong.)
Furthermore, the philosophical choices are weighted so ridiculously that it’s imbalanced.  On the one hand, you have the anti-augmentation side, who wants to beat you up and steal your lunch money and kill anyone who has contact lenses.  On the pro-augmentation side, you have every power-up that ever existed, giving you all the cool features that allow you to super-soldier your way to goodness.  Why would anyone be anti-augmentation by the end of the game?  There’s absolutely zero attempt to show us any disadvantages to having these augs (aside from the vulnerabilities that the antis exploit, and that’s not what they’re concerned about).
It’s like having an entire faction in the game be anti-puppy.  IF WE RELY ON MERE CANINES TO PROVIDE US WITH LOVE, WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO HUMANITY?
It’s not all a wasteland – I did care about my pilot, and they were smart enough to put her in danger – but in the end, no matter what good choices or bad choices you make, you get the same damn ending. So why did I make choices, then, if it has no real consequence? Shoot the whores, man, save them, they’re all ultimately worthless.
The gameplay is pretty good, too, except that the augmentation tree is a distinct disappointment.  Some of the tech trees are flat-out useless.  I played a stealth player, and literally left the whole “stealth” tree behind because all it did was show cones of vision on tiny sub-screen I wasn’t watching.  Likewise, the invisibility cloak burned up so much energy that I never bought it.  I finished the game with five upgrade slots completely unused just because I didn’t want them. That’s the sign of one stunted tech-tree.
You want to know what breaks the game?  You put all your points into hacking.  That’s it.  Once you hack, you get bonus experience every twenty feet, you take over turrets, you shut down cameras. Hacking is so superior to everything else that there’s literally no reason not to master it, even if you’re a psycho killborg.
Part of the problem is that you have batteries that fuel your powers… But that battery, while it recharges slowly on its own, never recharges beyond one bar.  You can buy extra bars with augmentations, but if you want to fill those bars, you need to use power-up items.  Which is dumb.  It means that the items that use energy become a liability, unless you can get usage out of them with one bar – otherwise, you’re burning precious power-up items.  This nerfs the cloak, nerfs the special sight requirements, and everything else. Why spent slots on augmentations that are hard to use and consume resources when you can just HAXX0R?
Don’t get me wrong – Deus Ex is a fun game.  Near the end, you feel like a complete badass.  In terms of gameplay, it completely absorbed me.
But I shouldn’t be irritated by a cutscene.  I was.  STOP INTERRUPTING MY GUARD-CHOKINGS WITH YOUR STUPID STORY, DEUS EX.
 

Call Me A Psycho, But…

I plan to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by ignoring all the maudlin sentiments and having a glorious fucking day, as though 9/11 never happened.
Look, it’s not that I don’t mourn those who were lost. But the goal of terrorism is – say it with me, children – terror.  And that day so scarred our national sentiment that we’ve all been fleeing like light-struck cockroaches every time anyone shows us a guy in a turban.  Every time a politician uses the specter of 9/11 to frighten voters into, I dunno, taking off their fucking shoes for the TSA, that means the terrorists win.
So you know what 9/11 the date is to me? Nothing.  It’s any other day in America. I’m going to go out, and kiss my beautiful wife, and have a nice cold glass of beer, and check in on my garden.
Take that, you bastards.

How The Ferrett Fucks Crowds

So after hearing that someone “Fucks like a beast,” and deciding that “Ferrett fucks like… well, you know that pair of shoes that’s always hanging from the telephone line from the laces, the ones you always wonder how they got up there?  Ferrett fucks like they got up there,” I asked y’all for suggestions on how I fuck.  I got some damned good ones.

• Ferrett fucks like Han shot first. (pnijjar)
• You know the point where you’re walking down stairs and not exactly paying attention and you hit the bottom step, except you don’t know you hit the bottom step and you step like there’s going to be another step and just for a moment it throws your whole equilibrium off and the world stops making sense for a second? Yeah, Ferrett fucks like that. (saaxton)
• Ferrett fucks like he’s got a few +1/+1 counters where it counts. (gomaironin)
• When the Ferrett fucks you think you can hear Carol Burnett’s Tarzan yell. (jemyl)
• Ferrett fucks like anybody else, only with a Benny Hill soundtrack.
• Ferrett fucks like Moose and Squirrel. (noumignon)
• When fucking, Ferrett always remembers that the enemy’s gate is DOWN.
• The Ferrett Fucks like Wil Wheaton dreaming he’s John Scalzi. (phule77)

And, perhaps my favorite:

“When I sucked The Ferrett off, I got mostly apples on both the nose and the palate with a nice lingering finish with just the right amount of acid. There was a slight hint of sweetness to my palate, but for being the first one I tried, it was a good start and it’s a good value for these kinds of parties.
“His second orgasm started with a hint of citrus on the nose with medium sized bubbles and a slight bit of yeast on the palate and a mix of crisp fruit. The second spurt of this orgasm had some citrus on the nose and apple and lime in the mouth. It was nice and crisp with just a hint of effervescence to me, a trait I find I enjoy this time of year.
“His depleted cock had notes of tropical fruit and banana, which I think added a hint of sweetness on the finish. I got notes of orange peel on the nose and floral notes in the mouth with a slight almost petrol note, perhaps from the lubrication he had used with other partners.” – chipuni

In an interesting parallel, I had the delight of a new partner just this past week – and she was willing to commit to my usual exit interview.  (Hey.  When I sleep with someone, I want to do a good job.  So I want the feedback.  Which, if allowed, comes in the form of a conversation about what was good and bad.)
I was given a grade of B+, with the notes that judged on my oral sex skills alone I would have probably gotten an A or more, but unfortunately I kissed with a hint too much tongue, and my stamina in the actual act of penetration provided an act that went on for too long to be fully enjoyable.
I immediately said, “Okay, a B+.  But if we grade on the curve of a first-time encounter?”  I am such a point-whore.

Deus Ex Hilarity

So I’m still winding my way through Deus Ex, but there’s an act of hilarity that absolutely kills me in the game.
For a game that wants you to save and reload a lot, Deus Ex is stunningly incompetent.  When you save a game, it churns for about twenty seconds, then provides you with a dialogue box (Hit “A” to continue!) that alerts you that boy howdy, that game’s done been saved.  Then you have to navigate all the way back out of the menu to the play screen.
Why does Deus Ex simply not return you, transparently, to your play-screen, with an on-screen message in the HUD saying “Game Saved”?  MORTALS CANNOT KNOW.
The good news is that t exit out of the menu, you must mash the “B” button at least twice, and generally out of impatience you’ll do it more.  But once you’ve dropped back into gameworld, the “B” button mutates from “Exit Menu” to “Punch whoever’s standing next to you in the face.”
So if you’re saving next to, say, an old man eating noodles at a shop, you’ll just randomly deck him.  It’s like your character’s so frustrated by this stupid game that he decides to crack-a-lack random strangers right in the chops.
…of course, you then have to reload the game, because then every cop and gang member in the world decides you must be filled with lead-induced holes, necessitating a minute-long reload sequence… but it’s worth it.  Almost.

This Is Why You Don't Do That

Yesterday, I posted about an argument I had with Gini.  The nature of the argument was irrelevant to the main point of the post, which is sometimes you need to use external markers to figure out when you’re out of line.
Yet that didn’t stop people from posting comments debating who was right in the argument.
The response was predictable; Gini felt she had to tell her side of the story, and people said, “Oh, I hate it when folks do that,” and Gini claimed she didn’t do that,  and while Gini was a good sport about it she still spent a good five minutes at lunch composing comments on her cell phone because dammit, someone’s wrong on the Internet.
This is why you never public-blog about your arguments.
At least not while they’re live.  Or freshly dead.  Or still rotting.  Basically, you only want to blog about your arguments long after the argument has passed that “stinking dead possum by the side of the road” stage and has passed into the “flat mat of faintly disturbing animal hair that is crawling with ants” stage.  If there’s any doubt at all who’s correct, then shut your yap.
I wrote about this a long time ago in one of my best essays, “I Aimed The Internet At Your Heart,” which talked about how to blog intimate emotions and still avoid emotional drama in your personal life.  What I said then was this:

“When you open up your relationship to the world, you’re calling sides. It’s getting comments from sympathizers, making people feel bad for you, confirming your point of view. Oh, you don’t think that you’re doing that – you’re just trying to get alternate opinions – but you are.
“And your partner will feel slighted. He won’t say as much to you any more, because he knows that your army of friends is against him. Let’s assume that you’re right, and that he is utterly and undeniably wrong. (It’s not very fucking likely, but it could be true.) It’s hard enough to hear that you’re an asshole when you know you are – but how many people are going to listen when a bunch of anonymous people you don’t even know are chiming in with a happy chorus of, ‘God, yes, that guy’s a dickhead?'”

Now, this didn’t do any damage, simply because Gini and I are experienced enough that we knew this would happen.  (And as a purposeful viewpoint exercise, I wrote it full-on from my perspective so you’d see how I felt when I apologized, instead of presenting both sides.  But it would have happened regardless.)  I read the essay to Gini before I posted it, as I do all essays about our arguments (another helpful trick), and she approved.
Yet if it had been something that mattered, well, this would have just exacerbated it. We’d still be fighting.
Here’s the deal: last week, Beavis and Butthead Do America was on, and I Twitter-posted how Gini was crazy because she didn’t think it was a good movie.  Later on, as an experiment, Gini posted how Beavis and Butthead Do America was an awful movie and how I was wrong.  We both got about the same number of replies.
The lesson here is that what will happen nine times out of ten when you complain about something is that the people who agree with you will post “FUCK YES THAT’S ANNOYING” and the people who don’t will wait for another thread.  Who wants to walk into someone’s journal and go, “Hey, you’re wrong here, this is fine” and get beset on by helpful friends?
There are times you may want to ask for help – when you think you’re in a bad relationship, and are considering getting out.  That’s fine.  That’s what friends-locks and filters are for.  (And generally, if you’re asking the question, you know the answer deep down already.)  But if you’re intending to stay, then find some other way to vent.
Because people will have opinions on what you do.  They’re not necessarily right.