So we've all beaten Portal (right?) and heard the amazing ending song GLaDOS sings to you after you win.

Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats fame went ahead and made a flash animated video of the song. It's pretty cute. Hopefully Valve will kick him something nice for it.

Watch it if you haven't!

An associate from the internet runs a website, and he dug up a forum post I'd done about the original Deus Ex about a half a year ago and cobbled it together into a review. He sent me an e-mail asking if that was okay and showed me the text; I took it upon myself to re-edit it a bit to read more like an actual review.

Probably worth noting that Deus Ex is my favorite video game ever, so it's hard not to drool all over it. I'm a raving DX fanboy, I admit. The second game was crap, but the original is pure gold (and on Steam for $10!) and I hate to say it but this was exciting to the point of arousal for me. If they pull it off and it's as good in reality as it is in my head...Man. I don't know what I'll do.

Anyway, commence review. Be forewarned, I lack screenshots so this may induce Wall 'O Text syndrome:





When I first saw the screenshots and read the about the ambition behind Deus Ex, it seemed like one of those games with its head in the clouds and no way to deliver on all the promises it made. The gist of the it was that it set out to be a hard science fiction "shooter RPG" set in a dystopian near-future setting where terrorism was commonplace, the underclass were being wiped out by a plague that many people suspected was government-engineered, and a half-dozen shadowy organizations, from the Illuminati on down, were all vying for Control of the World. In the middle of all this was you, and you got to play what amounts to a cop.

That's the setup, and all I needed at the time. I picked up the game based totally on the strength of its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2, which I'd absolutely loved, and figured it was going to be more of the same: Encounter baddies in a large, involved environment and solve a number of combat and situational puzzles in your method of choice while you developed your character down one of a handful of skill paths. Play the psychic, the combat guy, or the hacker. Expect spooky AI's whispering in your ear throughout and expect to get some kind of amazingly overpowered lightsaber-y weapon near the end of the game, the ability to be good or evil for added replay value, and a healthy sprinkling of journals to pick up to follow the backstory if you felt like it.

I was right about the AI and the lightsaber.

This game is basically System Shock 3, but seven years before BioShock and with a much more open-ended and interpretive slant on the 'Shock style of game. It's really the ultimate expression of DIY character development within a game world, but without the ridiculous handholding so many other games resort to in order to move the plot forward. The focused linearity of 'Shocks 1, 2, and Bio isn't here; you're free to roam, and the plot is there in abundance but doesn't leap into your arms for you. Dialogue abounds, there's often a peaceful (or at least sneaky) solution to puzzles, and many levels exist solely to further the plot. You're left entirely to your own devices for much of the game, only given a broad idea of what has to happen or which point you need to reach. How you go about that is entirely up to you.

This isn't to say the whole game is entirely freeform -- it isn't. But, it manages a linear design in such a way that you neither notice, nor care even if you do.

Nearly every scenario has five-plus ways to complete it, and half-finished concepts abound. The developers would toss in three or four obvious ways to go about something, then maybe stack some crates to a back window or give you a robot control widget and just let you figure it out from there, were you so inclined. The game has enough "open" systems in place to basically compensate for anything you could possibly do.

The Brute Force and Stealth n' Assassination approaches are each always viable options as well, so if your tricky Bond-like play of brazenly bullshitting your way into a huge corporation's main building doesn't work and you get turned away at the door, you can always opt for the unofficial Plan B and just blow the everliving crap out everything in your path. Or, just skip all foreplay before you even get to the prom: Knock everyone's head in half from a mile away with your customized, ridiculously powerful rifle, then stroll into an empty level and do as you please. No quicksave/reload shenanigans necessary.

On top of that, because of the way the game's designed, clever players are given access to what amounts to the entire plot well before it's supposed to happen, but only if you're clever (and only if you care). You spend a good one-third of the game on the side of Law and Order, so it's a bit disconcerting to discover a huge underground base underneath a manhole cover in the central part of New York City, or maybe a prototype weapon designed by a shadow government in a hidden room behind your dead brother's ex-girlfriend's apartment, but, as you might expect, these places tend to be secretive and require quite a bit of effort on your part to find them. None of these hidden areas have big neon signs over them.

Should you not find any of these, the game continues as normal. If you do, though, you get a lovely sense of chucking a giant monkey wrench in the works, when in reality the game is perfectly prepared for the player to find this stuff on the off chance and react accordingly. Crack open the developer cheat and take a look at the quest flags. There are hundreds of them, flagging virtually everything you can possibly do in the game, from walking into the women's bathroom by accident to killing off major characters hours before they're supposed to even play their part. Nothing goes unrecorded. This was a herculean bit of coding on the part of the developers, and it's rare you see this anymore these days; usually design of even forward thinking games leans much more favor of heavily controlled player herding for major plot events, not a "maybe the player will do this" approach.

While the moral lines aren't actually color-coded ( i.e. there's no "Good Points" and "Bad Points" to accumulate), human nature means that most people will guide their nanoaugmented private-military-science-project-cum-UN-peacekeeper JC Denton through the game as either a good-guy cop, or a total asshole. People tend to go for extremes in these kinds of games. Cleverly, the rationale for both makes sense in the game world, so the morality of the choice is literally totally up to you and how you want to role-play it. No matter which you do, it's never wrong.

As your brother Paul points out early on, you don't need to use lethal force in this game. JC is completely decked out in state-of-the-art nanoaugs and can easily subdue any criminal that regular police would have to resort to lethal force for. JC doesn't need lethal force. He's way too powerful for that. The few times when you do have to kill, it's against some giant killer robot or super nanoaugmented badass who borderlines on the immortal anyway. Lethal force against those far weaker than you should, you'd think, only be used as a last resort and only when absolutely necessary, and the game allows you to pursue this path of your own accord.

On the other hand, you're a multi-billion dollar killing machine. Not only should you not feel guilty about slaughtering an entire island full of terrorists, that's what you were literally made to do. It makes perfect sense in the context of the game, and it's something the game reinforces positively as you go. The terrorists are certainly using lethal force against your co-workers, the vast majority of whom are just doing their jobs. The United Nations police force you belong to is never painted as any kind of obvious aggressor. Your team aren't a bunch of jackbooted puppy-kicking gestapo or anything. They're cops, doing their job fighting off a heavily-armed terrorist force. Most of the time they're even outgunned, which is where you're supposed to come in.

So really, where do you drawn the line? You're blatantly more powerful than most of the enemies you fight. Those guys you mow down so easily are weak for a reason; they're nothing compared to the kind of kill power you have wired into your very body, and it is literally your job to be a military powerhouse when other measures of crowd control have failed. Whereas most games it's somewhat conspicuous how you can rip a random enemy's arm off and beat him to death with it, here it's absolutely expected of you.

You've been designed from the ground up to kill everything that needs to be killed. If you couldn't, something is seriously wrong, considering all the money that was pumped in to build you.

If you choose not to though, that's really sort of the same thing, isn't it?

Whichever side you chose to play it is purely a moral choice on your part alone, and there are ramifications for either one. The game itself makes no moral judgments whatsoever; either approach is rewarded and punished by whichever faction cares more about either outcome. The powers that be aren't real thrilled that their super expensive biological weapon has a conscience even against targets that are trying to kill him, and your fellow soldiers aren't real happy to have a pacifist in their midst while they're out there taking bullets in the gut from the people you refuse to kill. There simply is no "best" choice.

(This is one of the things that doomed Deus Ex 2, by the way. They tried to introduce morality, and it just didn't work. Lots of other things doomed it too of course, but the morality thing didn't exactly help. On that note, avoid Deus Ex 2 unless you're looking to play it to see how badly it blows this formula.)

This remains one of the few games I've ever come across where you can "do anything" and not have it feel like a sandbox. It's completely different than the GTA III model or even the Elder Scrolls model, where the quests are optional. The stuff you do in Deus Ex is not optional; how you chose to go about it is.

The whole "Killing Anna" event is a perfect example, and acts as a lynchpin for just how far the game is willing to take this concept.

Anna Navarre is a major character in the game. She's your superior in the police force, and is supposed to be able to curbstomp you at will, so when she orders you to kill a prisoner at one point, your character makes an objection on legal (and maybe moral) grounds but it's not like the obvious option is to kill her instead. The game never indicates this outright, but builds a scenario where you might try it.

After a heated battle to capture the leader of a terrorist cell, Anna demands you now shoot the unarmed prisoner, and furthermore demands you stop talking to him right as he's telling you all kinds of interesting stuff. You can keep talking to him, and she gets more and more pissed off as you do, eventually claiming she's going to report you to the Chief (which she does indeed do if you let her live, and you catch holy hell for it). The prisoner is saying things like "If you leave me here, she'll kill me. This'll be the last time you see me alive."

At no point does he even suggest you kill your superior officer to save him, but the thought has probably been planted. It's left entirely up to you to just try it and see if it works.

It sounds completely ludicrous, though. By all laws of game design, you shouldn't be allowed to kill off a major character so early in the story, especially when she's still got a ton of scripted stuff she's supposed to do. But sure enough, should you unload on her sufficiently, she dies! (And, amusingly, explodes! -- Try not to kill her too close to the captive or you're going to be bringing him back to HQ in a bucket.)

It really seems like it shouldn't work, even with all the hints dropped in the writing. This is one of those "only in videogames" things you do to putz around and see if it works, like shooting your friendly characters in World War II sims or making time paradoxes by killing Ocelot in Metal Gear. Best you're hoping for is an amusing game-over screen. To be honest, that's the only reason I thought to do it my first time through. I was never expecting it to actually work. Amazingly, it did.

Blow up Anna and Deus Ex won't even skip a beat. The game simply keeps going and dramatically re-shifts the plot to compensate for what should've been a game-breaking action. That was the moment when I became permanently hooked all those years back. I'd never seen anything like that in a game before, and nothing has had quite that level of holyshit-ness since as far as plot goes. Some games have come close, but never since have I felt like I was able to get away with something that wasn't supposed to be allowed and have the game not only allow it, but incorporate it flawlessly into the plot.

While the canon plot of the game doesn't have this happen, the incident is certainly not brushed off. It becomes a major plot point as your first big betrayal to UNATCO, and Anna's ex-partner will never let you live for it. He eventually discovers your murder and hunts you for the rest of the game. Often times in cutscenes you'll take off via helicopter only to see Gunter run in at the bottom of the screen and take a few potshots at the departing chopper. He rants and raves about your terrible betrayal and laments the loss of his parter.

The Anna-killing thing isn't the only one, just the first that players are likely to stumble into. If you fully explore the game, it's loaded with this kind of stuff. You can completely gunk up the default plot by being a complete tin-foil-hat-wearing bastard. Explore everything and trust nobody, because there really are conspiracies around every single corner. Paranoia is not only justified, it's encouraged and rewarded with some frequency. Stuff that you're not supposed to know right until the endgame can not only be discovered, but completely diverted mere hours into the beginning of the game.

And for all that? You can also just play it straight. Shoot the hostage. Follow orders. The game proceeds as normal. There are no manufactured plot events here. You make your own.

One thing I love about this game (and what was sorely, sorely missing in the sequel) is that it very meticulously builds a world around you at the beginning, and doesn't bring it down for a good long time -- you can, however, bring it down yourself way in advance. It will eventually happen anyway, but the ways in which it can happen are completely different. While the game will eventually force your hand for plot reasons, it never feels like it.


For example, if you don't kill Anna of your own accord, she will eventually show up down the road and fight you to the death, but much, much later in the game, and well after she's been given a good reason (and direct orders) to do so. Likewise, if Paul dies, this becomes a big plot point in the game, where JC is finally shown the corruption at UNATCO because they fuckin' killed his brother, dude. But you can save him! It's quite hard, and definitely not "supposed" to happen (nevermind that he's alive in DX2), but if you do, it completely alters a key element of the plot.

Nothing's ever come quite as close to a genuine interactive sci-fi novel that's written as you go. Other things have tried, but the guide rails are always way too visible. Here they blend in perfectly while still being there to eventually steer you in the proper direction, so the game never loses focus. It's almost magic.

But of course there are limits. The game isn't freeform and was never designed to be. It has a set plot, and things hurtle towards the same possible 3 endings no matter what you do. For all the narrative flip-flopping you can pull off, you're still just taking detours on a trip that's leading you to the same destination anyway.

That's not a negative thing, though. Considering this is still essentially an action game, it's mind bending how ridiculously elastic the the plot is. Yeah, you can't change the plot, but you can stretch it really really far and the game won't skip a beat.

This is helped along even further because the game breaks a lot of key design rules. There are a lot of areas that are just areas. You can walk around Hong Kong pretty casually, and maybe if you feel like it go swimming in the canals or try to jimmy open the back door to a restaurant to see what's in there. Some of my favorite moments in the game are from doing that in Hong Kong. It's such a great, cohesive, makes-sense-in-a-pleasant-way level. You can go to the dance club, wander the back alleys at night over the canals, head uptown with all the neon and activity going on, all that. There's restaurants, high rises, underground storefronts that all seem extremely natural and real, and all these places are loaded with people.

The people are what really set this game apart from its 'Shock brethren. There's more NPC interaction than your average Final Fantasy game, there are countless people to save or kill at random, and the gameplay is very relaxed and broad compared to the narrow survival-horror-y SS2. In DX you're far more powerful; in SS2 you're constantly being hunted, injured, and trying to get your damn gun to unjam so you can shoot whatever fucked-up thing is lurching down the hall before it eats you and assimilates you into a space-bacteria hive-mind.

Both are good times, just different. Generally if you like the former, you're going to love the latter.

That's really what it's all about, too. This game is going to appeal most to those people who want experiences with their games, who are willing to sit down and really immerse themselves and let the thing pull them into it.

And that's awesome.

I know this guy via the internet (okay, my Warcraft guild, commence "lol warcraft") who works for Microsoft. Nice guy, has a wife and kid, seems happy enough with his job that he's moving to Redmont to be "closer to the mothership" and cement his career with the company.

However, on the few occasions we chat about his job, I do get the impression that Microsoft is the victim of some serious managerial blunders simply because all the factions within the company are not communicating as well as they should be about things they should be.

I don't think this is exclusive to Microsoft or any kind of proof that the voodoo workings of various Open Source Shamans are finally bringing the company spiritually to its knees from within or anything; name me a giant monolithic company and I'll give you a minor planet's worth of people who can tell you how dicked over the whole thing is from the inside out. Still, the problem seems to be particularly rampant in Microsoft (as opposed to, say, Google) as they have a history of releasing a lot of stuff that either doesn't work, or only works by crippling half a dozen other things until the masses bang on pots and pans long enough to annoy them into fixing it via patch.

Add another one to the list.

See, apparently someone at Microsoft's Not-Gaming division saw how well this whole Xbox Live thing was going over at the Gaming Division and decided that hey, since some Xbox games were also coming out for windows, maybe we should have a Windows Live! You know, it'll be like the same thing where gamers can take their games on the internet and track each other's progress and stuff, and can act as an anti-piracy measure in the meantime! Even better, they can charge for it, just like an Xbox Live Gold Account!

That's right kids. Pay $60 a year to take your PC games online.

Yeah that's gonna go over real well with management who will surely catch the giant fucking flaw in the logic there right? I mean come on. The kids are gonna jump all over that one.

Apparently I'm just retarded for being sarcastic there however, as some cockwheel who probably makes more in one paycheck than I do in a year decided this was a fucking brilliant idea and the company went ahead with it. Now a bunch of PC games require it to run, even in Single Player -- Kane and Lynch and Gears of War immediately spring to mind.

Personally, while I think this is stupid as all fuck, I also sort of don't care. If some dude in MS got a paycheck because now I have to log into some other special account to play Xbox games on my PC, well, honestly? Whatever. As long as I can do it once, it never gets in my way, and I don't have to pay for it (and the paying part appears to be optional) I could honestly not care less.

People don't generally write blog entires about transparent things that work exactly as they should, though, so you can probably guess where I'm going with this!

I bought Gears of War PC yesterday, and returned it a couple hours later.

Do a Google search right now on "Gears of War" and "Crashes to Desktop". Or even better, check out the forums for the PC version of the game. Guess what totally-unnecessary-and-blatantly-money-grubbing program that Microsoft required Epic to include with the game prevents it from working at all?

That's right. Unless you fall into a veeeeeery narrow specification with your PC (such as using nVidia drivers that aren't even on nVidia's site for download anyone), congratulations! Windows Live will promptly crash your shiny new game to the desktop within a few seconds of starting a level. This is, of course, after the game itself loads and installs fine, and the only thing causing it is the Windows Live wrapper you're forced to install afterwards and load each time the game runs.

What the fuck, Microsoft.

This is a brutal failure on more levels than I have fingers to count them on, so fuck you! Make me load a staggeringly unnecessary program, and the watch with glee as that same program prevents me from playing the game I just bought. Awesome.

Last laugh's on me, though.

See this?



Yep, that's Gears of War, running A-OK.

All I had to do (and I shit you not) was track down a "patch" that was apparently coded by a Russian hacker, trust that it wasn't going to hijack my PC, steal my credit card number, and give me AIDS just for opening the .zip file, and then dump it in my Gears of War folder, which I hadn't bothered to delete yet.

Guess what? It worked! It completely crippled Windows Live and allowed the game to run perfectly without it. I just sailed through the first chapter and while things are a bit choppy, a fast scan of the reviews for the game say this is pretty common, and luckily the actual gameplay portion of it works fine.

After poking around the internet, it looks like a vast majority of the people who got the game were able to get it working by basically cracking it to run with no DVD, and this is despite a patch from Epic that was supposed to fix the problem.

So the best way to get Gears of War to work is effectively the same method one would use to steal it. Yay irony! Even better, the program that's basically there to (let's be honest here) prevent people from stealing the game is really only preventing people who actually paid for the game from playing it. Double Irony! Ultra Combo!

So like anyone with an internet connection and functioning eyes, I've been bombarded for the past month-ish by everything talking -- endlessly -- about Call of Duty 4. Big whopping deal, thinks me, I played Call of Duty 2 and could probably have only disliked it more if it gave me crabs, so why in god's name am I going to give half a piss about the same damn thing set in the modern era. Ooo, the Modern Era. 'Cause World War II was getting kinda stale after the eighteen-trillion-billionth D-Day scenario, so hey! Let's change it up. Woo. Now we have squad based military combat. Shit, that's right up there with making a Star Wars game with a Hoth level.

The hell do I care about such games? thinks me. I got excited when I found out I could emulate Bubble Bobble and Street Fighter III in the same program without having to change chairs to switch to the Dreamcast; my priorities are probably kinda screwed. If I wanna play Games Where You Shoot Some Guys I'll bust out Painkiller again.

But people wouldn't shut up about it. Oh, the single player is like the best action move EVARS, Oh, it has these awesome unlockable cheats that stains everything sepia toned and plays parlor music, Oh, your AI controlled squaddies aren't a bunch of gibbering retards and actually do stuff instead of running into a wall and dropping flashbangs on their feet, blah blah blah blah.

So yeah, here's me, a couple days later. I went to my girlfriend's parent's house for the holidays and lo, her brother had the game out for his 360 and was in the process of merging with some kind of Xbox Live Consciousness Singularity as far as I could tell. After his mom somehow managed to unhinge him from the console, I plunked down and figured I'd give it a whirl. In about 2 seconds Tim had pointed me into one of the cooler thematic levels wherein you and a buddy are all dressed up in camouflage, armed with silent high-powered rifles, and turned loose in Prypiat to go snipe some nuclear-bomb selling baddie in his face.

I love stealth gameplay (yes we do exist, and fuck off; I was there when Tenchu 1 dropped so don't get all Splinter Cell/MGS/Whatever whiny on me), I love giant abandoned cities to run around in (Stalker basically had me semi-turgid the entire time I was playing it), and while I'm not big on "realistic" run and gunnin', I do love me some sniping.

On top of that, this was actually done right. Checkpoints were fairly generous, the game knew when to take a breather and let the setting sink in, and the actual snipe itself isn't even the climax of the mission. Getting in and out (unseen) is. Modern day Ninjas with Guns and General Badassery is what it was.

When time came for the actual kill, it almost becomes a minigame. You spend the first half of the level sneaking into a hotel a mile(!) away from where your target will be and then waiting there for two days(!!) until he shows up. When you finally do get to take your shot at him, your partner rattles off all kinds of insane shit regarding how tricky the shot is going to be, which Tim translated: "See the flag on the jeep near him? See how it's blowing in the wind? The wind moves the bullet in the direction its blowing, so you either have to lead him or wait for it to die down. It takes like two minutes. I was sitting here forever."

At this point years and years and countless hours of muscle memory and mental dissection of game design kicked in, and I fired the shot about four feet from the guy and watched the wind gently curve it straight into his skull, which flew apart with satisfying results. Score! Tim grunted in what I will assume was approval, and that was pretty much it for me.

When time came to go, my girlfriend's mom was stuck with the unenviable task of trying to pry me away from the game. Wasn't easy.

So yeah, first thing I did when I got home was hop on Steam and buy it. Sigh.

Imagine my glee when it turned out to pretty much be the best thing I've played all year. It's got the "realism" bit in there but at no time does this come at the expense of the gameplay, which is tight, vicious, and just arcadey enough to be fun without turning into gun porn.

So yes I am a giant sellout, score one for the mainstream gaming scene, I hereby revoke my Cave Story rights, whatever. This game lets me solve airplane hostage situations. With guns. And grenades. While in flight.

And I haven't even cracked the multiplayer.

Kill me now.