But it’s not, and it takes some pretty dramatic Deus Ex 1 revisionism to claim that it is. While Human Revolution has some surface similarities it’s a drastically different kind of game in many ways, made by a team that either didn’t properly understand Deus Ex, or willfully ignored what made it special—preferring instead to ‘modernise’ it into an unholy union of Metal Gear Solid and Mass Effect 2.

Things that made Deus Ex a special game, one fondly remembered 11 years later:

• a great deal of player freedom at any moment
• a great deal of player control, never taken away except in conversations
• a consistent world, governed by elegant rules, that behaves in logical and expected ways
• large and open maps that can be approached in many different ways
• movement through and interaction with the world that feels organic and self-governed
• a bunch of other shit not so important to this post

Things that Eidos ignored, discouraged, or otherwise mishandled:

The best way to explain the differences is to show them, which someone has already done with this amazing mod that parodies modern game conventions and Human Revolution in particular. As well as ridiculing the cinematic takedown rubbish, it nails the poor level design. While the maps in HR appear large at first glance, they are stream loaded and enemy AI is restricted to small areas. The effect is that each play space is actually quite small, with a main path and some all-but-signposted alternative routes through a vent or through, maybe, a different vent. You complete one area and then you’re funneled through a door or a corridor into the next. Along with the other problems, it reduces the gameplay possibilities and results in a game that feels far more directed, controlled and restrictive than the original Deus Ex.

I can’t make a mod, so I’ll stick with words.

Here’s Liberty Island if it were made by Eidos today.

You start on the dock, and that is the first map segment. A cutscene shows JC arriving by boat and blundering over to Paul. The camera lingers on JC’s face because that’s usually what happens in the movies. Paul waxes lyrical about his and JC’s augmentations, and eventually gives you your objective. The game puts a marker on the radar leading you to a point 20 metres away, off the dock. There’s a gate at the dock entrance that serves as a streaming load point. You open it and walk though, the next segment is fully loaded up, and the radar updates to direct you to the front door of the Statue, with a secondary objective marker to go meet Harley Filben at the other dock.

The island outside the Statue is divided up into, let’s say, four different segments which you pass through in a linear order, and the enemies are restricted to those segments. The segments are separated by, say, doors or gates that funnel you into the next segment.

It’s probably daytime too; there’s no benefit to making it nighttime because the stealth isn’t light-based and the gold colour scheme makes slightly more sense this way. Actually let’s check Blade Runner. Night or day in that movie? Mostly night. Okay it’s nighttime then.

You move through these segments, which have far more crates in them than you would expect, all lined up handily to accommodate the cover stealth system. You take down a few NSF and are awarded more XP for being nonlethal and for using the 3rd person cinematic takedown ability. Along the way you deviate and head to the other dock to meet Filben. He seems evasive, so the game enters a convoluted persuasion minigame in which you pick a few conversation options from a dialogue wheel and the game displays a graph showing how persuasive you are being. You don’t listen to a word Filben says because the graph is all that matters. Anyway, he gives you the front door code so that must have gone well.

As you progress through the map you stumble upon a ‘secret’ back entrance to the Statue, but it requires Hacking Level 2, and you spent your first augmentation upgrade on making your inventory slightly larger than a match box. This is obviously The Hacking Path and you haven’t upgraded yourself properly. Don’t worry, there are probably two or three vents behind those glowing yellow boxes over there. Feeling patronised, you decide to take the front door anyway.

The game loads up the interior of the Statue. The Statue itself is split into three levels, each its own segment with its own enemies who will not wander from their assigned levels. Alex appears on your infolink to tell you Gunther is being held prisoner in there and the radar will update to show you his precise location. You exchange a few jokes with Alex (Fiction Writing For Dummies says that builds an emotional bond) and then head off to find Gunther. You cinematically take down the guard outside Gunther’s makeshift prison cell. When you enter the room there is a cutscene showing JC walking awkwardly over to him and the camera does the slow foot-to-face closeup reveal of badass Gunther. Then it enters an in-engine conversation with another inappropriate persuasion minigame where you can try to wrangle some extra information out of him via choices in the dialogue wheel. Gunther discusses at length the difference between mechanical augmentation and nanoaugmentation. You don’t have the option to give him a pistol and follow him while he guns down NSF, because the engine can’t support the AI crossing between segments like that. At the end of the conversation he turns away slightly from the camera and when you have control again he’s just gone.

Then you ascend the statue level by level, either snapping to cover behind the dozens of boxes lying around conspicuously, or moving through the vents which are everywhere. There are 27 computers in this map which you can access with the passwords that are lying right next to them, and all of them contain the same quirky email about employee rights and responsibilities. About 7 or 8 also contain a joke Nigerian banking spam mail.

Then you reach the top of the statue and find a door. You Use it and a cutscene begins revealing the NSF leader who is threateningly waving a gun. JC casually walks up to the terrorist leader, ignoring the gun pointed at him, and in fact turning his back on it several times. After a lengthy discussion about the Ambrosia haves and have nots the game reverts to an in-engine conversation with another persuasion minigame, featuring a graph showing how persuasive you are being. At the end you are given some options on the dialogue wheel: empathise, antagonise, or fight. If you choose fight (let’s go all the way with this) the game enters a Setpiece Boss Battle and dumps you right in front of the boss and he starts shooting before you can even fucking react. Seven reloads later you win and you watch a cutscene showing JC standing over the bleeding boss as he mutters a dying line of dialogue out of a Dean Koontz novel. You get 2500 XP for Getting Things Done and are rewarded with the Defending Liberty Steam achievement.

Well done.

[Spoiler warning: this article discusses significant parts of Anachronox's story, including big reveals, so it's really only intended for people who have played and finished the game, or people who don't intend to. If you do plan to play it one day, here's the spoiler-free version: Anachronox is excellent. You can still read about halfway down before getting spoiled, and there are some more warnings before they arrive.]

In a way it’s a bit hard to reconcile a love of Deus Ex with a love of Anachronox. Despite being made by the same company, albeit different studios in different cities, they’re very different. Deus Ex is one of those wonderful immersive sim things that values player freedom and expression while Anachronox is a console-style RPG with the linearity and low interactivity that usually implies. The design philosophies behind Deus Ex are what I think video games should be all about, while Anachronox is something else.

And yet. Tom Hall’s Anachronox is something very special. This game haunts me. Ten years after its release I still think constantly about its story, setting, characters. It’s a story about a timeless struggle between advanced civilisations, about strange planets and stranger inhabitants, about a space adventure and personal struggles, about comradeship and loss and redemption. It’s a game with eccentric men and dangerous women, with a self-aware robot and a shrunken planet, with an alcoholic superhero and a reincarnated secretary. It’s hard to describe and at the same time simple: it’s brilliant.

What must strike any player most strongly is the game’s uninhibited playfulness. It’s written and designed with creative abandon, and the result is a game with a sense of humour, an irreverence and a whimsicality that can only be produced in labours of love. And that’s exactly what it is. If a game has unofficial patches released by one of its programmers in his spare time after the studio has closed down, or has a standalone movie spliced together from its cutscenes by the cinematic director, you know it was a game made with love. You get that feeling every minute you play.

You can see the playfulness in the minor NPC names, like Brazz Tunkle, Taine Paradox, Dim José, Fazz Burbleman, Finian Paloo and Whackmaster Jack.

You can see it in the dialogue: the back and forth between characters, the creative euphemisms, and the many, many insults. In just the first couple of hours Boots is called a rude jerk, a monkey, a bum, a downtrodden bastard, moron, frowzy, poser, punk, smartass, schmuguggle, squab, butt steak, and an infirm bag o’ loose change. The many cutscenes feature some of the best voice acting this medium’s ever seen, but otherwise the dialogue—and there’s a ton of it—is all text. It communicates the voices of the rundown Bricks residents with shortened forms like wanna, gotta, gettin’ and lookin’. Sometimes the text boxes are moved around the screen to emphasise the tone, and often the interactive nature of the text boxes is used to deliver a punchline on its own screen for extra effect. In short, Anachronox embraces its form. It’s aware of what it is and has great fun with it.

That’s why it can click with someone like me who usually has no love for this particular genre. Anachronox plays with genre conventions, such as in the side quest to collect TACOs: Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects. To get a nice item for one of your party members, PAL-18, you need to leave him in one location for literally hours. There’s a crazy NPC preaching on a soapbox about everyone’s horrifying existence in which they just repeat the same lines over and over. There’s another NPC you need to click on over four hundred times to reach the end of his dialogue, at which point he blinks out of all existence in disgust, taking all your money with him. Anachronox knows how silly it is.

[Small spoilers begin here.]

You can see the playfulness in the design of the planets and other locations you visit during the 30-plus hours the adventure lasts, like the planet Hephaestus which advertises itself as a religious pilgrimage but is in fact a tourist trap. One of the more memorable planets is Democratus, a farce of a place that embraces the principles of democracy to the extreme. At least officially. Everyone has a voice, everyone’s voice is heard. But as you explore and speak to the inhabitants it becomes evident that everyone’s most concerned with following the crowd. It’s an incisive critique of democratic systems, and it doesn’t stop with just one visit. Out of gratitude to Boots and co for helping them out, Democratus’s rulers shrink the entire planet down to person-size and it joins your party.

The miniplanet makes itself useful later when you’re captured by a comic book villain. Because that’s what happens. On your way to what what’s shaping up as the climax, the game takes an elaborate detour and deposits you on a spaceship belonging to the supervillain Rictus from planet Krapton, and this segment is told through comic book conventions with plenty of POWs and SMACKs.

When someone hits the Emergency Parole Button (i.e. the airlock) in Rictus’s prison Democratus inflates to full size to save the party being sucked into space, and instead they’re scattered across the planet’s surface. If you happen to have Stiletto in your party at that point, you can play through a parody of the Endor moon from Return of the Jedi, where the Ewoks are evil and routinely terrorise the poor stormtroopers.

Before you reach these more bizarre places, the game opens on the comparatively normal Anachronox, a city-planet with a mysterious history, strange gravity effects, and huge structural plates that seem to move of their own accord. Boots introduces it to us by wandering out into the Bricks, getting beaten up by a thug, taking a look around, and muttering ‘I hate this place.’ It’s a great opening to a fascinating and unsettling location. The storytelling in the first few hours on Anachronox has elements of noir, and as Boots follows leads and meets the bizarre residents of the Bricks, the game plays out like hardboiled detective story as comedy. Early on you’re tasked with tracking down an unfortunate soul who had half his foot amputated in an industrial accident and asking him for his stinky, pus-filled sock. So you can give it to someone. Who likes to chew things. All this just so you can get past a door and finish what seems to be an innocent job for a grumpy old man.

[Mega spoilers begin here!]

From these humble beginnings we start learning about the artifacts called MysTech, and the game broadens out—really, really far. To explain how far we need a word that describes something bigger than the life of a universe. That’s the scale Anachronox deals with. It’s remarkable, then, that a story that tackles events on a universal timescale is memorable for at the same time focusing on something far smaller: people.

What ties Anachronox together is not the grand scale war between Order and Chaos, the Vyre and the Chatagra. By the end of the game that story is not finished. We get the impression it’s only just begun. And despite what desperate fans might say, it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. It ends at the close of Part 1. What ties Anachronox together are the stories of the varied companions Boots recruits along the way, and by the end his and their arcs are complete. Each one of these characters has challenges or ‘poisons from the past’ to overcome, and somehow this ragtag bunch of losers manages to solve their problems through their unlikely and serendipitous relationship.

Rho Bowman and Grumpos finally learn the secrets of MysTech, PAL-18 learns to deal with becoming a self-aware and agentic being, Paco regains his confidence and powers, and Democratus … Well, Democratus might be a lost cause.

Boots finds his redemption in becoming the universe’s saviour (as you’d hope) and the help of Fatima and Stiletto, the two women he loves, is crucial in that. This trio’s story is tied to the game’s most identifiable villain, Detta. He is a totally necessary character in this tale; the Order and Chaos conflict remains a little too abstract for most of the game, Chaos’s servants a little too mysterious. If Anachronox is really about the characters, the villain is Detta. He started out as a street kid maybe even lower in status than Boots before making it big ‘from a bloody cocktail of blackmail, extortion, and violence’, and now he commands respect through crime, fear and intimidation, loaning money to down on their luck schmucks like Boots and thereby, in Detta’s words, owning them. Fatima’s death and Stiletto’s life are both intimately tied to Detta—and the guilt that Boots confronts is the knowledge that Stiletto’s kidnapping and Fatima’s death are both his fault. Boots taking out a loan from Detta to pay for Fatima to be converted into a LifeCursor (a touch of genius that allows the player’s cursor to be an actual character) shows how much Boots cared about her and how much he’s lost. He can’t let her go but, given his own guilt, her presence must be a constant torture. These revelations, revealed as the plot progresses, add some extra tragic and poignant motivation to the characters.

Learning this past history through flashbacks complements the game’s structure. There are often return trips to planets previously visited, where a new companion or mastered ability can unlock new areas or secrets. Return trips are often rewarded with new information too, best demonstrated by the subplot of Detective Rukh and his trailing of a killer who’s been offing Tetra dealers, and who turns out to be linked to the universal events. It’s a story very easy to miss, or which will remain incomplete, if players don’t take every opportunity to explore.

There’s a consistent echoing of concepts and themes as the game progresses.  The idea of a ‘poison from the past’ is reflected in the character arcs, the threat of Chaos destabilising the universe, and the history of Anachronox itself. Long before we learn the true nature of MysTech, we’ve been exposed to it in Grumpos’s collection, in the MysTech tunnels and MysTech Museum. Each time we return to Anachronox or Sender Station we learn more about an underground revolutionary movement planning to topple Detta. We’re rewarded for a second, third, fourth play by catching glimpses of the Dark Servant presence before they’re fully revealed. This recurrence lends the game a familiarity. Locations become known, characters become friendly faces. Instead of presenting a brief slideshow of places and people, the ones in Anachronox deepen each time.

Aiding the familiarity are the memorable visuals and audio. The voice acting is top quality, with theatre actors Bruce DeBose and Raphael Parry the standouts as Boots and Grumpos, and the soundtrack is a perfect complement to the epic science fiction tale. It’s a beautiful game in the way all artistically consistent games are. Those unfamiliar with it might scoff at the Quake 2 engine graphics, but it has a confidence and consistency that absolutely works, and now it’s impossible to imagine Anachronox looking any different. Ion Storm ran with the low polygon and low resolution limitations: in Jake Hughes’s cutscenes the camera never shies away, never tries to hide anything. It zooms in close to the characters, it puts objects right in our faces, and we quickly understand that this is precisely how it’s supposed to look. And despite being a decade old, the engine manages to convey a wide range of emotions convincingly. Boots’s sceptical raised eyebrow is a signature, a cheeky grin is infectious, and one particular occasion when a character wrinkles his brow in sad regret is agonising.

It’s that gamut of emotions that makes Anachronox so easy to love. It manages to be hilarious and heartbreaking, serious and absurd. It’s a wonderful game in the most literal sense: it’s full of wonder.

Along the way it sometimes falters into corny dialogue, doubtful quest design, and nonsensicality, but at its conclusion it draws together the genre’s strengths and delivers a moment of emotion and reflection rarely seen in any genre.

Sparing the details, it involves a servant of Sauron, Amarthiel, and her quest to reforge a ring in the same forges where the rings of power (including the infamous One Ring) were made. Caught up in her plan are two elves: Laerdan and his daughter Narmaleth. To accomplish her goals, Amarthiel corrupts Narmaleth and inhabits her body. Rather than heed advice that his daughter is lost, Laerdan does all he can to get her back, including deceiving the player to ensure no one will stop him, however hopeless his quest is.

Before Amarthiel (in the body of Narmaleth) can succeed, her master Mordirith returns, after having been defeated by the player in earlier quests. Rightly wary of her ambitions, he strikes her down, cuts off her hand, and takes the ring. Before he can finish her Laerdan arrives, and to save his daughter he enters a fight with Mordirith he has no chance of winning. He is killed, and Mordirith leaves Narmaleth in her sorry state. Seemingly rid of Amarthiel’s spirit, Narmaleth helps the player in a final battle against Mordirith. In the fight she is finally defeated, and with a last effort she kills Mordirith. Successful, the player returns to Rivendell alone.

In Rivendell is the final resolution to Shadows of Angmar. You return to Laerdan’s room, where another elf gives you a parcel she discovered that Laerdan addressed to you, perhaps knowing that he wouldn’t return. Attached is a letter, in which Laerdan thanks you for your help, and begs forgiveness for his deception. Referring to the parcel, he writes, ‘Perhaps this will help you understand why I have done all that I have.’ Opening the package, you find his reason, his motivation, and his defence: it is a portrait of his daughter Narmaleth.

In LOTRO players have houses they can decorate with various items, including paintings. The story over, with enemies and friends all slain, the player can return home and hang the painting on a wall.

It’s one simple in-game object, but this painting communicates more meaning than blocks of NPC text ever could. Rather than trying to explain everything as a book or a film would, LOTRO explains it as a game can. In that painting is a constant reminder of all the effort we put in over the previous year, and (fantasy nomenclature aside) the very human story at the heart of it: a father’s love for his daughter, and his will to do anything to save her.

In a fantasy setting like Tolkien’s, it would have been easy to lose sight of those personal stories in an attempt to tell an epic adventure. What Turbine did right was to bring everything back to these two characters, and close their story in a way that allows us to remember it every time we go home.

It’s a problem when it comes to a game like People Can Fly’s Bulletstorm. At present we only have a demo and pre-release details to go on, but the inclusion of ‘skillshots’ with names like Facial, Rear Entry, Double Penetration, Gang Bang, and other pornographic terms has raised some eyebrows. Its marketing doesn’t do it any favours, with CliffyB speaking wistfully about ‘blowing out a man’s asshole’. Richard Clark at Gamasutra has sensitively and measuredly questioned Bulletstorm’s content, and we can mostly (though perhaps not completely) ignore an absurd Fox News story that blamed Bulletstorm and its ilk for rape crimes.

But most coverage of the game has progressed in the usual manner of screenshots, trailers, previews. Perhaps when the game is reviewed some writers will criticise the names of the skillshots. But I doubt it. They might find them funny, after all, as they’re entitled to. But I hope reviewers don’t simply ignore the obvious and unsettling coupling of sex and violence.

Bulletstorm has a degree of sexualised violence I’ve never seen in a mainstream game before. Living in Australia, I’m very familiar with the rather tenuous accusation of sexual violence levelled at Grand Theft Auto 3 a decade ago by this country’s classification board: that you could hire a prostitute and then kill her afterwards. Those were two different acts, and there was nothing violent about the sexual act itself. Yet it was enough to cause a temporary ban and editing of the content.

Bulletstorm, on the other hand, has no such excuse. How this game passed through the classification process unscathed is a mystery, and probably more worrying than the game itself. The violence and sex are inextricably combined in these skillshots. Shooting an enemy in the face is rewarded with a word that describes the act of ejaculating on someone’s face. (Whatever the more dim-witted of Bulletstorm’s defenders might claim, there’s no chance of Facial referring to a beauty treatment.) Shooting someone in the butt is rewarded with Rear Entry, and given the violent context the subtext of anal rape is clear. Gang Bang needs no explanation.

The names of these skillshots have turned what could be a passable shooter into a juvenile sex fantasy. At its most innocent, it’s teenaged boys giggling under the sheets. At its most guilty, it’s about fucking a girl (or a boy) in a gang bang, deeply penetrating her, fucking her in the ass, and at the moment of climax ejaculating on her face. That’s the game the developers at People Can Fly have created, supposedly because they think it’s a laugh.

Fox News went way too far, but its article has some justification. Bulletstorm is a contributor to a very troubling sexual culture. One in which ejaculating on a woman’s face and teaming up with buddies to tag-team (or whatever) a woman is considered acceptable. Rugby teams cop flak for it when stories of their ‘team building’ escapades come to light. Bulletstorm shouldn’t be allowed to escape its own responsibility.

That may be the most important factor here: responsibility. I’m no prude, but the thought of a 15 year old boy — an age when he’s finding his first girlfriend and experiencing his first intimate relationship — blowing away enemies and being rewarded with supposedly positive and rewarding terms like Facial and Gang Bang is deeply troubling to me. Developers making a game that will be played by millions must consider the impact of their product.

For a few years there RapeLay was the posterboy of gaming’s potential debasement. It still is. Taken on their own, of course RapeLay is ‘worse’ than Bulletstorm in its depictions of hideous sexual predation. But RapeLay will always be the nicheiest of niche products, the domain of the irredeemable. Those of us accustomed to normal and healthy sexual relationships need not concern ourselves. But Bulletstorm, packaged as a typical over the top shooter, can inveigle its way onto millions of screens, with its attitude that dominating and objectifying sexual practices are acceptable and fun. It’s far more influential than an obscure Japanese game most people will never hear of, and therefore more concerning. I’m not talking brainwashing. I give people more credit than do Fox News and the like. I’m talking the creation and moulding of a sexual culture, something that should never be treated lightly.

I’m aware I’m laying a lot at the feet of Bulletstorm here. As far as objectifying sexual practices go, the endless supply of terrible internet porn is a thousand times more responsible. That doesn’t mean we should welcome and reward any crossover of this stuff into mainstream games.

Game reviewers have an important role to play if they feel the medium’s ethics is an issue worth discussing (and maybe even something worth protecting). Imagine, if such a thing is possible, if Bulletstorm was a film. I suspect a dominant thread in reviews would be its puerility, its utter lack of a moral base. It’s just as acceptable for games to be judged the same way.

Wan Chai police station.

A touch bigger than the game version.

More beyond the click …

Up the road from the police station, wonderfully, was a little newsstand.

Up that way you come to Canal Road, which leads into the cross-harbour tunnel. That's the collapsed bit in Deus Ex, where the scientists were eaten by karkians.

A familiar name. Behind this sign lives a Porsche dealership.

Looking south down Tonnochy Road.

King's Hotel, next door to Kwan Chart Tower, in a similar place to Queen's Tower (Maggie's residence) in the game.

Queen's Tower in DX was at 1313 Tonnochi Road, so this green sign near Kwan Chart Tower was a small thrill. Not quite right, or the right road, but don't let details get in the way.

On the opposite side of Tonnochy are these apartments, right where Jock's is in the game.

Up a side street. Club Tonnochy is on the corner.

Probably the most DXish of the lot. This alleyway leads up the side of Kwan Chart Tower to some elevators at the back, just like the game. Note the security camera down the end, in about the right place too.

Ten years later is a good time to look back. It’s all the more appropriate with Human Revolution due for release before long — especially since Deus Ex fans are apprehensive about whether it’ll stay true to the series (by which they mean Deus Ex 1, but more on the sequel later).

Deus Ex was an important game, that was obvious right away. Even before its release it was much hyped in the games media. It was a Warren Spector game with a rich heritage. For people familiar with the Ultima games of the early 90s in particular, there were expectations, and for good reason; Deus Ex has an impressive pedigree. It’s often considered a member of the same family of important titles like Ultima, System Shock and Thief.

It’s been ten years, and it’s difficult to gauge just how significant Deus Ex’s contribution to the medium has been. It’s strange that a game considered a classic and widely praised didn’t spawn a flood of clones. Nothing has followed directly in its footsteps besides its own sequel, and in fact there are some characteristics of Deus Ex that modern games seem to shun. But it’s probably fair to suggest it contributed to the ongoing maturation of the industry. Its near future setting allowed it to deal with real political issues, not just philosophical ones, and Deus Ex’s accessible first person gameplay opened it to a potentially large audience. Its commercial success might have helped pave the way for BioShock years later, and the melding of shooter and RPG is increasingly common now as a method for character advancement. It’s been a significant game in the history of the medium, and arrived at an appropriate time: a game for a new millennium.

My own relationship with Deus Ex has been long and personally important. I didn’t follow the industry closely in those days and didn’t know which games were considered noteworthy. So I hadn’t played the Ultimas, hadn’t played System Shock in 1994, Thief in 98, or System Shock 2 in 99. Deus Ex was my first introduction to this family, and immediately it was something special. I remember it keenly. The first mission, the game loads and places you on a dock on Liberty Island. The sound of the sea, the wind, birds, the boat’s engine idling on the calm water behind; the music evoking just the right mix of suspense and adventure; a dark mood, pale clouds lit from beneath by the city of New York across the bay; and rising above a short distance away, the decapitated statue of Lady Liberty. It was a density of atmosphere I’d never experienced before, and I knew things had changed before I’d taken a step. That was the moment I realised a potential of games I’d never considered.

The start of a great adventure.

Following its release it was immediately praised. The combination of action, adventure and RPG came together to form something new and compelling. It was, in fact, difficult to describe. It puzzled the occasional checklist reviewer who marked it down a little because, well, the graphics were a bit dated. Or the voiceacting was a bit weak. The shooting gameplay was clunky. All true. The graphics were less impressive than other recent releases, character models were generally ugly, the shooter gameplay wasn’t as fluid as Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, stealth wasn’t as involved or nuanced as Thief.

A lot of the recent previews of Deus Ex: Human Revolution based on the E3 presentation are frustrating for the way they speak about Deus Ex ten years on. Previewers are quick to defend any changes in DX:HR by arguing that, well, Deus Ex was actually really rough and messy now that we think about it. The technology was dated even then, there was a lot that could be ‘fixed’. That’s true. It’s also not the point.

Fortunately at least one DX:HR developer understands that. PC Gamer suggested to art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete that Deus Ex’s artistic message was inconsistent because greasels and karkians didn’t seem to fit into the world, to which he responded:

Yeah, yeah. But hey, it worked. It totally worked.

Smart man, him. That’s the point that needs to be made: Deus Ex worked. Its ‘flaws’ are meaningless. It’s gone beyond the point of criticising any single part of it as weak or messy. Not even the sum of its parts any more, it is simply Deus Ex. That’s why any changes to the game in sequels or prequels are always dangerous: the moment you change something, even to make it better, it becomes a little bit less Deus Ex and a little bit more Something Else. It’s also why defending changes in the prequel by using the rationale that, hey, Deus Ex wasn’t perfect you know, misses the point entirely. We went through that with Invisible War, we’re going through it again now.

It’s a conundrum for all concerned: everyone wants the ideal followup to a classic game, but how can that ever be possible when every change necessarily makes it something different? The ideal Deus Ex is only ever a dream, the ideal sequel never possible. Not back then, not now. There are some characteristics of Deus Ex that help explain its longevity, however, and which any followup should keep in mind.

A reactive world

Certainly back in 2000, most reviewers and players realised Deus Ex was more than any one feature. Those who worked on the game often used the term ‘immersive reality simulation’. It’s a description you don’t hear nowadays — and in fact ‘immersion’ has become a dirty word in recent years in some quarters. But immersive reality sim is such a useful term for describing what Deus Ex is, why it’s popular, why it’s a classic, why it’s still unsurpassed, and why it’s still fun to play again today.

Let the quibblers debate the definition of immersion; we know what it means. Deus Ex captures you, places you in the fictional world of 2052, with its rich backstory and complex relationships between characters and organisations. Despite the dated graphics, it’s a realistic world in that it’s consistent in its presentation and its rules, with potential for emergence. Remember emergent gameplay? It’s not spoken about nearly as much nowadays, but it was always important in discussions of Deus Ex.

Emergence could be something as simple as throwing a LAM at a locked door to blow it open. It sounds trivial, but it cuts to the heart of how Deus Ex was designed. There isn’t a dedicated Locked-Door-Opener-Grenade. The LAMs have certain properties, doors have certain properties. When those properties impact on one another, emergence is the result. It could also be more complicated, like hacking a computer terminal and taking over a gun turret, which attacks an enemy bot, which explodes and opens the adjacent locked door. Emergence is just a matter of learning how objects interact with each other; simple rules for how explosions affect objects, what is affected by EMP blasts, how gas grenades affect humans, and so forth, which can then be combined in creative ways.

This is key in how Deus Ex allows players to be improvisational, planning approaches and attacks and then adjusting if things don’t quite go to plan. It’s why we feel so in control when playing Deus Ex: because there are so many opportunities we can choose from. In fact ‘choose’ is the wrong word. We don’t choose, we create. That’s the magic of Deus Ex. And it’s much more than just building multiple entrances to a warehouse.

I’ve not heard Eidos Montreal, or any journalists for that matter, so much as mention emergence in the context of Human Revolution. For such a central component of Deus Ex gameplay to be ignored like that suggests it’s not a central component of DX:HR. That would be a shame, because creative moment-to-moment gameplay is a major reason why Deus Ex is still fun to play today. It’s never the same thing twice. A map — and everything in it — is sprawled out before you, you choose how to approach it, and every time something new happens. It’s a far cry from the ‘cinematic’ approach Eidos Montreal is taking with their game, with their liberal sprinklings of cinematic cutscenes and cinematic conversations and cinematic takedowns.

The developers at 2K Games following in the System Shock tradition with BioShock and XCOM are probably the standard-bearers for emergent gameplay in immersive first person games today (though a great many strategy games embrace emergence more than any shooter has). As boring as BioShock was, it gave players a selection of tools, put them in control, and let them go. I have, in fact, heard 2K developers mention emergence while discussing XCOM at E3, so hope remains.

I’m not sure Eidos Montreal is interested in that kind of gameplay. In a presentation many years ago, Harvey Smith explained the role of emergence in games like Deus Ex and System Shock 2, and described Deus Ex as a ‘dated paradigm’. Ion Storm was trying to push creative gameplay further way back then. It’s disappointing that Eidos doesn’t seem to be using the opportunity of a new Deus Ex game to continue where Ion Storm left off, instead falling back on carefully-planned dialogue options and multi-path approaches to give players choice, rather than crafting reactive environments that encourage creativity.

In their excitement to make a ‘cinematic’ game, Eidos is creating something that — in some ways — is almost anti Deus Ex. The leaked gameplay footage from E3 shows control frequently taken out of the player’s hands. The game cuts away to a close up of a conversation between Tong and another man which progresses the plot. At the end of the presentation the gameplay pauses and we watch a cutscene showing Adam Jensen discovering a bomb about to explode, and then leaping through a window into the arms of a large and angry man. Earlier, Adam drops from the roof of a warehouse, the game cuts to third person, and we watch him decimate a group of four enemies. The third person takedowns in Human Revolution certainly look cool. The footage might sell a few copies. But once we buy the game we don’t watch it, we play it. Deus Ex understood that.

This is what ‘takedowns’ look like in Deus Ex.

Taking down Scott the UNATCO trooper with baton. Non-lethal.

Taking down Scott the UNATCO trooper with large knife. Lethal.

Dumping the corpse of Scott the UNATCO trooper on Manderley's desk. Impolite.

Exploding Manderley with a GEP gun. Psychotic.

You choose your weapon, which comes with certain characteristics, such as lethality or non-lethality, you equip it, you sneak up to your target, and you knock them out, or stab them in the head, or slice up their body until it gibs, or carry their body through a map and terrorise your old boss with it, or something less anti-social.

Now here’s what Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s takedowns are more akin to, courtesy of Alpha Protocol.

A or B ... So many choices ...

You get close to your target, some large text prompts appear, you choose to press A or B, and you watch your character ‘take’ your target ‘down’ for you.

This is not a criticism of Alpha Protocol; it’s a marvelous game and don’t let reviews tell you otherwise. But despite a few similarities, it’s a different kind of game from Deus Ex. Alpha Protocol’s RPG roots take centre stage, and performing actions and engaging skills is more like rolling a die or playing a card in a tabletop RPG. (And AP doesn’t completely remove the camera from the player and swirl it around ~*~cinematically~*~.) It suits the game nicely. But Deus Ex was never that kind of game. We come back to the term immersive reality sim: a richly simulated world with the player always in control, choosing what to do and then using the supplied tools to do it. You never have to sit back and watch the game play itself for you.

Unfortunately that’s the direction Human Revolution seems to be taking with it’s cinematic focus. It’s not damning. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the rape of Deus Ex. It’s just disappointing because it’s not what Deus Ex was ever about. ‘Cinematic gameplay’ is an oxymoron. In order to do both you must weaken both. Along with its stable of predecessors, Deus Ex was proud to be a game, proud to put players in control at all times. It had no desire to be a Michael Bay movie, and didn’t try to sell itself on its cinematics. The only cutscenes were at the beginning and the end, bookends to a player-told story. Human Revolution wants to tell a story in its own way, and will drag us along whether we like it or not.

The details of system design is probably not a concern for most, though. The more obvious strength of Deus Ex is its fictional world design, and I suspect that’s an area where Human Revolution will stand tall too.

A believable world

In between loading onto the Liberty Island docks and stepping into the Helios AI chamber about 35 hours later, Deus Ex presents a rich and fascinating world. From New York to Hong Kong to Paris to Area 51 and places in between, the locations have a strong sense of identity and place, and are populated by a big cast of memorable characters. Manderley, a weak puppet of Walton Simons who seems stuck between doing the right thing and not being fired and/or killed; your mechanised co-workers Gunther and Anna who seem caricatured until your emotional showdown with Gunther in Paris; Smuggler, an underground weapons dealer in Hell’s Kitchen, who you can save or leave to die when MJ12 sweeps the area to find you; the Rentons and their ongoing family drama (‘What a shame’); Shea the bartender, defensive about her mechanical augmentations; Jojo Fine, big-talking NSF leader slash pimp; Maggie Chow, retired actress and now involved in the top levels of a global conspiracy; Nicolette DuClare, the heiress of her mother’s fortune but not her ideology; and Jock, your grizzled and slightly drunk pilot (‘A bomb’). And there are smaller characters who contribute to the whole, like Louis Pan, the annoying kid doing footwork for the Luminous Path, Tessa and Mercedes who convince you to pay for their entry to the Lucky Money, or even the two dead zyme addicts in the ‘Ton Hotel. They might exist as only a couple of lines of dialogue or less, but they all belong.

Some are more than just a couple of lines. There’s Morpheus, the prototype AI in Everett’s house who schools JC on issues like social observation, structure and control in a conversation that brings together of number of the game’s themes. ‘The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature and answered by death,’ it tells JC. ‘You are another kind of question, with another kind of answer.’ The NSF leader in the statue speaks about the role of government and big business while defending his group’s tactics. Isaac the bartender in Hong Kong criticises the structure of western governments in the worst Australian accent you’ll ever hear.

'A think tink?' Maybe he's supposed to be a kiwi, come to think of it.

The environments, and their well-matched music tracks, themselves become memorable characters. Names like Liberty Island, Battery Park, Hell’s Kitchen, Wan Chai market, VersaLife and many more prompt memories of innumerable great video game moments, and they’re places that stick in the mind years later. I was in Hong Kong recently, and being a shameless fan I wanted most of all to scout out some Deus Ex locations. Best of the lot was finding the real Tonnochi Road, which ends in a y not an i.

The virtual Tonnochi Road.

The real Tonnochy Road.

The similarities filled a Deus Ex fan with joy. On the left was a King’s Hotel and a Kwan Chart Tower — not quite the Queen’s Tower housing Maggie Chow in the game, but close. There’s an alleyway leading up the side of Kwan Chart Tower which leads to some elevators at the back — just like in the game. On the opposite side of the road are some dirty apartment buildings, in just the right place to be Jock’s.

How wonderful and extraordinary that a game can prompt such moments. This is a hallmark of a classic: something that can forge such strong connections with a player that seeing the real place ten years later is such an excellent moment. If Human Revolution’s environments can inspire such wonder, Eidos will have succeeded in creating a worthy followup. It’s a big ask, but it looks promising so far.

Along with the level design comes the storytelling, at which Deus Ex excells. This is a world in which augmentations and nanotechnology and advanced AIs and secret organisations and rich men conspiring to control the world all seem to belong, and they combine to craft a compelling story in which JC — you — decide the fate of humanity. It doesn’t get much bigger, and could easily fall down if weren’t for the deep treatment Deus Ex gives its plots and themes. The fiction is expanded in numerous ways, from environmental storytelling to an abundance of text — email, datacubes, newspapers, books — that gives background and context to the world of 2052. We learn about President Mead’s domestic political troubles, about the nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, about Page Industries killing thousands of people in order to sabotage a competitor’s attempts at lunar mining, about the history of the Northwest Secessionist Forces and how they’ve been characterised as terrorists, about advances in human augmentation first in mechanics and then in nanotech.

None of these details are essential to the plot, but they enrich the world and create the impression that these places and the people in them live their lives independent of you the player. It’s a world you explore, not a place that’s been created specifically for you.

Sharing the details of this world is what kept us fans happy following Deus Ex’s release, and we chatted together happily awaiting the release of Invisible War. And then it was released. And oh dear … the reactions.

An unbelievable world

I was a moderator on the Ion Storm and Eidos forums during those days when Deus Ex fans made their opinions known in enraged howls of betrayal. The critiques were energetic, though in most cases not terribly insightful. It’s been consolified, the inventory is too simplistic, where are my skill points, why is the HUD a circle, I want to type passwords into computers, where’s the headbob, why are augmentations called biomods, is augmentation too big a word for Xbox players, Alex is a pussy, the maps make closets seem spacious, all the weapons use the same ammo, you’ve dumbed down Deus Ex. There was some truth there, and some of those issues were symptoms. But there were more fundamental problems.

It’s not that it was a bad game. For all the complaints that it wasn’t a worthy sequel, it was still a Deus Ex game insofar as it was a globe-hopping world-changing conspiracy story which unfolded through a combination of shooting, stealth and dialogue, with various ways of building your character, multiple playstyles and solutions to problems. Unfortunately it did all of that stuff worse than Deus Ex 1. Given the surface similarities between the two games, it’s notable how pointing out the flaws in Invisible War results in highlighting the strengths of Deus Ex. In other words, everything Deus Ex did well, Invisible War did poorly. Comparatively. That’s why there were such vociferous reactions from fans, and that’s why they felt it failed as a sequel. Different sets of strengths and weaknesses is exactly how Harvey Smith (lead designer the first time around, and project lead the second) described the two games to Gamespot back in 2004. (His own scores for the games were 90% to Deus Ex and 85% to Invisible War, which are pretty close to their Metacritic ratings too, for what they’re worth.)

The way I always described the difference between them, in extensive debates for years afterwards, was simple and encompassed what I felt were the real problems with the sequel: Deus Ex was a world, Invisible War was a game. Deus Ex had such a degree of detail: a huge cast of characters, extensive dialogue, sprawling maps, descriptions and explanations of every item you picked up which justified their place in the world. It was a world you could live in, explore and feel.

Most importantly, and this is worth stressing, Deus Ex had what a lot of game studios today would probably consider redundancy. If it were made today, most of Deus Ex would be stripped out as unnecessary. Is this map/character/quest/subplot/item important for the gameplay or main plot? No? Lose it then. And yet it’s precisely the ‘unnecessary’ content in Deus Ex that made it an extraordinary representation of a future world.

Take, for example, one of the goals both games give the player: find Tracer Tong. Simple on paper.

In Deus Ex, you leave New York pursued by MJ12 and fly to Hong Kong, have your helicopter captured at an MJ12 base, release the chopper’s weapon locks, blast your way into Wan Chai market, explore and find many new areas and characters, are told by Gordon Quick you need to gain his trust by visiting Maggie Chow and discovering what’s up with a special sword and a triad war, are told by Maggie to visit a police station in Wan Chai, discover Maggie’s up to no good, return to her place, find the sword, are told by Tracer via infolink to take it to Max Chen and end the triad war, go to the Lucky Money Club, talk to Chen, fight off an MJ12 ambush, talk to Gordon Quick, who finally lets you inside to see Tracer.

Tong is here somewhere.

In Invisible War you land in Trier, walk into a pub, and Tracer’s waiting for you in a back room. For some reason.

Oh.

Fictionally there’s no reason for Tracer to give you a similar run-around, true, but the point is clear. In Deus Ex you have to work to achieve your goals, and in the process you explore well realised places and meet interesting characters. In Invisible War everything is handed to you. If you need to meet a certain character, they’re bound to be waiting for you around the corner. If you need to get to a certain place, you’ll spend more time on loading screens than exploring the space between here and there. Like it’s some kind of video game or something. It’s stripped down, efficient and unsatisfying, and it’s what’s wrong with a lot of highly polished games today.

(Morrowind and Oblivion are characterised by similar differences. Morrowind is a highly detailed, hand crafted work of art, a world beautiful, frightening and fascinating. Oblivion is a pretty and anaesthetised bore, neutered by Bethesda’s desire to make a ‘better’ game.)

Harvey Smith has explained his own thoughts about the sequel in a conversation with Warren Spector as part of a master class at the University of Texas. As well as a refreshing admission that they ‘fucked up’ in various ways, most interesting is the claim that during development of the sequel Ion Storm listened too closely to their ‘designer friends’ rather than fans, leading to changes in Invisible War that felt important for the game design but which fans didn’t appreciate. To put it mildly.

Along with less complexity in world detail came a different focus on the player character. In Deus Ex you start out as an unproved agent under the control of your superiors, you’re dismissed by Walton Simons as a troublemaker who can be put down at his whim, you need to work hard and jump through hoops to uncover the truth. It’s not until the last third of the game (which is its weakest, probably not coincidentally) when you start giving Bob Page a headache that you become the central player in the drama. In Invisible War, on the other hand, you’re always the most important person in the world. Everything revolves around you, everyone’s either looking for you or is waiting for you, as in the Tracer example above. Only you can change the world, Alex, the game makes clear as it pats you on the head and sends you on your way. It’s simply not as interesting: it’s playing through a game rather than exploring a world. The insistence of so many developers to make their games All About YOU might play to the power fantasy aspect of gaming, but it has consequences for the fiction. I’d rather be a regular guy doing his thing as the world turns than The Chosen One™ who must save it.

Take another example. In the Paris street map in Deus Ex there’s an apartment you can enter on the second floor of one of the buildings, occupied by a couple discussing their future. It’s utterly unnecessary for the plot, there are no interesting items to find there, it’s pointless — except for creating a more believable world. For that, it’s very important, and serves to reinforce the drab and depressing mood of a city under martial law. There are occasional attempts at this in Invisible War, but the maps are so small that it’s obvious and forced.

O and Rene, two of the supporting cast.

Right, the maps. This leads to the real problem with the sequel: the technology. Everything that stops Invisible War being great is attributable, ultimately, to a horrid game engine. The small maps prevent a believable depiction of the world, the time spent trying to work with the engine obviously led to large chunks of content being cut out, resulting in a truncated plot and undeveloped characters, the aesthetic ugliness and inconsistency of the game is a direct result of the tech, and let’s say nothing of the epileptic fit that is the game’s physics. Harvey Smith, in the same Gamespot interview linked above, said he wished they hadn’t made their own tech, and I’m sure Invisible War’s pre-production documents would be painful to read now for the lost opportunity. These flaws of Invisible War serve as testaments to the successes of Deus Ex.

All this sounds quite damning, but Invisible War does have some things going for it. The one thing it did better than Deus Ex was creating interconnected game systems that allowed for creative solutions to problems, something Harvey Smith was always passionate about. Again, the small maps prevented the game design from reaching its potential here, but it’s still a notable achievement. It’s possible to complete the game without even picking up a weapon thanks to this flexible design, which might be an odd goal to set yourself but it does suggest stealth gameplay is solidly designed at its core. The game contains a lot of dialogue about political systems and sociology, which might be forced but remains interesting, invoking names like Russell and Tocqueville during its sociological discussions, and Foucault and Montaigne for more philosophical reflections. It’s not simply namedropping, these names and their ideas are important for the choices the player makes to decide the future of the world. And the game does have its moments: breaking into a Seattle apartment at night and evading the security systems almost feels like playing JC again.

More than anything we can appreciate Invisible War for continuing the Deus Ex story: the Denton family story, and perhaps even more so Helios’s story. The AI’s attempts to transcend humanity and transform human society led to unnerving results at the end of Invisible War, and I still get goosebumps watching that ending cinematic. ‘The only frontier that has ever existed is the self.’ Whether it’s a singularity fantasy or socialist dream or a relevant warning depends on the viewer, but it strikes me as the ‘proper’ ending to the Deus Ex story, and is the logical continuation of the Helios ending in the first game.

And now there’s a prequel on the way, made by different people in a different game generation. It will be a different game in many ways, and it will probably be quite good. Eidos Montreal is quick to assure fans that Human Revolution takes its cues from Deus Ex rather than its sequel, but time will tell exactly what that means. Given the intervening years and the disappointment of Invisible War, I think most Deus Ex fans will accept most gameplay changes Eidos makes. The pragmatists, at least, will appreciate a high quality Deus Ex game, and acknowledge that a perfect followup can never be. But what will probably matter most is the creation of the fictional world, one that’s complex, rich in detail, thoughtful and memorable. That’ll go a long way towards making it a Deus Ex game.

How does one get on this thing?

If you get the joke, I tip my hat.

I was a little surprised by how many games journalists and commenters agree with him, and seem to think RapeLay is perfectly fine. The defence of Japan as a country and society in the face of some aggressive quotes in the CNN article is probably fair enough; but I’m more interested in his defence of hentai games, including ones featuring the rape of women and children like RapeLay — because a lot of the arguments echo the ones we use to defend violent games here. Trying to find a difference between the two arguments is kind of interesting.

Those products are developed for rational adults. You surely don’t believe that a rational adult would be influenced by such a game into committing rape, do you? Of course, in Japan, both that game you reported about and the hentai manga I draw are only distributed and sold under strict age restrictions to adults.

…

We make works of art. Let me say that again. It is just art. I assume that you are capable of distinguishing fiction from reality like we do. Are you not?

I don’t think ‘it’s just art’ is ever an excuse for anything, but the rest of this sounds familiar. If we defend violent games by saying they’re aimed at adults and they won’t make you pick up a gun and kill people, it seems pretty fair that Nogami can use the same argument for hentai games. Non-interactive hentai porn is nothing new and seems to have a strong audience, and there’s a genre of porn involving rape fantasies. A lot of S&M deals with it, and that kind of stuff (for some reason) is enjoyed by very balanced people in stable and fulfilling relationships.

The ludophobes would no doubt suggest playing a rape game will lead you to rape. Or, you know, “While I don’t think that playing games causes people to go out and do things, what it can do for those who may already have that preclusion is further break down social barriers to them taking that action.”

I don’t think it’s that simple (and nor is Nogami’s defence). It’s more an issue of this kind of content working to shape attitudes towards women in particular. It’s not a case of virtual rape = real rape, it’s a case of submissive depictions of women = submissive perceptions of women. All this western porn showing men ejaculating on women’s faces has a similar effect, and I think it’s hard to argue otherwise. (After all, it’s commonly accepted that unrealistic depictions of men and women in magazines results in unrealistic attitudes towards our own bodies. It would be disingenuous to suggest popular cultural productions have no effect on us, because that’s obviously untrue.)

But in that case, what about our arguments that violent games are fine for adults to play? Anyone who suggests a violent game will make someone imitate the violence, like your Jack Thompsons and Michael Atkinsons, doesn’t understand the issue — but there’s still the point about attitude shaping. I think it’s also disingenuous to suggest that depictions of violence, in all media, has no effect on adults. I have no doubt the barrage of violence has a (probably very serious) effect on our attitudes towards each other: the fear of strangers, the voluntary isolation within crowded communities, and so on. There’s always someone wanting to do bad things to you. And the glamourisation of violence has always encouraged young men to beat the crap out of each other. The effect of violent media is an old issue, and there are a lot of similarities in the arguments that defend it, and the arguments Nogami uses.

I do think there are a couple of important differences though. For one, violent media tends to align viewers with a Good Guy. Violence might be a solution, but it’s a good solution to a bad problem. In RapeLay the viewer/player is clearly not a good guy. That’s one of the redeeming features of violent films/games/whatever. Even in something like Manhunt there are reasons for it, it isn’t mindless. In RapeLay you’re just getting your rocks off at a helpless victim’s expense.

More importantly, there’s the problem of sexual depictions of especially children creating a market for it. This is the reason there are such harsh penalties for simply possessing child porn: if you help to feed the market, you’re indirectly contributing to the exploitation of real victims — even if the depictions are virtual.

Following from that, if we compare the effect of these kinds of violent and sexual depictions, there’s another big difference. Young men fighting each other is simply not as emotionally and personally destructive as the sexual assault of an unwilling victim. Or if we don’t want to go that far, at least the subjection of women in a dominated role, in an era when equality is an almost-global ideal.

There are a lot of circular arguments here and a lot I’m not taking into account (not least cultural differences, but I don’t know enough about Japan). But the short version: the differences between violent media and sexually exploitative media are pretty subtle, and suggests to me that arguments in defence of violent games should be a little more careful and detailed to avoid contradictions. In any case, discussions about these things should be about media representations in general, and not focus on a particular medium, which has been the case in all the coverage of RapeLay. It ignores all similar representations elsewhere and suggests it’s a new problem with video games.

At the same time, seeing gamers and especially games journalists blindly defending something like this because they see any criticism as a threat to their medium is simply harmful to this whole discussion. While I don’t think simply banning stuff we don’t like is a mature response, we are always free to criticise tasteless creations. RapeLay is one such.