I start here with the boring details of my life: if not for the boring details of my life, I have nothing.
In my bedroom I'm trying to clean up a bin of DVDs. It includes a Deus Ex (1997?) CD-ROM. I see it from time to time and am glad to have it. I collect video games.
I played it years after it came out, but still years and years ago. I remember only a few details; the statue of liberty where at the top are some remote mines, some kind of back alley where you climb ladders, a room underground where there was water or a locker or something, a phone booth in a subway station that took you to the mole people, going into the bathrooms at the office, taking the boss's basketball. I remember a certain spaciousness to the game. I don't remember it being hard.
This spaciousness is, I think, important for 3D games. I have another blog post in progress about this topic, but basically-- the main verb in most 3D games that I enjoy (and I'm only speaking for myself) is "walk". I don't want the game hyper concentrated. It's fairly difficult to orient in 3D space. It's hard to get a good understanding of how things are laid out. This means you should be free to just, well, walk, get lost, gradually figure out where things are. This can be quite boring-- my blog post is about this, sort of. But at least, I want that kind of feeling, even if it is boring.
I also am on Mastodon and follow a bot which posts randomly from the Deus Ex (1997?) script. Words crop up like "UNATCO" that vaguely remind me of the older game.
A few days ago in my Steam backlog I saw, "Deus Ex: Human Revolution".
The only things I remember about this game, from reviews:
- The bosses were somehow harder and out of place
- The game was orange
- There was a city you could wander around in
This was all enough to make me install it on Videogamemas (December 26, also known as Boxing Day.) If you do Christmas, which is the best part of Christianity, then you should always play videogames on Videogamemas.
Because I remembered there was a city you could wander around in, which was in a trailer or something, I was hoping the game would be a bit wandery and spacious, but it's not.
I played it for a few hours last night. The opening has you walking through a lab, but it's basically on-rails. This could have been really pretty interesting, but I think the producers were probably afraid to let the player lose their way right from step 0.
There is then an invasion of the lab, and then the first you get to "explore" is really just as a shooter level where you shoot your way through. I found this annoying and hard (I picked the "normal" difficulty level.)
Near to the end of this segment, there is a room with 4 guards you need to kill. I think I tried twenty plus times and it wasn't fun at all. I tried to sneak past. I thought maybe it was trying to teach me that. No you just have to really do a hard shooting segment.
After that is a very solid cutscene event and opening/credits cinematic and structurally a nice jump.
I understand this is the opening and the producers needed to make it exciting. So my dreams of "start off with wander the lab and explore the toilets" is maybe just not reality in 2013 or whenever this was made. But why is that one room so hard?
I played a little further on. There are things to like, for instance one scene after the jump he has an auto-sunglasses moment that is very funny and good, and there are cans of orange paint everywhere at least on the first mission, which is funny because this game is really, really orange, and I like the cutscenes and production values, but overall, my feeling is that the main problem is there are too many enemies.
It's a stealth shooter-- OK. I'm not good at these. I don't play shooters in general. So, it's not quite the original Deus Ex in spaciousness, at least as far as I have played (not that far, but I don't anticipate playing further) but having lots of enemies makes whatever is here distinctly not fun. I want to creep through with my stun gun, drag bodies to a hidden place ala MGS, and creep on. This is a reasonable expectation. Barring that, I want to simply slip by undetected.
But both of these options are really really hard because the enemies are always clustered together. You end up either waiting a super long time for an opening, or you can try a diversion-- but as far as I can see the mechanics punish this a bit, because throwing things creates an "alarmed" state and puts all enemies on high alert-- as far's I was able to experience, at least. (I want to be able to throw a box and have the guys just go, "huh, what was that?" and wander over, but it's more realistic that they would go on high alert, I do realize...)
So anyways, that's about it. I am OK that this game is different than the original Deus Ex, because certainly it came into the world at a way different time and place, with a way different budget and whatever, and I feel silly writing about a "AAA" game to begin with-- but can there just maybe have been fewer enemies?
I have a back-burner project to take my game, The Real Texas, and do exactly this (reduce the number of enemies in certain areas) because I think it has the same problem.
One last thought, but shooters generally don't appeal that much to me. I do wonder why! It's a popular thing.
I did enjoy MGS snake eater (whichever one that was) actually a lot, but again-- it's quite spacious. I also don't remember it having too many enemies.
But today I was thinking, these games are basically "hunt humans" games, and I do think it's possible that some people are just more wired up by evolution or whatever to find this premise extremely exciting. In history and prehistory, humans cooperated a bunch but we also, alas, did and do kill each other a bunch. Well, I'm no historian but.
As I play Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I certainly can imagine some very "shooter expert" people absolutely warping through it no problem, either in violence mode or nonviolence mode with daring takedowns and so on.
So maybe MGS snake eater is just a different kind of game. Maybe it tickles the "sneak" part of your brain first, and more.
As a child and a teenager I loved running around the neighbourhood sneakily with my friends. Once, I remember, I was even spying on police at a local strip mall (who were spying on something else happening in a parked car) and at one point, they spotted me and gave chase, and I had to excape on my bike. (This doesn't sound like a true story, but rather like an 80s movie, but it really was a great experience, though it might not have been, and this all happened in a kinder gentler time, and I'm white, and I can support police budgets insofar as they do provide harmless entertainment for teenagers ala 80s movies about white teenagers, which is not reality, but I digress...)
So MGS feels more playfully about this kind of sneaking around. Maybe Deus Ex Human Revolution is just a "hunt humans" game, first.
Last, I'll mention that I think it's extremely healthy to just play the start of a videogame, and set it down, and never plan to pick it up. Completing a videogame is such a laborious thing, basically for any game, and you should do that for the ones you love. But videogames can be had digitially for so cheap-- and I'm sure I bought Deus Ex Human Revolution randomly for like 5$ or something-- and your time especially as you get older is so precious, that you should just enjoy the very frosted coating or licking out the center of the oreo or whatever analogy you want to use for playing the first hour or so and throwing out the rest.
To take a rather extreme example, if you just played Zelda: A Link To The Past up until you get through the sewers and end up at the cathedral, or whatever, you would have seen the absolute best that game has to offer, and that's no small thing.
Since I have a bunch of games in my steam backlog, I'm going periodically pick one, just play the first part of it and use it to write/muse a bit, kind of like this.