QUOTE(Dr.Shotgun @ Sep 2 2005, 10:18 PM)
Anyone else beat the game? I chose the Helios merge path, so I would like to hear what the other choices are like.
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I beat it about a year ago, so forgive any names, locations, etc that I forgot. I saved right at that facility where you had to choose:
Helios -- you merge with the AI and create a powerful "ultra-being" that is supposed to be just (basically the "best" moral choice... could be argued with the Dark Age one).
Dark Age -- you blow up the facility according to Tracer Tong and run out. That's about it, but it's cinematic. Everything else is pretty much implied.
Join Illuminati -- the cutscene involves Morgan Everett explaining to you what you have to do, but it's basically creating more FUD for the world and controlling it yourself (basically the "worst" moral choice).
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It was a great game, albeit not very polished. First the bad things: I discovered 2 gameplay bugs (one severe one where you got to have all the skill points ever... ruins the fun when you know you can do something like that). Here they are (severe one first):
1. It was the end of that underwater facility where you have to save that chick. When you get near the helicopter, the guy that gives you the aug. canister also gives you something like 500 skill points. Well anyway, if your inventory is full, he won't give you the aug. canister but you'll still get the skill points. Because it's marked as "failed", you can go up to the guy again (still with the full inventory) and get another "inventory is full" message and another 500 skill points. Rinse and repeat until you have enough skill points to buy out every skill on expert.
2. If you get over 999 saves, your last "new" save will overwrite your previous "new" save. This is because of the extra fourth digit in the file name that for some reason it can't make (the devs must have been extremely lazy about this... it's not that hard to implement.) I had to search for an hour or so before finding the (somewhat obscure) workaround: you have to go to the console and change the saves folder to something other than "\Saves" and save the game. No, re-installing the game didn't help, that was one of the first things I did.
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Aside from the gameplay bugs, there were also 2 graphics ones that I found:
1. If you set the anti-aliasing on something other than 0 on an nVidia GeForce4 MX 420 (yes I know, card blows but it's still better than minimum by a little bit... possibly other cards are affected), the game will be stretched out to the point where even adjusting monitor isn't going to help (the only thing that would help is setting the resolution to 640x480, and that defeated the purpose of better image quality.) I didn't find a fix for this one. Possibly driver update?
2. On a Radeon 9600SE, any alpha texture would be white far away... Tried fiddling with the settings, didn't help. Didn't bother researching for a fix either. Maybe driver update/change to something like Omega as well?
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Disclaimer: I own the GotY version, which (I found out) is the same patch as the last one publicly available, only pre-applied. So these bugs were never patched.
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Ok, now on to the good things: I liked the fact that you could go about beating an objective depending on your skills. You could try the "stealth" sneaking/finding info out way, or you could try the head-on, kill-everything-in-sight way.
It's not as linear as, say, Half-Life 2. Non-linear games are really much more fun in my opinion. That's why I like the Elder Scrolls series so much (esp. Morrowind because of its immersiveness.)
Back on topic: I also liked the fact that the game isn't easy... I played on "medium" and it was harder than the average shooter.
Deus Ex was also a bit mysterious/frightening. You never know what might happen next. The first time I played that game, when I got contacted by Icarus in the tunnel in Paris I re-loaded the game... I thought that was it, you were supposed to find another way. The models of the "genetically mutated" creatures/the aliens were also scary as hell... Especially if they sneak up on you. What adds a new dimension is that you could have gotten the blueprints to them as a side DataCube in the facilities, so in reality you know more than you technically "should" about them. The whole world had a gloomy and desolated feel to it, and that was also a pretty weird experience.
Other such times included when Gunther Hermann kept messaging you, threatening to kill you ("Run while you can, little mouse..." ???), or reading one of those news terminals where among the news once is "ICARUS FOUND YOU!!!!! RUN WHILE YOU CAN!!!!!"?. Reading the FUD that the government/MJ12 is spreading about you is also pretty interesting as it develops.
I also liked the little side things that were added in. For example, sometimes you could eavesdrop on conversations and that could affect your gameplay later (or affect the way that person talks with it/acts.) The aforementioned news terminals or the email that you could read of other people was also pretty fun to look at.
The AI was decent... not realistic, but still pretty fun to manage. When the alarm is activated for no apparent reason and people are looking for you, you think "oh crap... what did I do?"
On a scale from 1 to 10:
Creativity/Originality -- 8. 9 would be if it were a completely different game from anything out there and 10 is theoretically impossible.
Sound -- 7. Wasn't "ultra amazing surround sound w00t", but had the best voices and sound effects I've heard.
Graphics -- 5.5. They were average for their time (2000), not too great, and the bugs were quite annoying.
Gameplay -- 7.5. Would have been an 8 if it wasn't for the bugs. Combines RPG with FPS.
Music -- 6.5. I liked the actual composition, just that the sound quality wasn't that great. They could have easily used the .mp3 codec instead of their propriatory midi look-alike (although it sounds loads better than midis... at first I couldn't notice it, but you could hear it in some of the samples they used).
Texture art, misc. -- 8.25. This was immersive, frightening, and executed fairly well (with the technology available back then.)
This isn't the best game I've ever played, but it does have some good memories. Go ahead and pick up a copy if you feel like it (and if they still sell it, that is.)