Hello everyone,
Day 24 and the end of this series ! It’s been a fun series to do, looking back at some old games and gaming history. And the models have been pretty good this year too.
What’s behind the door today ?
There we go, Darth and his favourite jumper. It’s been a good advent calendar this time around, some old classics, some more unusual like the Lucrehulk battleship and the A Wing, a new favourite with the Razor Crest (not watched Mandalorian) and a few really cunning ones like the Tauntaun and the shield generator.
What’s the game there in the background ? I actually bought that one in 2012 not long after my previous machine, Pumpkin, was built. Best Buy were still operating in the UK then before being undercut out of business. It’s Deus Ex Human Revolution and one of the best shooty games in my collection.
You start off as the security chief of Sarif Industries and before you know it, the company’s been invaded, the top scientists have been murdered (or have they) and you’ve been left legless and armless and near death, only to be rebuilt into a half man, half machine version of your former self.
Fast forward six months and you’ve been recalled to deal with another invasion at an outlying facility and you launch off into investigating an increasing conspiracy. Along the way, you help out with the inevitable side quests and bounce between various locations.
And lots of flavour stuff on the tellies and news letters is left around the place too, with radios littered around the levels that I must listen to at some point. There’s lots of attention to detail here …
One thing though about these games is that while it’s possible to go through, all guns blazing, the game isn’t really supposed to be played like that. Bullets from the enemies hurt a lot … So the idea is to steadily go through the levels, eliminating enemies undetected (and you get a bonus for just making them unconscious too).
Deus Ex Human Revolution is a game I’ll keep going back to occasionally, it was good to revisit it again in the last few months.
The follow up game, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, takes place a couple of years after this one. There’s a prologue that sees you being sent in to a desert hotel to extract an operative that’s in trouble.
The world situation is dealing with fallout from the end of the first game, where people with augmentations are subjected to a form of digital apartheid. They’re forced to relocate to segregated living areas amidst further separation and discrimination.
They definitely upped the ante with the graphics, one thing to look out for being the increase in detail on display. That’s having the freedom to make levels in daylight, for all that lovely light, shadow and reflection detail. It’s also being able to add in curves to the levels. Prague of DXMD feels a lot more like a proper city than the Detroit and Hengsha levels in DXHR.
That came with a cost though, it took me 4 years to go back to this one because I bounced off the game thoroughly when it came out due to crash bugs. (The lighting didn’t like the AMD card I had at the time)
It looked great in the night time too.
I enjoyed this one a lot when I played it back in May and going back to DXHR again was partly so I could remind myself of what had gone before before tackling another run at the newer game. Hopefully we see a third game in the series, the first two Adam Jensen games were pretty good and I’m intrigued to see where they would have taken the story.
There have been other Deus Ex games over the years, DXHR was not the first … I’ve talked about these before but here’s the rough timeline :
2027 Deus Ex : The Fall. We don’t talk about this game.
2027 later – Deus Ex Human Revolution : Adam Jensen’s first game.
2029 Deux Ex Mankind Divided : Adam Jensen’s second game.
2052 Deus Ex : the original game, released in June 2000.
2072 Deus Ex Invisible War, which is another game we don’t really talk about.
I should probably have more of a look at the timeline sometime. It’s time to sign off for at least a few days though. Doing a post a day can be pretty wearing, although it’s been great talking about the old games again. In the meantime,
Have a great christmas everyone, such as it is in these weird times.
Stay safe, be well.