Sounds Like A Mission

Hello everyone,

Techie stuff today … and a mission. The game Deus Ex Mankind Divided has popped up again in the playlists I use as background and it’s prompted me playing through the game again. This is a bit odd because I don’t usually like to be playing a game I’m watching as it can get a bit confusing. I’m following a guide this time through though and there’s a few things already from the videos and the guide that I completely missed the first time round. Like …

More of that one later. I’ve had two techie things happening today with the desktop … The first is that I thought I should probably correct the murder that I did on Windows Update … hostile software is definitely more of a thing these days. Oh and the issue meant that I couldn’t tidy up the hard discs with the defragmenting tool. (A defragmenter is something that rearranges all of your files so they’re all in one place instead of having bits of them all over the place).

So techie issue 1 was the Task Scheduler not working, which is apparently how I killed Windows Update off all those years ago. Nothing I tried would fix that, outside of manually allowing Windows Update to do its thing. Which allowed the nasties from Microsoft in that you’ll have seen on your computers already probably. I’ll deal with that at some point.

Techie issue 2 is sound … My ears are bad at the moment anyway (right ear is recovering from being almost all blocked last week, not quite sorted yet) so it’s a bad time to be sorting out sound issues. Apologies if I dive into tech speak too much here by the way …

Loudness equalisation is usually a thing that helps to make sure you can hear everything, it quietens loud stuff and amplifies quiet stuff. It’s really useful for just being able to sit back and watch stuff that has all sorts of different source volume levels, the loudness equalisation flattens it all out. Except when the newer drivers remove the option because it went somewhere else.

I’ll figure that one out, one way or another. (Not yet, the Sun Kissed rpg show is on).

About that Mission ?

This one is set in the future, a near future that’s getting a bit grimmer by the time of the game. Whereas the previous game, Deus Ex Human Revolution, saw augmented people being a pretty common sight, the events of the last game meant that the augments are becoming under much tighter control. The people with them are subjugated and at worst, thrown into ghettos. More on that later. The aim of this one is to investigate a big conspiracy going on in the world, although we just touch on the corners of that.

Save the world kind of thing, although a bit less than the first one. It’s also a challenging game, where if you get caught out then you don’t last long. A lot of first person shooter style games give a massive sense of invulnerability because you just soak up the damage. That’s not really something you can do in this one. Oh and I like it for the main character, Adam Jensen, voiced by the gravelly Elias Toufexis. That’s Prague by the way, looks pretty.

I have no idea what that is in the sky by the way. Anyway, what’s the Mission ? I’m looking to collect more achievements this time around, including some of the weird ones. Like going on an Odyssey with the Penguin Prince. He must be returned to his people.

The mission starts in the Golem City ghetto, which is where the augmented people have been sent. Outwardly, it’s to give them a better place to be but really it’s to contain them in the same place away from normal people. Just in case their augmentations drive them into murderous rages again.

On your way across the area, you have to either evade the Police or go in and help out the local contacts.

Not all the Police were cooperating with our enquiries … (Don’t feel bad about the knocking out, we left them all alive and they’d been heavily roughing up our innocent contact).

Wonder if the shark has laser beams.

When my Adam Jensen retires, he’ll come back here. The shopkeeper here is called Entity and she’s only in this part of the game but she’s great. She used to work making biocells with those augmented hands but the Incident in the last game broke them and they don’t work well enough now. She’s set up shop in Golem City now.

The Mission is in two parts here … The Golem City part is peaceful, outside of avoiding the attentions of the police. The second half takes you past the Throat into …

Here’s the entrance. Your side mission here involves going in to get the leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC). People think he’s been doing terror stuff. He’s kinda being set up with that though. The ARC people want to stop you seeing their boss though, so you’re in for a fight from here. The sign is a 3d construction thing, with the words only appearing like that if you’re in a certain place. I like the effect.

The general idea with games like this is that if you dive in all guns blazing, you get overwhelmed quickly. The gung ho approach isn’t really supposed to work. So instead, you carefully pick your way through the level quietly neutralising each enemy in turn. (Pacifist approach gets more experience too !) After all the enemies are gone, it’s time to Pick Up A Penguin (do they still make those ?) and head on in.

Almost there. You don’t need to take the penguin all the way through to the exit of the level. Going through a bypass for the checkpoint is enough. And then you find a vent, with a narrow passageway. And more penguins … I think we’ve found our objective.

There we go. The Prince is reunited with his people.

There is a point to this in game, outside of the silliness of carrying him through the level. When he’s on his throne, the compartment behind him opens up revealing a Praxis Pack. These are how you get the upgrades in the game.

I still have a decent amount to go in the game. I was originally going to hold off on a replay until I had the graphics card upgrade installed but it’s been good to go back to it a bit early. It’s a challenging game and one I enjoy a lot.

Until next time, stay safe be well everyone !