@ this thread
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youâre right, expired roll of Game Boy Printer paper should have beat Deus Ex instead
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Just because i played it recently and have been thinking about it, i do want to write a little about Deus Ex. Its loss to Game Boy Camera was pretty predictable, and fair enough imo â GBCamera is a fun and unique tool of art, and iâm glad thatâs something people at sb value as much as i do, and as much as âGood Game Designâ and whatnot. But ive seen a fair few folks weigh Deus Ex against it and basically go âboooring! (armpit fart noise)â and i think that is, itself, a boring opinion. DE is such an unusual and lovably sb game in its own right that, up against anything else, i think it would have been more of a contender.
For me the avatar of what is good about Deus Ex is the player avatar of Deus Ex, JC Denton (or, as i named him on my most recent playthrough, DC Jenton). Heâs infamous for meme-y lines like the one geist linked there, thanks to his actorâs extremely specific flat delivery. Said delivery is supposedly modeled on Dirty Harry; it sure as hell doesnât sound like Dirty Harry, but it sounds plausibly like a guy doing what he thinks is a good Eastwood. Thatâs kind of JCâs whole character, and Deus Exâs whole character: an extremely dorky idea of whatâs cool.
The voice acting in general hovers around so-bad-itâs-good and caps out at pleasantly hammy. The writing is often surprisingly excellent, but delivered with a similar curious woodenness, the kind you can only get when you quickly fill your acting stable with random staffers and decide 2 takes is good enough. So youâll get these scenes where JC says what he imagines is a cool one-liner, and the other person just disinterestedly talks past him. It gives the impression of playing an incredibly competent, genuinely badass, and hopelessly socially awkward man. Thereâs even parts where the game puts on a fine point on JCâs strange presence, like when obviously evil teammate Anna Navarre (in her own ridiculous Baroness voice) mocks his oversized trenchcoat and the fact that he wears his sunglasses at night (to which JC petulantly responds âmy vision is augmented.â) Your âphilosophical discussionsâ with characters like Leo Gold and Isaac the Australian Bartender consist mostly of an exasperated JC reciting propaganda while the other person owns him with logic. For as much as he is meant to be a cool player empowerment character, you feel hilariously uncool most of the time. (the sheer number of times you will break your legs doing some augmented parkour and loudly slap soldiers on the butt when you were trying to knock them out only add to the impression)
Deus Exâs_trick of course is that it is actually a cool player empowerment game. Un-augmented, JC is pretty fragile, and before he puts in the points to improve accuracy, damage, reload time, etc., even the playerâs FPS skills canât really compensate. When you start building your list of augs across the right side of the screen, and powering them up little by little, you really feel the effect, and itâs so rewarding when you can leap down from rooftops, use x-ray vision to spot guards through walls, shoot EMP-deploying drones out of your eyeballs, uhh, swim real fast⌠By the end of the game you can easily have Wolverine-tier healing factor and a laser katana. This is, obviously, all still dorky as hell, but at the same time, it is also very fucking cool. Even if â especially if! â all this power is wielded by a guy who dresses like a Blade cosplayer and laughs like Beavis and/or Butthead.
Then thereâs the actual foundation that Deus Ex rests on, the undeniably, genuinely cool moment to moment. Creeping along darkened city streets, arguing philosophy in seedy nightclubs, hacking into and taking over surveillance networks, ghosting through layers of hidden government complexes, each vent you crawl taking you deeper and deeper into a cross-section of every conspiracy theory youâve ever heard. Itâs only made better by the fact that you can, at any moment, smoke 10 packs of cigarettes in a row and immediately die. In conclusion, Deus Ex is a land of contrasts
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Game Boy Camera has an extended version of the Mother 2 File Select theme thatâs always playing in my head
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Hip Tanaka was one of the lead designers of the Game Boy Camera! that song also appears in Mother so it maybe itâs a personal favorite of his?
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Game Boy Camera winning makes me feel a lil better about Minecraft losing
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I donât recall many people putting forward a case for Deus Ex in this thread. It might be a difference of platform thatâs unlikely to overlap but maybe weâre all just assuming the same reasons for why Deus Ex is even here to begin with. Maybe itâs just a case of âthis is the best immersive simâ. Gameboy Camera meanwhile is just such a great outlet for creativity that everyone recalls it in very personal ways. I recently looked back through all the modes and this thing was crazy. You could make music, animations, photos, blend images, create assets for rudimentary games, and even print stuff (albeit with peripherals). Not to mention the offbeat presentation and secrets that Nintendo seems to have abandoned.
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one of these days i will genuinely attempt this game. itâs just so bizarre to try and get into it in the year 2015 or later, yâknow? it seems really dope from what everyone else has ever said.
one dayâŚ
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In looking back at the brief time I spent with it on Steam I think DX on PC seems really unapproachable and complicated for me to get into, but it seems the PS2 port has a simpler UI, built to be usable with the PS2 gamepad, that I might have an easier time grasping. Although I did have a good time making it some way into the first Stalker which I felt also had a really fiddly/unfriendly UI. Maybe it was also my modern-day resolution settings messing with the UI and field of view that threw me off, which seems like it can easily be fixed with a few mods.
Yeah, I do not recommend the PS2 version. Memory constraints meant that the levels had to be chopped up into small walled off areas. You canât do as much creative stuff in this context because the PS2 port canât handle it.
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Thatâs good to know and a lot of this discussion is pushing me to try it again so will tough it out on PC.
PC version runs fine for me off steam, and iâm aware there are patches to make it run better but havenât ever found them necessary. The UI takes getting used to but i actually like it? highly recommend binding the augs you like to more accessible keys than F1-F12 (e.g. if you donât bind the flashlight to F what are you even doing. give me your computer). I also equip/use a lot of stuff right from the menu and find it easier that way than juggling hotkeys
Hehe i was exaggerating other peopleâs positions a bit, of course. I got a vibe of âthis is a stuffy legacy PC game, how can it stand up to something as one-of-a-kind as the GBCamera?â and just wanted to make the case that itâs actually a funny, offbeat legacy PC game. That still probably deserves to lose to the Game Boy Camera. Any game that encourages people to be creative, and puts the tools in their hands to do it, and makes those tools accessible and fun to use â i love anything like that and itâs hard to beat.
it hits pretty weird in 2020! the opening cutscene is literally the end villain ranting about letting the uncontrollable plague he engineered destroy the underclasses lol
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Oh yeah, I voted for Deus Ex, because I do consider it one of a kind and pretty much unmatched at what it does well. Itâs also a game made by people who had cultural influences outside of conventional nerd media. One of the main works that the game quotes is a little known philosophical sci fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, which is just such a deep cut that it reflects the game designers actually thinking about their world, and the political and philosophical implications of that world. It is also a game that tried to anticipate as many bizarre actions a player could take as possible, and write reasonable or at least entertaining consequences for those actions. My favorite was if you killed the bartender in that bar in Hellâs Kitchen, the next time you return to the area, someone else is behind the bar and shouts âfree beer for everyone!â
It is that kind of attention to detail that transforms these badly voice acted npcs into characters I can pretend are real. Thereâs just a palpable sense of discovery that I think is even better than the GB Cameraâs many secrets (though I understand why the GB Camera won). One of my earliest memories of the game was finding a secret Majestic 12 base in the sewers of New York and only finding out that that was relevant to the gameâs main narrative a dozen hours later. There are many one-off encounters that are later re-incorporated into the narrative that gives Deus Ex a potent sense of place.
Deus Ex was made at a time when games like Deus Ex didnât exist. I maintain that games like Deus Ex still donât exist. DX was fundamentally new to video games, as it blended all sorts of genres and influences together into something different. It still remains relatively new, because many of the âimmersive simsâ that came after aimed not to just produce as much interactive depth as technology would allow to a place and narrative, but to imitate Deus Ex and Thief. They may be smoother, generally more pleasant experiences, but they aspire to no more than imitation and iteration.
Deus Ex had air vents because air vents exist in real life. Other immersive sims have air vents because Deus Ex had air vents. Thereâs a fundamental disconnect in design there, and it can be recognized by how something like âcrawling through air ventsâ is implemented. In the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex sequels, air vents are just a source of easy experience points, and they are one of typically 3 ways to enter the next room in a linear sequence of rooms that make up the non-hub areas of the game. Theyâve been rendered into a video game signifier of Immersive Sim. Deus Ex had air vents because they are an architectural feature of real world spaces. They are part of the Nakatomi Space of the setting. They are part of the fantasy of being able to trespass into spaces that arenât meant for people to inhabit. They are a sign of the gameâs aspiration to make a space that could be real, that could function in the real world.
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Wow, the polls are very close to having 100 votes per match-up.
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Looking at the bracket again and this wonât happen for a while but what a great matchup
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Lmao, going to abstain from that one. This shouldnât influence the vote in any way because everything is ephemeral in the end but if you still have an attachment to physical ownership of games the WarioWare GBA carts somehow havenât reached stupid collectorâs prices but they are starting to climb.
Itâs hard to emulate Twist!
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I played Twist standing up on the Yamanote Line and that is definifely one of the top 100 video game experiences Iâve ever had.
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If I could play that way thatâs probably also how I would play it. I believe there are romhacks that let you control twisting with button presses, but then that whole physical interaction is lost.
Speaking of portability LSD is probably a good time on a PS1-capable handheld but like Yume Nikki, a lot is probably lost if one isnât able to play alone in a dark room with good speakers/headphones and TV as the only light source.
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Want to suggest the shorter TOP64-2020-3 for thread titles moving forward.
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