TOM FRANCIS
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Deus Fucking Ex Fucking 3

I should briefly explain what this truncated latin phrase refers to, for anyone who doesn’t know: it’s a game released in the year 2000 which, for a lot of people, holds the same status within games as the Beatles do in music, Citizen Kane does in film, Shakespeare does in literature.

It’s a bit ugly. The writing is never particularly remarkable. The guns aren’t that much fun to shoot people with. If you’re wondering how it can, then, be broadly considered the greatest game ever made, it’s possible you don’t understand games as distinct from videogames, as distinct from arcade games, as distinct from art, from cinema, from toys, from fucking Halo. This is understandable. There haven’t been many that really take this medium for a spin yet, but Deus Ex was one.

I was quite excited when the third was first hinted back in May – to be made by Eidos Montreal, with no involvement from the original’s designers Warren Spector and Harvey Smith – and in the intervening time no new information has actually surfaced. But something else has happened: Far Cry 2.

Before real evidence of that game’s content emerged, I was a fierce sceptic of publisher-made sequels to games whose original developers have long since departed. But it’s now clear to me that Ubisoft played the original game for a long weekend, then someone senior took luxuriant toke on a lengthy, substantial joint, a real carrot, and said “Whoa wait! I just thought of something! Oh wait I forgot. Let’s just make it fucking nuts. I’m so hungry.”

If Eidos can at least try that, we’ll either get a beautiful game or a beautiful mistake. I’m resigned to the fact that we’ll never get a worthy tribute to Deus Ex, not from Spector, not from Eidos and certainly not from Smith.

And the most popular story on news-feed aggregator GameTab right now? “Breasts are awesome.” I love geeks, but man, I fucking hate nerds.