By Pentadact

I’ve been waiting for this enormous, surreal, self-referential net-culture conversion of Deus Ex for ages. It finally came out today, so I immediately carried on playing the game I was reviewing this weekend and then sat outside and wrote it up and then cooked a meal and watched a bit of TV and talked to Kim for a while. But then, right away, I read a review of it.

Richard Cobbett gives it an enormous and extremely enthusiastic write-up on his blog, which makes a good read while the 923MB file is downloading. Lead Designer Jonas Wæver often chimes in here on James, so I’m glad to hear his work wasn’t wasted. I’ll update this post once I’ve given it a fair shake.

If you find your reading and connection speeds are such that you finish Richard’s review some minutes before the mod itself has downloaded, I can recommend from first-hand experience writing a blog post about its availability and the fact that you haven’t played it yet. It leads immediately to enormous popularity and profit.

Update: I’ve played it! A bit. I did the whole training section and watched the intro in full, so I didn’t actually get far into the game proper in the time. I dig the manned security camera mechanic, whereby you can eliminate the guy watching the monitors to neutralise one.

It was actually a guy watching monitors who saw me when I was sneaking around the apartment vents, though, and I had to grab a screwdriver from his desk to stab him in the back of the head with as he set off the alarm. That screwdriver saw some pretty heavy use before I finally succumbed to the summoned security forces, so I think I need to up the difficulty. And not sneak around stabbing security guards with screwdrivers.

All very impressive, and Richard is right, it adopts the Deus Ex motifs well. The voice of the main character seemed particularly good, as far as I played.