Deus Ex: Decennial Edition 'What a game.'

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Former Human: Oct 15, 2001

The Anti-Masonic Party was founded in New York in 1828, the first real third party in the US. That's about as mainstream, national and popular as it gets.

counterfeitsaint posted:

They won't necessarily take him more seriously, that stuff just wan't a common place pop culture joke yet.

Many of the jokes and characters in Dr. Strangelove are a parody of the John Birch Society.

And don't get me started on Lyndon LaRouche!

# ? Aug 2, 2017 08:39

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:58

Lork: Oct 15, 2007; Sticks to clorf

OK, so maybe there were some periods when politically relevant conspiracy theories were big, historically. Are you saying that the late 90s to early 2000s were one of those periods? Because that's the context in which Deus Ex was produced and consumed.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 09:31

Danger - Octopus!: Apr 20, 2008; Nap Ghost

Lork posted:

OK, so maybe there were some periods when politically relevant conspiracy theories were big, historically. Are you saying that the late 90s to early 2000s were one of those periods? Because that's the context in which Deus Ex was produced and consumed.

Yes, the period when the X-Files was on tv and really popular was a time when conspiracy theories and paranormal stuff was being featured in mainstream media so people were much more aware of it. The spread of internet access at the same time helped with this because it was easier for folk to share conspiracies and find fellow crazies.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 09:59

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Whether they were mainstream or not isn't what's being talked about. Conspiracy theories about alien abductions did not drive US politics like conspiracies about Obama's birth certificate or whatever do now, is the point.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 10:03

Psycho Society: Oct 21, 2010

That's not a very good conspiracy

# ? Aug 2, 2017 10:55

Lork: Oct 15, 2007; Sticks to clorf

Lemon-Lime posted:

Whether they were mainstream or not isn't what's being talked about. Conspiracy theories about alien abductions did not drive US politics like conspiracies about Obama's birth certificate or whatever do now, is the point.

Yes, this is what I mean when I say "politically relevant". People who believed in alien abductions were not a unified voting bloc that could be exploited by anyone unscrupulous enough to pander to them. Conspiracy theorists don't seem as fascinating or funny anymore now that we've seen them be used to cause real damage, and you can see that reflected in the way they're depicted in modern fiction*, which is exactly what Errant Signal was talking about.

*Unless you're telling me that the hilarious sitcom trope of "your racist uncle who thinks Obama is coming to take his guns away" just completely passed me by.

Lork fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Aug 2, 2017

# ? Aug 2, 2017 10:55

Guy Mann: Mar 28, 2016; by Lowtax

Lork posted:

Whether the conspiracies theories themselves were more innocent or not, they absolutely weren't weaponized the way they are today. If there was a 90s equivalent to something like Sandy Hook trutherism it may have been just as despicable, but it didn't have a mainstream entity like the Trump campaign to latch on to it and adopt it as the party line or wide reaching propaganda outlets like Infowars to broadcast it. Conspiracy theories in the 90s definitely had a popular perception of being "harmless" whether that was actually true or not, and that's not the case anymore - far more people take them seriously, and in turn people take the fact that they're being taken seriously... seriously.

Pictured: the totally harmless anti-government conspiracy theories that completely dominated conservative discourse during the Clinton administration.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 13:34

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

Watergate

# ? Aug 2, 2017 13:46

SolidSnakesBandana: Jul 1, 2007; Infinite ammo

The government WANTS you to think that conspiracies only existed post 1999. It's part of a conspiracy.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 15:39

Jblade: Sep 5, 2006

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUIcCyPOA30

# ? Aug 2, 2017 15:39

counterfeitsaint: Feb 26, 2010; I'm a girl, and you're
gnomes, and it's like
what? Yikes.

If you asked a few hundred people what the word Illuminati meant in 2000 would you get the same response as you would if you asked it today?

# ? Aug 2, 2017 21:33

Cat Mattress: Jul 14, 2012; by Cyrano4747

counterfeitsaint posted:

If you asked a few hundred people what the word Illuminati meant in 2000 would you get the same response as you would if you asked it today?

Yes. These responses being
1. "What?"
2. "They're Masonic Reptilian Jews! They fluoridate the chemtrails!" (ironically)
3. "They're Masonic Reptilian Jews! They fluoridate the chemtrails!" (unironically)
4. "A secret society in Bavaria, but they were disbanded in 1785. :goonsay:

# ? Aug 2, 2017 22:16

Former Human: Oct 15, 2001

Jblade posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUIcCyPOA30

The look on Joe's face is gold.

You know you're in deep when even Joe "the moon landing was fake" Rogan thinks you're nuts.

# ? Aug 2, 2017 23:32

the black husserl: Feb 25, 2005

It's 100% accurate to say Conspiracy theories have a totally different role in culture today than they did in 2000.

In 2000, Alex Jones was a fringe radio whacko who hated the US Government. Now he runs a successful media empire that acts as a mouthpiece for Trump and Republican policy.

Or in Deus Ex terms, in 2000 Alex Jones would have been a ranting bum in Hell's Kitchen. Now he'd have an office in MJ12's headquarters.

# ? Aug 3, 2017 00:24

Gadzuko: Feb 14, 2005

It's accurate but it doesn't detract from Deus Ex in my mind. The conspiracy theories of today are totally different, there's some overlap but the Illuminati theories and such are still so detached from reality that it doesn't feel like there's any connection between that and current conspiracy theories.

# ? Aug 3, 2017 01:10

aparmenideanmonad: Jan 28, 2004; Balls to you and your way of mortal opinions - you don't exist anyway!; Fun Shoe

I agree that having the president consume and endorse media that glorifies bat poo poo crazy conspiracy theories to the point of letting them influence or even dictate what passes for policy is a new thing in 2017.

I also agree that this gives a voice to people who have always believed this poo poo but knew it was the kind of thing that other people would (properly) laugh at before it got legitimized by the white house.

I disagree that conspiracy theories were somehow underground, unfamiliar, or otherwise missing from pop culture before this. Look up Art Bell and coast to coast AM - conspiracy theory radio shows have been wildly popular long before Alex Jones. Tabloid readership was also huge back when print media was huge. None of this is new aside from Trump's election victory enabling vocal belief in it.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 01:33

MasterSlowPoke: Oct 9, 2005; Our courage will pull us through

Fox had a primetime special in the late 90s about how the moon landing was faked.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 03:51

Guy Mann: Mar 28, 2016; by Lowtax

Also the Oliver Stone movie JFK was a huge deal and more or less cemented a lot of pop culture fixation on government coverups and conspiracy theories.

It wasn't even limited to conservative ideology, the Million Man March was rife with anti-semitism. 90s America was a kid living in sterile environment and developing allergies left and right without a foreign enemy to worry about.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 04:13

Scalding Coffee: Jun 26, 2006; You're already dead

I won't miss the frequent doomsaying of the planet going to end, now that the money for it dried up. I wonder why they stopped pushing it when they still had the data for it? It was just a little cash.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 05:43

Zephro: Nov 23, 2000; I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

counterfeitsaint posted:

Sure they are. This was even discussed in the Human Revolution commentary. They couldn't make a game with the exact same tone as the original DX now, because today everyone has heard the word illuminati and conspiracy theories are jokes about lizard men and chem trails. When DX came out, this was not the case.

Deus Ex had this very distinctive late-90s/millennial/eschatological feel to it ("millennial" as in the time period, not the stupid marketing category for young people). I'm not sure I could put my finger on exactly what's different now but something is and the game definitely feels like a piece of the past. Not that that's a bad thing at all but I agree that it would feel odd to use the same tone in a modern game.

Fake edit: Bloodlines has the same feel, especially the first half of the game.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 06:43

Necrothatcher: Mar 26, 2005

Zephro posted:

Deus Ex had this very distinctive late-90s/millennial/eschatological feel to it ("millennial" as in the time period, not the stupid marketing category for young people). I'm not sure I could put my finger on exactly what's different now but something is and the game definitely feels like a piece of the past. Not that that's a bad thing at all but I agree that it would feel odd to use the same tone in a modern game.

Fake edit: Bloodlines has the same feel, especially the first half of the game.

It's like Guy Mann said a couple of posts up. The USA (and let's be honest, many nations) psychologically craves an adversary, and in the 90s there wasn't one, so the people unconsciously created one.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 07:55

counterfeitsaint: Feb 26, 2010; I'm a girl, and you're
gnomes, and it's like
what? Yikes.

Zephro posted:

Deus Ex had this very distinctive late-90s/millennial/eschatological feel to it ("millennial" as in the time period, not the stupid marketing category for young people). I'm not sure I could put my finger on exactly what's different now but something is and the game definitely feels like a piece of the past. Not that that's a bad thing at all but I agree that it would feel odd to use the same tone in a modern game.

Fake edit: Bloodlines has the same feel, especially the first half of the game.

Yeah. In the game world established by DX, the Illuminati should be a very big deal during HR, but it only comes up a single time at the end of the game, and Jensen rolls his eyes when he says it sarcastically. If HR treated the Illuminati with the same serious tone as the original it would have come off as absurd. That's what I'm (so poorly) trying to say, not that conspiracies didn't exist in the 90s.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 08:12

Jblade: Sep 5, 2006

JC reacts nearly the same way when he hears about the Illuminati from Tong as well so it does pay a bit of lipservice to the idea that it sounds ridiculous.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 10:40

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

Although in both games the Illuminati was portrayed as almost completely incompetent. In HR they try and play both sides and end up nearly losing to some bit players and by Deus Ex they've got half their organization taken over by a single businessman.

# ? Aug 5, 2017 11:23

SolidSnakesBandana: Jul 1, 2007; Infinite ammo

Gaius Marius posted:

and by Deus Ex they've got half their organization taken over by a single businessman.

Yeah. Me.

# ? Aug 6, 2017 07:12

MasterSlowPoke: Oct 9, 2005; Our courage will pull us through

I had a dream last night that I was back in college and my new roommate was playing Dues Ex on the GameCube.

Who/Why did they hide this GameCube edition from everyone? What exclusive content is hidden from us forever?

# ? Aug 6, 2017 18:04

SolidSnakesBandana: Jul 1, 2007; Infinite ammo

There'd be like a statue of Mario and Yoshi in Paul's apartment or some poo poo

# ? Aug 6, 2017 19:28

BlueberryCanary: Mar 18, 2016

The special edition would come with a controller in the shape of sunglasses, and it would be very difficult to use

Nobody would have asked for it

# ? Aug 6, 2017 19:36

Caufman: May 7, 2007

SolidSnakesBandana posted:

There'd be like a statue of Mario and Yoshi in Paul's apartment or some poo poo

Human Revolution made SquareSoft the canonical winner of the console wars.

# ? Aug 6, 2017 19:45

Guy Mann: Mar 28, 2016; by Lowtax

Caufman posted:

Human Revolution made SquareSoft the canonical winner of the console wars.

Actually per Mankind Divided it was Soloto.

AMD is still going strong in the PC world, though.

# ? Aug 6, 2017 20:29

Former Human: Oct 15, 2001

Knuckles & Knuckles & Knuckles :lol:

# ? Aug 6, 2017 21:16

Guy Mann: Mar 28, 2016; by Lowtax

Former Human posted:

Knuckles & Knuckles & Knuckles

Say what you will about Mankind Divided, the had a lot of fun making all those little apartment tableaus.

# ? Aug 6, 2017 23:01

MysticalMachineGun: Apr 5, 2005

That attention to detail probably bogged down their release timelines and contributed to future games getting canned but I loved it, dammit

# ? Aug 7, 2017 01:52

Caufman: May 7, 2007

A bit tangential, but I love those walking simulators like Tacoma where you can pick most things up and see all the small details the creators put into the objects.

# ? Aug 7, 2017 02:05

double nine: Aug 8, 2013

https://twitter.com/selmaleh/status/813966923033518080

# ? Aug 7, 2017 10:18

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

cross-posting of the retarded poo poo i gave birth too in the 10 minutes after finishing invisible war from the gbs thread in case anyone has any thoughts on iw or wants to call me stupid and tell me i missed the point:

quote:

i just finished my playthrough of the four dx games, going dx1 -- hr -- md -- iw. i've already written bout the first three, so regarding iw:

incredibly frustrating. almost every gameplay design decision they made made the game play worse than the 2000 game - the only one i think wasn't nuts was the combination of multitools and lockpicks. paradoxically, it's all made the game look and feel more aged than dx1, despite having nominally better graphics. the flaws of iw in this respect are probably well-known to everyone reading, so i won't spend much time retreading them.

(i wonder how much of the dated feel was the awful colour palette. dx1 had drab colours, but that was part of the cyberpunk/shithole new york neighbourhood vibe. it added to an aesthetic feel. and there were vibrant, colourful areas to offset that, i.e. pretty much any modern area, hong kong, and the like. here everything felt unnecessarily washed out.)

the tiny level designs are obvious, but there are other things. the gunplay felt like gunplay from a really crappy low-budget doom knockoff. there's no recoil (or if there is i didn't notice). the universal ammo i don't need to comment on. the only tactical choice i can remember is if i were running up against bots or not. the level design didn't allow for any interesting setpieces, either. eventually, i stopped treating the combat parts as part of the game and just brute forced through everything to get to the next part of the story. the game was also not very long - this wouldn't be a problem but for one thing i will come to in a moment.

it wasn't all bad, and what i have to praise is much the same as my previous posts have indicated. the narrative design and a lot of the writing were interesting. the ideas for what might rise up to replace the nation-state, the failure of the order to centralise ideology as a guiding force (which seem like a fair failure of imagination to attribute to the illuminati, since they are technocrats), the omar as a representation of the weird divergent strains of humanity that might arise from the free availability of biomodification tech, some limited ability to play between the various factions ... all pretty good. i liked the endings, as well, even though the way they were presented felt unnecessarily bleak. the jc ending was perhaps perfunctory in execution, but a somewhat utopian idea of what might develop if we stopped playing traditional human power games and used technology to redefine how power operates. the omar ending is a companion to this, showing what might happen if control was removed entirely (on a hobbesian view of human nature). the templar ending is probably the most boring, since it's just a spin on a human society we've seen before. the illuminati ending shows an idea of what might happen if we didn't change human nature but just amped everything up about our current (western) governmental structures and globalism. solid, if not mindblowing. they could also used jc's ending for a sequel (though unnecessary, since this definitely wrapped up the thematic threads from the first game pretty well) which would get more explicitly sci fi (and definitely not cyberpunk - postcyberpunk, if anything), looking at what problems could fracture a society where humans are more nearly equal in capability and there is no real privacy.

however, it all felt like they hadn't had enough time to write, or maybe just didn't care enough. a lot of what i got out of the narrative and themes is what only occurred to me because i'd played dx1 almost immediately beforehand and am familiar with a lot of the underlying philosophical thinking, so i was able to extrapolate. more obvious development and discussion of the underlying ideas would have been nice. the only conversation i can remember being really interested in in this respect was the one where jc spells out his plan - which is only slightly above the kind of conversation you'd have with a random bartender in dx1 (okay i'm being a bit cruel there - i liked the ideas jc had for overcoming the deficiencies in human nature that make government a perilous affair). there was a lot they could've done here - explored the kind of conditions that made tarsus, where we know they experiment on children, highly desirable; paul's devotion to jc even though he admits he doesn't really understand all the thinking, the failure of the illuminati to predict and control the templar...

a lot of the little efforts at worldbuilding were much diminished from dx1 - there were very few books, and the newscasts, while pretty good, were too slow. i did find one book kind of cute, about conspiracy theories raging about the faked mars landing - i wonder if this was recognition that the moon landing is something that got pulled from dx1?

anyway, since it's loving short, if you really liked the themes and narrative of dx1, i recommend a playthrough, just turn the difficulty down and murder the poo poo out of everyone in the most time-efficient way to get through the bad bits. have a think about the story, get through the gameplay bits as fast as you can.

having written all this, a remake by a competent team would probably be really good. there's potential there, but it falls short in ways that should have been predictable at the time the decisions were made.

# ? Aug 15, 2017 10:06

aniviron: Sep 11, 2014

quote:

having written all this, a remake by a competent team would probably be really good. there's potential there, but it falls short in ways that should have been predictable at the time the decisions were made.

There are enough good ideas that you could make a game with similar themes, I think, but you'd have to change so much in a remake that you might as well just make a new game.

# ? Aug 15, 2017 21:03

Weedle: May 31, 2006

I'm currently playing through the Director's Cut version of Human Revolution. I've played the original release already but this is my first time with the DC, and I'm wondering about something regarding the Missing Link segment. I know you're supposed to get all your Praxis points back at the end, but does this include points that you haven't spent yet at the time you start the DLC? I have ten unspent points and I'd hate to lose them, but I also don't want to spend them all yet since I'd rather wait until I come across an obstacle I can buy an augmentation to help me get around.

# ? Sep 24, 2017 19:54

Mzbundifund: Nov 5, 2011; I'm afraid so.

You'll get all your poo poo back, but for goodness sake you're not going to run into some unbypassable nightmare hallway with layered gas, electric floor, punchable wall, hack 5 security and an icarus drop that will require you to have banked 10 praxis to use on obstacle avoidance augs.

Spend your points and be a cool cyborg man, ya doofus.

# ? Sep 25, 2017 20:17

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:58

Weedle: May 31, 2006

[quote="�Mzbundifund�" post="�476754863�"]
You�ll get all your poo poo back, but for goodness sake you�re not going to run into some unbypassable nightmare hallway with layered gas, electric floor, punchable wall, hack 5 security and an icarus drop that will require you to have banked 10 praxis to use on obstacle avoidance augs.

Spend your points and be a cool cyborg man, ya doofus.
[/quote]

In past playthroughs I've spent my points as soon as I've earned them, but doing it this way is actually working out great. I'm only spending them on stuff I actually use (instead of inevitably wasting a few on stuff that sounds cool but I never think to take advantage of), and having a few extra laying around allows me to do stuff like I did yesterday, where I had to get through a group of guys I couldn't effectively sneak up on, so I instantly maxed out my cloaking aug and got them all with takedowns. It was dope.

# ? Sep 25, 2017 20:37

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