Now, the thing to remember is that I was playing this five years after the game came out. Did they succeed? Most would say they did, and most of those people would say it was by the skin of their teeth, which means the game didn’t really get the recognition it deserved (and still doesn’t).īear with me here folks, we’re going somewhere important with all this. Sure, this wasn’t at all unusual in the more progressive PC RPGs of the day but for someone to present this format in the context of a first person shooter? Well that was bloody audacious.

I won’t go too much into what I mean by that, as it’s a loaded statement, but put simply: Deus Ex offered at least a dozen different unique solutions to whatever problems the game presented with you, and by merit of being a semi-open world game (long, long, long before ‘open-world’ became the only acceptable mode of presentation for video games not made for kids), what was a “problem” and what wasn’t depended entirely on your mood. But what I encountered with Deus Ex was not just a game that catered to my every mirrorshaded, black ice-wielding whim, but provided a whole new kind of experience within the realm of first-person shooters. As a cyberpunk fanatic, Deus Ex appealed to me by merit of being a true adherent of the genre, perhaps to a fault, as The Matrix had already both perfected and killed cyberpunk a year prior to the release of Deus Ex, which was six years past at the time I first experienced the game. I quickly snagged a copy of a game called Deus Ex, one I had long sought after since reading about it in one of the dozens of PC gaming magazines of the era. Years later, just as the third installment of the Halo franchise was bursting forth from the delicate underbelly of the Xbox 360, I acquired a PC with the horsepower equivalent of what was available to the elites back in 2003. I cut my teeth on Halo: Combat Evolved but it didn’t take long for me to discover that, as first-person shooters went, it won my attention by merit of being the only game of its ilk we had access to, lacking high end PCs with which we could experience the games whose shoulders it stood on to attain its marvelous heights. We rarely played the single-player it was fun but it didn’t provide the same adrenaline-pumping, nerve-scraping experience we compulsively craved. Back in the early days of the Xbox, I was a fervent, if untalented, Halo addict, staying up until all hours of the night with three friends in a cramped bedroom repeating the same loop of Hang ‘Em High, Boarding Action and Battle Creek, every game ending invariably with me at the bottom of the scoreboard. I don’t play first person shooters anymore.

Far cry 4 soundtracks