Deus ex: a deep dive into the ghost drive of the human soul.

Once upon a time there was a far greater journalist than myself, shocker i’m sure. They wrote with an unbridled passion and a free beating heart. The stroke of their pen could make or break a game’s release, and for one ascendant moment i found my own work nestled in the bosom of their greatness. The sophiticated gamer, the literal grandfather of video games journalism has, like the buddha, left this mortal coil behind to explore new frontiers of consciousness, a place they called “IRL”

Once upon a time, upon a time, i reviewed deus ex human revolution. I’m not one to repeat myself, but i am one not to repeat myself, myself; however the words i spoke then were those of a child and as a child i thought only as a child, a child. So it think it’s a good time, that being a time where once upon a time is a time constraint that alludes to a time now past; saving time on specific details, i’ll only have mentioned once upon.

Deus ex is a series that has firmly entrenched itself in the cyberpunk genre just to the right of the neuromancer and next door to Ghost in the shell; although the latest entry has tried to dislodge itself from this matrix by being bad. How would i know? i’ve not played it but maybe i’ve had the memories implanted but there’s no unicorn in my dreams so maybe i’m me. Cyberpunk’s ascendancy and main /function, aside from being hard boiled with low key body horror, is posing philosophical and social questions that play on the anxieties of the modern age; or if they’re feeling lazy it can be a race relations allegory.

Deus sex falls hard onto the latter ladder and manages to hit several rungs on the way down by adding: the other guys have superpowers basket, that skewers any hope of a equality being salvaged from the deluge or am i thinking of that other cyberpunk game set in detroit but with fewer memorable lines than. “i never asked for this,”
Hard to know i’ve not played that unicorn either but my recent holiday to mars was lit.

Let’s jack-in and see if we can’t hack the source code of this technovirus. Side note: the idea that the internet would be used for jacking-in is one of those predictions that was just a stroke off being bang on the money shot. I have actually played deus ex, not as many times as i’ve watched bladerunner but more times than the aforementioned sequel that i haven’t played. Which is about as descriptive as i can get without really thinking about it for more than three seconds. According to the omniscient super intelligence, ie google: the world’s faster computer can do 33,860 trillion calculations per second meaning if i were a computer working out how many times i’ve played deus ex would be impossible because i haven’t given it sufficient data to give an exact figure but it would realise that faster… wow!

That computer is located in china and so are the best parts of the game, the time spent in neo-shanghai, or just shanghai for short, is easily the best part of the game. The whole city actually feels like a futuristic hexagonal laden metropolis; unlike detroit that feels like it’s just come to grips with the 20th century, which is still more progress that anyone could really expect it to make, meaning this is technically soft sci fi.

It would be wrong to talk about deus ex without exploring the series’ stance and commentary on conspiracy.

The game has you do the sneaky sneak with a series of cover based mechanics that is buffeted with hacking minigames gunplay when you F’ed up. Pretty standard fare at this point. You’re reading a review of a game while walking through the desert but the review has run out of things to talk about and fallen on it’s back, you try to flip the review into a Voight-Kampff joke but not everyone will get it. Why can’t you review videogames normally like everyone else?

In the future it is likely horses will become obsolete, that means unicorns too but then why do they keep showing up in my dreams; i only found out yesterday one can pay for purchases using their phones and in a near future dystopia the only way to participate in elections will be with a subscription to google vote or going to the ivote store and installing the app into a small microchip that helps dampen deviant thoughts and impulses. The every essence of humanity is dissolving under the microscopic analysis of the military-scientific complex and all we have to show for it is synthpop; maybe that is a fair trade? All this speculation; lost, like piss into garden hedge.