Square Hell: Rage-Quitting Deus Ex 3.

This is a post about a video game.  Do not be afraid. 

So in the post-throwdown era, I've been catching up on video games I've missed.  After I brought myself forward into this century, I picked up the third in the Deus Ex series. 

I expected great things.  If I still had a LiveJournal, I could actually link you to long essays about how much I loved the original game: great writing, a deep sense of openness for the time, excellent environment and setting, and a real sense that I could choose a faction with whom to ally and completely shift the game's narrative.  It was a great example of why I play video games - the narrative was interesting, engaging, and I felt as if I were part of a unique story.

Deus Ex Number 3 (or, the Great Turd +1) had none of these things. 

Let me elaborate.  DE3/TGT+1 is a trite, frivolous game of no consequence.  Here are my chief complaints, ordered by subject matter. 

GAMEPLAY:

If you are making a technology-centric game in 2011, you probably shouldn't use Starfox-era 'popups' in the HUD whenever someone radios you.  Every time Sarif sent me an IM, I tried to do a barrel roll.

The AI is either a) severely mentally handicapped or b) precognitive.  I can shoot the baddies, with impunity, from 2 feet inside a vent and they can't figure out how to fire back... or I can be in plain sight, blast away, then run into a room and shut the door behind me (OH MY GOD HE SHUT THE DOOR HE'S A WIZARD WE'RE FUCKED) without any of the 'Elite Spec Ops' bots learning how to turn a handle.  On the other hand, literally the moment I peek over a crate into a room, as long as I'm in line of sight, every bot in the room has me in their sight picture.  I call shenanigans. 

No matter how much havoc one causes, running through rooms tossing grenades like confetti and blasting away like Scarface, it takes less than two minutes of hiding for the guards to return to calm.  It's like they were all trained by the United States Air Force.  "Haven't seen him in a couple of mikes, boss... coffee break!  Let's read US Weekly!"

The conversation trees are literally pointless.  There are no lasting consequences for playing Jenson as a nice, cold, or harsh guy over the course of the game... which means each conversation is a mini-game where I'm trained to press the right button to get the tidbit of info I need (which is probably sitting on a desk two rooms over anyway). 

In the entire game, I found hundreds of ventilation shafts that led me exactly where I needed to go (because at CIA HQ, vents often provide the most direct means of travel from the maintenance closet to the Room of Infinitely Sensitive Information)... and I only found two (2, dos, etc) false leads.  For the duration of the game, my problem solving skills were reduced to FIND THE VENT TAKE THE VENT GET THE XP JUMP OUT OF THE VENT LEVEL COMPLETE. 

The level design is boring on almost every level.  Coming out of the sewers to the Chinese skyline was pretty neat. 

It makes no sense to put things where they are and not other places.  Why are there sniper rifle rounds in a TV station closet?  Why do I need TO EAT A CANDY BAR TO POWER MY MILITARY-GRADE CHEST EXPLOSIVES and I can't buy one from a vending machine?  WHY ARE THERE VENDING MACHINES IN EVERY BUILDING?

The story is linear.  Make no mistake, this is a game-writing crime that offends me more than anything else.  I'll put up with all manner of shenanigans if the story is good, and it feels like I can affect it in a meaningful way, but other than side quests, the main narrative travels from Point A to Point Bullshit.

By the time I'd sunk 2 hours into the game, I'd become a sociopath.  Linear story line?  No consequences for my moral choices throughout the game?  Ammunition hiding out in trash cans?  I literally executed every major character I was able to, just to prove it didn't matter.  I felt a mild remorse when I ran out of 10mm ammo. 

DESIGN:

Apparently, some time in the next 30 or 40 years, EVERYTHING IN THE FUTURE BECOMES SQUARE.  Maybe Apple effectively copyrights everything rounded.  Maybe the level designers loved Square Enix so much it's a joke.  But shit gets old, quick.  Ever seen a round trash can?  Well, rejoice, because no one at the Montreal studio has. 

I am typically a stealth-based player in games like this... and, typically, skill trees play to my play style.  By the end of the game I had nearly every skill maxed, and I used... um... three of them.  Not for lack of trying.  But seriously?  There's no incentive to try different things, so the ENTIRE HOOK OF YOUR GAME DESIGN IS BROKEN.  Time to reboot, jackass. 

Everything cool that happens in the game is done in a cinematic.  All the neat stuff that you saw in the trailers?  Cinematics.  Your job to make that cinematic happen is to run up to something and hold a button, then sit back and watch the carnage.  Oh, and ANY meaningful interaction with a plot-dependent character happens in cinematic.  Spend 45 minutes sneaking your robot-ass through a level like a ninja?  Yep, you're going to walk straight through the door like Clint Eastwood the moment you get within ten feet of a plot point.  Except you don't shoot like Clint.  You shoot like Napoleon Dynamite. 

AND FINALLY:

This game is racist.  Deeply, deeply racist.  Remember what Asian people and Black people sounded like in movies from the 60s?  Yep, that's what they sound like in DE3/TGT+1.  BUT!  BUT!  I learned a very valuable lesson from the random street people in this game:

If there are two black men wearing hoodies standing in a corner ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, they will sell me guns and explosives. 

Everyday Fuel:

GEEK THROWDOWN VOL 2:

            To blatantly steal from Fukuyama, the Geek Throwdown is now in the End of History.  The zero-sum game has ended; we are beyond competition for supreme hegemony.  

            It’s good at the top.  

            Call it hubris, or the sweet flush of victory, or overwhelming relief, but I did forget to mention the final books I read in my race to the top.  And since I know you all wait with great trepidation, here they are.  Pay attention, they’re some good ones. 

1.    The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides:  It is easy to forget how amazing this book is, to remember only the movie and the soundtrack and to lose sight of how the prose wraps itself up into your bones and takes root there, blooming in strange and unexpected ways when you see a field of grass or the summer scabs on a young girl’s knee.  It’s a primer for being a sentimental boy, for trying, and failing, to know a girl, for the consequences of binding our souls to something lost long ago.  In another life, Lux and I could’ve been sweethearts. 

2.    Ready Player One, Ernest Cline:  So I’ll admit that the premise, and how it was originally described to me (“It’s like someone crammed every geek culture reference into ONE BOOK and MADE IT AWESOME”) didn’t sell me at all.  There are too many books out there that try to be self- and geek-aware, and fail miserably, like your mom using LOLZ in her awkward texts.  It doesn’t work far more than it does.  RP1… worked.  I think it worked because the world was fully realized and consistent, which is where many science fiction novels fall down.  I think it worked because it made sense.  I think it worked because I cared about the characters.  Ultimately I’m not really sure what the secret was… because I was way too busy getting all ehmehgerd!!! over the Dungeons  & Dragons references.  

3.    The Magician King, Lev Grossman:  So… hm.  I felt tricked by the first in this series (It’s like Harry Potter if Harry were Holden Caulfield and Brett Easton Ellis wrote all the characters to be like his terrible friends!)… and I couldn’t put it down.  I feel exactly the same way about the sequel.  It feels cheap to make such self-aware jabs at Harry Potter and Tolkien and then to lift, wholesale, entire plot devices from Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling.  I imagine Mr. Grossman explaining how clever and post-modern the whole premise was using Power Point to some room of jackasses at the NYT Book Review and then getting high-fives (Ironic Pro-Plebe High Fives, at that) from Michiko Kakutani.  But I bought it, and read it, so I guess Grossman wins. 

Necessary Noxious Navel Gazing:

      Last week I booked my ticket to fly to Spain and hike the Camino de Santiago.  Seven short weeks from now I’ll start that trip and it feels both very shockingly real and impossibly far away.  I originally started thinking about it from the pilgrimage perspective, and then, as things went suddenly sideways in Boone last spring, as a time to find some peace and let go of the expectations I’d had, and lost, for the future.

      Right now I’m mostly curious about what will happen.  I feel confident in my ability to do the physical work and to navigate the process.  I feel confident in my commitment and ability to pick up enough Spanish between now and then to stumble through the basic interactions.  I feel comfortable in just committing to it, letting the process happen, and being grateful for the opportunity to reflect and examine my faith and myself.  

      I think I’m less confident in the kind of support I’ll get from my family – it seems like all of the major decisions I’ve made as an adult, they immediately fall into questioning and focusing on the potential problems or disadvantages.  Or, to be honest, seeming distant or uninterested when I try to talk to them about why it feels important to do, what it could mean.  

      Part of being an adult means standing on your own – I understand that.  But I’m often jealous of people who have parents who get excited about the great things they are able to do ahead of time.  I only really get that excitement after the fact, so when it comes time to take the plunge, I nearly always feel alone.

Endgame:

The time has come, faithful readers: Kate has conceded the Geek Throwdown.

I thought I would be eager to gloat.  I thought I would run triumphantly through the streets at dawn, half-naked and giddy, proclaiming my victory to any open window... but, much like finishing the last of the ice cream, waking up next to the sorority girl, arm-wrestling your 15 year old cousin, or polishing off the bottle of Aftershock, all I feel is disappointment and shame.

Don't act like you haven't been there. 

So instead of my crowning as King of All Book Geeks and subsequent benevolent reign of Geek Glory, let's do a video recap in the style of a posthumous lifetime achievement award:

In 7 months of competitive reading:
I read over 40 books totaling nearly 18,000 pages...
While working 60+ hours per week without a vacation...
Getting booted out of a 3 year relationship...
'Trending ascetic' aka Living Out of My Jeep For 2 Months...
Moving to a new state...
Significantly changing job responsibilities...
Training for a marathon...
Writing increasingly inane and obnoxious blog entries...
Finishing Alan Wake, Mass Effect 3, and Dragon Age: Origins...
Learning how to operate a 'smart phone'...
Playing Dungeons & Dragons...
and NOT LOSING MY SHIT. 

Ok.  Maybe I did win a little bit.

"We are always sixteen / I am a thousand Julys":

Summer broke on the backs of children... wait.  Right man, wrong book (and if you can snap up that dangling allusion, kiddos, I'll buy you a stiff drink). 

I realize the Throwdown is morphing more into a regular old blog as my distinguished opponent is increasingly absent, work has gotten busy enough to keep me from reading as much, and the fact that summer is here.
Summer. Is. Here.

Since it's actually gotten warm, I've sat up late among fireflies and stars drinking cold beers with multiple sets of good friends, gotten tasty food at the farmer's market, run through swarms of bugs on gorgeous trails next to the Ocoee, rekindled my love for Lux Lisbon, spent quality time with coworkers at the Universal Joint every dang week, fallen asleep on the back porch while the bright sun warmed my skin, stumbled post-workout through the doors of Jittery Joe's in search of a 7AM coffee fix, gone on an amazing bike ride through farmland and the 90-degree heat on the promise of pizza, imagined honeysuckle everywhere, found delight in the tartness of pineapples, driven with the windows down, driven with the music up.  Sung loudly.  Fallen asleep happy.

Before the leaves start to kamikaze down onto our heads, I want to crash a hostel near a beach (any beach, really), pretend like I know how to navigate a boat down a large body of water, swim in a lake, load the Jeep out with gear and friends and find a place to camp, put a few hundred rounds down range, laugh until I hurt. 

I am grateful and joyful.  Winter is coming, but summer is now.

"She radiated health and mischief."

In keeping with tradition, Dan Simmons gets his own entry.  He is allowed to stand alone, unchallenged, with a smug look upon his bearded face.  You go, Dan Simmons, you go girlfriend.

So it's taken me a few weeks, but when I was in Asheville last month for the Zombie Prom (Hey!  I finally got to go to prom!  I knew all those people were wrong about me all those years ago.  Except when they weren't.  Um.  Crap.), I made my obligatory trip to Malaprops (hereafter known as The Finest Bookshop in All the Land).  In those hallowed stacks, smelling the coffee beans, hearing the delightful banter, possibly touching the best books in an inappropriate fashion (you can't prove anything), I picked Summer of Night. 

Again, in keeping with tradition, when I brought it to the counter the bookseller not only was a Simmons fan but also wanted to talk about said fandom.  And she wasn't upselling me a damn thing. 


NOTE TO BOOKSTORES ACROSS THE LAND:  This is how you build loyalty.  I actively want to spend my hard-earned money at Malaprops.  I want to throw it at them and thank them for taking it from me.  I want to buy them a drink afterward.  I want to roll around on the floor like a happy Labrador.  I want to evangelize about Malaprops. 

I want to do these things not because they have 20,000 books on the shelves, or because they have the best discounts, or because they have a loyalty program.  I want to do these things because the people there obviously, deeply, love books and are willing to talk about it.  I believe that when I walk up to the counter, the person taking my money will have something useful and sincere to say about what I'm reading.  I believe that if I want help finding a good book to read, their booksellers will help me not because it's their job, but because they enjoy talking to people about how fun it is to read. 

But let's get back to Summer of Night. 

You know how much I loved The Terror.  Summer of Night isn't quite there, let's be honest.  I didn't expect it to be.  What Summer of Night does really well is evoke what it is like to be a kid brimming full of wonder, mystery, and fear as the classes are let out in June and the bikes are oiled and the pellet guns are loaded and you think you're going to explode with excitement and also sadness.  What it's like to be sweaty and tan and invincible underneath the noonday sun and then feel a terrible ache for the back door light when the shadows go sideways and you can't see the path clearly.  What it's like to have the entire world condensed into one awesome, heartbreaking moment of holding hands or kissing a girl for the first time. 

Plus, all the other stuff in the book is scary as hell and gave me nightmares.  I can see a Venn diagram in my head that connects Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Stand By Me, It, 'That Place', and Winter's Bone around the focal point of Summer of Night.  It works, it's good, and you should read it.

Summer of Night - Dan Simmons, 528p.

TOTAL PAGE COUNT:  16,131!

Only Revolutions of Ruin:

As far as the books go, all good stuff.  I knew that things would take a slow turn this summer as sun, the outdoors, work, and friends take precedence to sitting on my tail reading (And definitely not Mass Effect 3, not at all, nope, didn't spend any time at all on that bastard of a time-suck.), but I'll take the numbers I've got. 

Mostly, I'll take the impending trash-talking that I'm going to deliver to Kate, in person, tomorrow.  Lady can't hang. 

To be totally honest, I'm less interested in writing about reading this month than I have been.  (WARNING! WARNING! INTROSPECTION AHEAD!)  The move to Athens and the shift in job duties has been both hectic and deeply fulfilling - it is a blessing to be back among friends with whom I have history, who know the stories that get told over drinks late in the night, who smile at my flaws and laugh at my terrible jokes.  Life at work is full of energy and excitement from the new staff, and from me as I learn new things and take on new responsibilities.  It's been a while since I have felt both challenged on this level and able to deliver a high amount of energy and enthusiasm to side projects of my own; the shift reminds me of the reasons I love and believe in our program and seems to have fueled a growth spurt for my own development. 

Personally, my sudden life changes back at the beginning of the year have been judo-flung into embracing everything.  It works.  I keep wondering when the nasty grief and loss will hop out from behind a rock and kick me in the neck, but those feelings float somewhere between resignation and bewilderment.  That's fine.  Mostly I miss beautiful Boone - the wind and the bright blue skies, Stick Boy Bread, family dinners, the hardwood floors, St. Elizabeth's of the Hill Country and the wonderful people there, the guy at Gamestop who was nice, the evidence that everyone in Watauga County was deeply connected to the outdoors, the strange blend of 'good ole boy' and 'local/organic/green/yoga' folks.  It felt like home.

Alright then.  Enough of that.

On a side note - I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I have officially decided that Summer 2012 is the Season of Really Good Music.  Not all of these albums have come out in the last few weeks, but they are new to me: Regina Spektor, Of Monsters and Men, Company of Thieves, Horse Feathers, Laura Marling, and Metric right around the corner.  It's raining awesomeness.

The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett - 400p.
My Life With the Saints, Fr. James Martin - 432p.
Believing in Jesus, Leonard Foley - 324p.
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, Paulo Coehlo - 208p.

SIX MONTH TOTAL: 15,603 PAGES!

"A child could know the meaning of fall..."

So in lieu of the missing Kate's competition, I have done a couple of things: 

First, I have given up reading.
Second, I got a tattoo of the entire text of Howl on my backside.
Third, I have done other things.

(Only one of these is true.)

June 1st, and the subsequent 6-month watermark, are on deck this week.  That being said, I will wait to see Kate in person to confirm that I have duly SUNK HER BATTLESHIP before talking trash and posting my recent books (not many, to be honest) and half-year page count (pretty decent). 

On the other hand, I have used much of my normal reading time to watch all the YouTube videos.  All of them.  Here are some of my favorites, for you.

They made a statue out of us.
The pressure is rising.
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops.
We are all our own devil.
I could say that I don't love the light and the dark.
Ringing joyful and triumphant.

That's all, folks.