Having recently celebrated my birthday, I’ve found myself reflecting with fondness upon some of the quintessential firsts in my life. The awkward tenderness of my first kiss; the anxious thrill of my first solo spin as a freshly licensed driver. But soft! What light through yonder memory breaks as shiny and brightly as the first time I fell in love … With a video game.
What? You were expecting ruminations over my first time with the humpity-bumpity? Interesting enough, that eager young lad was also the one who first introduced me to the joys of PC games … And let’s just say that the latter was much more satisfying. =)
Now if you’ve been betwixt and between my ramblings here, you may remember that my first true foray into gaming was with my beloved Oregon Trail, followed several years later by the NES – a console burned so fondly into my heart that I happily refer to myself as a Nintend’ho. But I can’t say that I truly fell in love with gaming until I got my first PC and began a torrid affair with an intriguing gentleman named Gabriel Knight.
Oh, that Gabriel! He was so mysterious and clever, voiced to utter perfection by the infallibly swoon-worthy Tim Curry. I was transfixed by Sins of the Father, and later transformed – into a lifetime PC gaming enthusiast, thanks to the sequel, The Beast Within. But while the first two Gabriel Knight titles will always rank high on my “favorite games of all time” list, my affection for adventure games was fleeting. There are a few other wonderful adventures still fondly remembered – The Longest Journey, Syberia – but it wasn’t long before I craved something with a little more interaction. I’d heard about role-playing games, but had assumed that they might lack the intrigue and spice that a solid adventure game inspired. But much like that first tumble in the bed sheets, all it took was a little trial and error, a little patience and practice, and before long, I’d found my sweet spot.
Lost in my heady romances with RPGs (and the occasional real-time strategy), I became a woman obsessed. Arx Fatalis! Morrowind! Oblivion! Scores more than I can no longer recall, all blurred together in a delirium of bludgeoned beasts and honorable quests. And yet, there was still something missing. I watched friends playing first-person shooters with a mixture of awe and disdain. I was impressed by their lightning-quick reflexes and intuition, but the lack of storytelling left me cold. The perfect game, in my eyes, had goals far beyond your number of kill-shots. It had adventure and open-ended possibilities and made endless combat look lazy in comparison.
And it also had melee weapons, dammit! Like a crotchety old woman stationed in her ubiquitous front porch rocking chair, I ranted over guns like they were some kind of new-fangled technology. “When I was your age, we killed things with broadswords and claymores! We used bows and arrows, not those blasted sniper rifles. We swung clubs (or old bones, when times were tough) and we were fighting like men!”
In truth, I was secretly inflamed by my lack of superior reflexes and that nagging sense of vertigo that crept up anytime I attempted a fast-paced shooter. Had The Guild existed in the early 2000′s, I’d have aspired to be Riley, the “stupid tall hot girl” who excelled at Halo and could match the boys skill for skill.
But then, I found it … A game with the perfect blend of action and RPG elements; an intriguing storyline that perfectly melded mystery and conspiracy; a game that taught me to embrace gunpower (and the shooter within) as I fought the good fight in a seedy, dysotopian world. Enter, Deus Ex.
If you haven’t played this amazing game, you are dead to me. … Okay, not really. But I’d be willing to take you over my knee and learn you some lessons, because missing out on Deus Ex is a crime that’s certainly worthy of a punishment! And if you don’t believe me, the respected publication PC Gamer Magazine has declared Deus Ex to be “the best PC game of all time”. As in, ever! And while I do take a slight bit of umbrage with this sentiment, having declared a Mass Effect 2 as my personal all-time favorite, that distinction was won by the most narrow of margins – and was a recent victory at that. Deus Ex, after all, debuted 10 years ago and is still a classic with a luster that has not been dulled by time or dated graphics. Ahhh, but there is one notable blip in its history of awesomeness, and unfortunately it’s a glaring one: the all-around disappointing sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War.
But 7 years after Invisible War tainted the Deus Ex legacy, and long after I’d stopped hoping for another go-around with JC Denton, I learned of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, set to debut sometime in early 2011. Ohhh, if you could have witnessed the fan-girl squee! I’m cautiously optimistic that Human Revolution will find a way to reinvigorate the franchise, especially since it’s being billed as a prequel to the first game. And now that Spoony has secured entrance to the iconic Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), along with his brilliant and talented TGWTG comrades, AngryJoe and JewWario, I’ve tasked him with a quest line of my own. He is to bring me any and all juicy bits of news that he can summon with regards to Human Revolution … And I’ve also made him promise that if there’s a Thane cosplayer at the Bioware booth, he must be rubbed up against in my honor. Association by osmosis! (Or something.) But c’mon, who wouldn’t want to hob-knob with Mass Effect 2′s drell assassin, that most lethal Lothario of lust-worthiness …
Hey, don’t judge! We all have our vices, and I can’t help it if I find certain video games to be alluring, intriguing, and downright Deu-Sexy. ;-)
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