Tuesday, August 31st

Had a very successful crafts party. The vibe was very conducive to getting things done. Usually, the crafts parties devolve into babbling about our lives, but I stayed up until about 10:30 actually working on my arts. Very nice.

Ran 5 miles. Whew. Going to consider taping my feet to prevent blistering. Currently, the blisters are the biggest thing slowing me down. Looking at Kinieso-Tex tape.

Played a bit of Deus Ex this morning. God that game is fun. Nothing makes me happier than sneaking around and beating people up. It is also reasonably realistic: you have to look through the iron sights to get a clear target with most guns, and normal characters don't have a HUD.

This makes me think about Japanese media, specifically their willingness to simply repeat a successful idea with no regard to continuity.

In Japanese franchises (for example, Tenchi Muyo), the original series is usually simply repeated, redone, reformulated, reimagined, and rehashed with no regard to continuity or canon. With Fullmetal Alchemist, I used to watch it with my girlfriend, and now I watch a completely new series with my wife (the same woman, incidentally).

Americans are starting to get better at this, but we still have this scurrilous idea that you have to wait a long time, usually a generation, to take a popular idea and update it with more modern visuals, fashions, technology and acting ability. You don't have to do this. And in fact, you probably shouldn't.

With the original Deus Ex, you had a lot of very good ideas, but the ending was a) player driven and b) cataclysmic in scope, so a sequel should have been impossible. Instead they effectively retconned the original game with Invisible War and said, "Actually, it was none of those things, and all of them." Which brings us to...

Reasons Why Deus Ex: Invisible War Sucked

1. It erased important decisions from the first game, effectively giving the player the option to choose between some of the same kinds of endings again. Also, it turned Tracer Tong from a neo-Primitivist into a group-mind evangelist.

2. It turned the 20 minutes into the future setting of the original game into Star Trek. Part of what made Deus Ex so compelling was that it was reflection of contemporary concerns: terrorism, pandemic disease, government/corporate conspiracy, inequality/poverty, fucking scary MIBs, aliens, body modification, cyberterrorism and the internet. The second game had many of these elements, but the fact that it was set in a future without nation-states with unrecognizable technologies causes it to betray its roots.

3. Same players in dumber costumes. You knew (or should have known) that the Illuminati would be back. You knew that the rag-tag rebels from the first game would be back. But rather than the complex web of deception from the first game, with front-companies, patsies, tools and splinter groups, you had the Illuminati, practically right out there in the open (WTO and the Order), a group of card-carrying Bad Guy luddites (the Templar), a group of card-carrying Good Guys (ApostleCorps), and aliens (the Omar).

4. Same choices with worse execution. Likewise, rather than performing one of a set of varied and interesting objectives (merge with Helios, overload the reactors, or shut down the base), the final mission of the second game had you simply selecting from 3 options on a drop-down, or doing nothing.