The Secrets of Deus Ex…

I’m playing Deus Ex again, for about the billionth time. I’ve done the game with so many different approaches over the year it is kind of unreal – you know you’re in trouble when you can literally recall half of the door codes by heart.

It is one of my favourite games and since I was sure that I knew everything there was to know about it, I figured I’d play it once more and properly explore and harvest every single piece of info, just in case there was something I’d missed before. I didn’t expect to find much. Once again, the game wowed me.

There’s so much redundancy built into Deus Ex it is scary. There was stuff that I didn’t find until I played the game eight or so times – like the hidden phone call with Icarus in the French Embassy, or the different conversation paths based on whether or not you kill the Private who comes to collect the NSF commander in the first mission. Once I’d found that stuff, I though I’d found it all. Turns out I was wrong.

It really is remarkable that I’m still finding stuff. Like the safe behind Manderley’s bookcase (accessible only with cheats). Or the extra lines of dialog that you can unearth if you make sure you keep clicking on everyone you meet.

There’s a load of stuff I feel I should have found before too. Extra paths and gameplay routes. I usually go for the sneaky-explorer path, using a pimped up stealth pistol to clean house as I go, so I thought I knew all the route. Then I find things like the extra routes onto the PRC Wallcloud. I normally would jump from the crane above the dock, or swim under the ship and climb the ladder to deck level. I’d avoid lowering the ramp to stop reinforcements getting on-board and making me waste ammo.

Turns out though that you can swim under the boat and climb the crane cable that dips down close to the water instead. Climb that and you can get up much, much higher and sit atop the tallest crane on the ship. You get 20 exploration points for that, plus you can snipe everyone from safety and jump atop the cargo containers on the way down to find the extra supplies. Using these and the Speed Enhancement you can get on top of the command deck and enter the ship at the top level and not the bottom.

Purely amazing – though the amount of redundant content built into the game must have made it a real bitch to make.

Also, here’s a quote from my review of Zombie Fluxx.

Players decide the rules of the game for themselves by placing down Rule cards, change goals by playing Goals and they complicate matters with Actions. By the end of the first turn you’ll have gone from ‘Draw one, Play one’ to ‘Draw five, Play two, with a hand limit of zero and a goal which sees you trying to escape the Zombies by collecting a Car and a Chainsaw’.

By the midpoint of a game it can be harder than trying to get smoke into a coke bottle with a cricket bat and it’s at that point in our lunchtime tournaments that Hiren usually gets flustered and plays the ‘Reset Rule’ card, taking everything back to basics and prolonging the game even more.

Out, Joe