61 Frames Per Second : deus ex

Deus Ex Machiwuhuh: Where is Warren Spector?

John Constantine — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Warren Spector is what we here at 61 Frames Per Second call “a mule of epic proportions”. His mulishness can be measured by a number of standards. For example: how many people could make a decent videogame about Mark Hammil dogfighting giant space cats? How many people could make a medieval stealth game and actually have it feel speedy and good? How many people could make Deus Ex? Precisely one person. He rules, but it's been quite a long time since we've seen him 'round these parts.

Now, admittedly, everyone knows precisely where Warren Spector is. He and his assembled crew of visionaries from Junction Point Studios have been at Disney Interactive since 2007. The long-lived rumor, which popped up again just this past December, is that Spector has been working on a Mickey Mouse platformer alongside Disney Feature Animation and Pixar. Sounds like a match made in heaven to be honest. Some of gaming’s brightest designers have worked on Mickey Mouse platformers. That’s just a rumor though. The fact is that Spector hasn’t had a new game on the Markey in half a decade and Junction Point hasn’t published anything at all. What’s the hold up Warren? We miss you!

Spector actually sat in on a roundtable discussion with other famous gaming faces like Will Wright, David Perry, and another of others. Spector touched on subjects all too familiar for him, like creating single-player experiences that require lower time investments from players while still having potent narratives. He didn’t mention his new game though. Maybe this year, the year Eidos will show off their Spector-less Deus Ex 3, will be the year Warren re-emerges. If it isn’t, and you’ve got a hankering for the man, I heartily recommend you go play Thief or Deus Ex again. Or head over to The Escapist and read Spector’s four part essay series, Gaming at the Margins. His theories on the medium are off-base here and there, but are nourishing food for thought all the same.

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A Decade of Gaming Excellence

Indiana Mackey and the Kingdom of the Cardboard Box

Bob Mackey — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When it comes to the corporeal state of games, most of us are pretty jaded; and rightfully so. Speaking as someone who only recently realized the emptiness of carrying around a bunch of plastic junk from apartment to apartment, I've grown to welcome the age of digital downloads and its inherent lack of box-lifting. I don't think I'm missing out on anything by not having a space-wasting DVD case for every XBLA game I have on my hard drive; and yet, certain things bring me back to the time of unbridled video game materialism that was the not-too-distant past. Since the conveniences of Gamefly, Steam, and the XBox Marketplace have entered my life, I've cut down the time I spend in brick and mortar retailers by about 99 percent. But on the few instances I leave the loving embrace of my apartment, I usually stumble upon an artifact of Gaming Past that's too good to pass up. And I can't exactly ignore the tiny, capitalist gremlin shrieking in my brain. He controls my thoughts, you see.

Whether or not I should be institutionalized is not what's important here; with this post, I hope to highlight one such recent incident of gaming archaeology--and I'm talking about the cool, fictional, Dr. Jones branch of this respected field. We've all probably stumbled across amazing finds at garage sales and flea markets, but my most recent adventure took place in the retail chain named Micro Center, the first word of which describes dignity level of the employees who work there. One of my buddies had to go track down some PC parts, so I wandered over to their video game section to discover something I didn't expect to see: an entire bin-full of original, shrink-wrapped Deus Ex boxes at the insane price of $1.99. Having never played this game was always a regret of mine, and the fact that a retail chain somehow undercut Steam was cause for celebration. So, after convincing the kind, middle-aged clerk that it wasn't necessary for me to give him all of my biographical information for a two-dollar purchase, I had a little--albeit, wholly insignificant--piece of gaming history.

Of course I opened it--this was no huge investment. After breathing in air that was straight from 2000 (it smelled like my teenage years), I shook the massive PC box to see what else it could contain: out fell two identical instruction booklets (I'm guessing this is why Ion Storm went under), a fictional newspaper insert to give a little more history about the game's world (stuff like this always justified those unwieldy PC boxes), and a survey card complete with the delightfully quaint question, "Do you own a modem?" I toyed with giving my postman something to send to a now-defunct Texas developer, but I decided my time would be better spent not abusing civil service workers. To my surprise, the untouched and unpatched disc from 8 years ago worked fine in my Vista PC; my ability to cope with slightly out-of-date game mechanics, however, seemed to be completely broken. I'm not sure what agent of Satan decided stealth in a FPS could be anything but a baffling ordeal, but I have a whole five weeks of uninterrupted freedom to find out.

Anyone else out there stumble upon any little treasures like this? The only other story I can think of is that of a friend of mine, who, at a local flea market, bought a copy of Chrono Trigger which was housed in a Shadowrun cart. But I assume that was simply the work of black magic.

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F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval:

"What do you got for us today, concept artists?"

"Check dis!"

"This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!"

"I'm fired aren't I?"

"No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway."

I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Its towering super-skyscrapers and dank alleyways are the aesthetic meat of beloved games like Shadowrun and Snatcher, but you can also see them in mid-period Contra, Flashback, Abe’s Odyssey/Exodus, and even recent blockbusters like Mass Effect. Then again, it’s not just games. Syd Mead’s Los Angeles has been the template for depicting the urban landscape of the future in all media for close to twenty-five years.

I’ve been curious for awhile now as to what the next popular conception of the cityscape is going to be. The Blade Runner type came on the heels of the ultra-slick Logan’s Run-style, cities of spires all white and sterile that typified science fiction from its 1950s heyday through the 1970s. This may not be the most academic logic in the world, but since sci-fi literature gave us our Future City model post-WWII, and sci-fi film bore its successor, I’m looking to videogames to create the next archetype.

If you’ve been reading 61FPS regularly, you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think Mirror’s Edge features the most likely model for tomorrow’s City of Tomorrow. Edge’s nameless city has the same whitewashed sterility that was the hallmark of the 60s/70s future city but twists the model by coating it in streaks of primary color and keeping the architecture familiar. The buildings, subway stations, and shopping centers recall today’s Montreal but with a consistent modernist bent. Edge’s dystopia is also a recent institution. The story constantly reminds the player that the totalitarian government responsible for the city’s current shape hasn’t been in power long, and so the omnipresence of architecture-as-construction-site provides a fine narrative metaphor: you play behind the future city’s façade of perfection. Whether or not this model fully captures the zeitgeist of 2008 and beyond remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Edge’s city more often then Blade Runner’s, especially in games, going forward.

Note: Forgive my hate against Eidos Montreal. Yeah, Fear Effect and Kane & Lynch suck, but they made Soul Bubbles. They’re alright.

(Link: Gamereactor via Kotaku)

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Whatcha Playing: Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)

John Constantine — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Truth to tell, I’ve never played a Fallout game. The vast majority of my gaming career has been spent in front of a television, not a monitor, my hands clutching a controller instead of hovering over a keyboard. It’s not a point of pride, let me tell you. Not gaming on a PC throughout the ‘90s meant you were perpetually on the outside of the cutting edge, waiting for advancements to come to Nintendo, Sony, or whoever else’s systems sometimes years later. Deus Ex, Half-Life, Diablo, even Sierra’s King’s Quest V, all games I’ve gotten to try my hand at, eventually, when they were ported to a console, shadows of their former selves. It’s even kept me from really experiencing whole genres; I’ve never played a real-time strategy game for more than a few minutes and my aging laptop could barely run World of Warcraft when I tried it out in 2005. Since that year, though, consoles have started gaining on PCs as the place where developers make their greatest strides. It’s not too surprising. Consoles have turned into high-end computers themselves.

Since finishing off Metal Gear Solid 4 a week and a half back, I haven’t played much of anything. I’ve spent spring 2008 devouring the cutting edge, playing Grand Theft Auto 4, Rock Band, Wii Fit, Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus, playing and replaying the games on Valve’s Orange Box, my morning commute spent with the best the PSP and DS have to offer with games like Crisis Core and The World Ends With You. As summer starts to kick into high gear, I’m finding myself grateful for the encroaching lull in the release schedule. I suppose it’s the fallout from too much of the present. Maybe this is why today’s reveal of Mega Man 9 has me so excited. Art, whatever shape it comes in, doesn’t always need to push at the future’s edges. Sometimes its greatest delights are slightly behind tomorrow.

Previous Whatcha Playings.

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