The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
There's a portion in the game when your brother Paul is sick and he tells you to leave him to fight off enemy goons alone. Apparently you can fight your way through the hotel and he survives all the way to the end of the game!
When the sequel came out, I was like "why the fuck is Paul still alive"
The issue with this is that the game doesn't really communicate this fact to you, and not killing the goons technically should mean that they're still going to go upstairs at some point and kill Paul.
The most hilarious part of this is that Paul himself says he's too weak to climb through the window, but as soon as those goons bust in through the front door, he whips out a 50 lb flame thrower and starts strafing around at 30 mph like he's in the motherfucking murder olympics.
You can kill Anna on the plane where you're supposed to kill Lebedev; the game accounts for this with voice dialogue and everything. Crazy. At that point in the game there is no reason for you to even try (and she's a tough match) unlike later on --- but you can!
I tried playing Alice a couple times when I got Steam in 2023, and I couldn't get into it. Tried another game from that era: Made it about halfway through Half Life 1 on a long flight and couldn't get into it either, even after I'd played Alyx.
It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.
IIRC Quake used “a” and “d” to… turn, instead of strafe, by default. Absolute madness. Can be played without a mouse I think(?).
On the other hand, it is still very cool that you can get the bad guys to fight each other sometimes. That should be a feature in every game really.
Second, there's Open Deus EX (I think not GMDX compatible yet) and DX-Rust, which it is.
I still play to that game, and it's my favourite among Slashem and some few interactive fiction ones.
OpenDE: Fast, vanilla https://github.com/jarmitage99/OpenDE
DX-Rust: Slow, AI slop, but it can be improved. It supports GMDX https://github.com/Grissyelda/dx-rust
If you use Recomp Launcher you can install these with ease, even on Steam Decks.
One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté:
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world.
I never made that connection until literally reading this piece. Bankers weren’t all Jews, and not all Jews were Bankers. I had heard the stereotype, sure, but I never read said stereotype into such conspiracies or narratives. It just made logical sense that a newly-emerged global society formed around currency and trade would be manipulated by those people who specialize in said sectors, i.e. bankers and financiers. The fact said individuals continue having outsized import on daily news and current events almost cements the plot point as real prophecy instead of antisemitic nonsense, but I can also see how bad actors would tie hate speech to current events to boost their own platforms.
Just an odd bit of reflecting, is all.
Compared to those, all bankers of the world even combined are still a minor insignificant player. I wonder if we will ever see 'occupy sillicon valley' movement?
On the contrary: whenever I see someone accuse a work of antisemitism because it has greedy bankers, I think that says a lot more about the accuser than it does the work in question. It is not normal to look at a fictional banker sect and assume that they are meant to be Jews, or a reflection on Jews.