Is Deus Ex Still the Best Game Ever?, Part One

Labeling this initial installment as “Memories and Hardware Renderers”, the folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun are once again taking us down a nostalgia-filled trip that seeks to determine whether Ion Storm’s original Deus Ex is the great video game ever created. Unfortunately, the FPS/RPG crossbreed has a few quirks on modern operating systems and hardware, so we won’t hear much about the gameplay experience until part two:

The years have not been kind to Deus Ex. No, not the clunky graphics or obtuse interface they weren’t kind to Deus Ex on launch. It’s the technological years.

My plan was to play Deus Ex as it was launched, vanilla. It doesn’t seem fair to question whether Deus Ex is still really the best game of all time if I don’t play it as it was intended by its developers. The most recent official release was the Game Of The Year Edition, on 8th May 2001. So that’s the version I wanted to go with. It’s also a version that could barely run.

A common issue running DX on modern machines is the dialogue cutting off mid-sentence in cutscenes. That was certainly happening, the game seemingly trying to run itself five times too fast. It was also refusing to run in fullscreen, and would only load in far-too-small square windows. Not really amenable to playing. The OpenGL version was essentially dead, and the Direct3D option was messing with the resolutions. The cure for all this, it seems, is updating the hardware renderers. And the only way to do that is to start fiddling with mods and launchers.