Deus Manifestare

During this ongoing Dark Age for PC gaming, when corporate Greed has coupled with pseudo-DRM schemes to stifle any original idea or creative process, I found myself, again and again, reaching for the classics. And Deus Ex is definitely a classic masterpiece.

Set in the near future, infused with equal doses of cyberpunk mentality and noir atmosphere, playing like an FPS with strong RPG elements (inventory, character development, modifiable equipment, secondary quests) - and yet one is better off avoiding shooting more often than not!. Whoever played Deus Ex can attest that this game will stay with you. Forever. And rightly so.

This is a game infused with life. The characters act natural. The script is brilliantly paranoid. And the whole setting will immerse you into this twisted world of technological possibilities and power.

In a perfect world, David Lynch would have realized William Gibson's Neuromancer. Short of that, we have been offered Deus Ex.

Sure the graphics may look dated. But I promise you that you will find no lip-synced modern game more appealing than Deus Ex  Even 5+ years old PCs will be able to render its full potential (although the game's strengths are hardly limited to its appearance) - and it is DRM-free.

Failure Of The Obsidian Order

Strange things expectations. Receiving the same item may trigger either satisfaction or disappointment depending on what you were expecting. From a game that was developed by members of OBSIDIAN, the people who had released such masterpieces as Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate, one expects lightening to strike yet another time. Unfortunately, they seem to have stroked out.

The first thing that strikes you with Alpha Protocol, however, are how bad the graphics are. Admittedly, great games have worked wonders and have been offering great fun with only limited graphics. There are games that are 10 or even 15 years old, when graphical capabilities were but a fraction of what they are today, and yet they are still more fun to play than most of the vapid eye-candies released these days. Unfortunately Alpha Protocol is not one of them.

The graphics look just bad. From the institutional colors to the awkward movements of the characters and the almost non-existent interactive environment, the game feels like a cookie-cutter Third-Person Shooter game found in a sales-bin.

Of course this is not a simple TPS game, it is rather a Third-Person RolePlaying Shooter (RPS). Your character advances in level and he also has an inventory. There are classes to choose from and skills to add to. There are different weapons and armor to equip with. Stealth is very important yet not the only way to go and there is a spy story unfolding through the dialogue options and cut-scenes. All this looks quite good on paper yet, somehow, it failed to work for me. And I have been an RPG fan for years.

The story is not absorbing and the characters are caricatures rather than the deep, complex characters one enjoys in a good RPG. The RPG elements are all there but they seem to get in the way of one another and work together. Having a time limit on the (Mass Effect 2-short) dialogue options is not a good thing either.

ALPHA PROTOCOL also sports...mini games. With variations of ideas we have seen in Fallout 3 and BioShock, hacking and lock-picking are carried out by completing mini-games that (just like in those previous games) get old and tedious. Fast.

As DRM goes, good ol' SEGA slipped in a Limited Activations scheme - but promised to patch it out in about a year, so the game will stay yours. If promises are kept that is.

An RPG that strives to also be a shooter, a stealth tactical game with the possibility of bullet time, an endlessly bifurcating story that manages to end up predictable. This is a game that takes up a lot of different elements on its brush but the picture it paints in the end is unoriginal if not confusing. Had all the different elements worked together, this would had been a masterpiece. Unfortunately, inspiration alone is not enough.

All in all, Alpha Protocol consists of a lot of good ideas that got thrown together but were then left underdeveloped and unrefined. Maybe they exhausted their A-game on developing Fallout: New Vegas, who knows.

Because of the developing team's history, I will be overlooking this one.

If you are out of ideas guys, I would propose developing a game looking like Diablo III and playing like Baldur's Gate. And if it had a steampunk setting it would be heaven.

Alpha Protocol will be remembered as a bump on the road.

Taking Down An Angel

Only three years in it, and CyberPunk 2077 is the most anticipated release of the decade.

CD PROJECT RED, the gaming Studio behind the legendary Witcher Series is bringing together mature Role-Playing Gaming in a Gibsonian hard-boiled cyberpunk setting.

Based on Mike Podsmith's 1990 Cyberpunk 2020 pen-and-paper RPG, the story has been hinted to borrow and pay homage to numerous pillars of the genre, from Blade Runner to the Sprawl Trilogy.  

Fixers and Nomads, NetRunners and Techies, Razor-Girl Psychos and Max-Tacs - the mix keeps getting ever more explosive by each passing week.

Will it hold until its release in 2015?

Are You Prepared For This?

Inception is a movie built like a labyrinth, complete with a menacing minotauric presence and a guiding Ariadne; worlds within worlds and dreams reflected onto dreams like an infinity mirror effect.

Nolan takes the viewer deep, deeper than any other filmmaker in memory, and without holding your hand all the way he never lets you get lost. His vision has years compressed into hours, Paris folding onto itself, militarized minds and entire worlds built out of a single person's imagination. Yet in the end, his logic is solid and his story scintillatingly brilliant.

This is a bioSciFi, a cyberpunk and an action movie all rolled into a complex story in the near future, where not even our dreams will be safe and sharing our subconscious fears and fixations will only be an induced REM cycle away. A true and timeless Masterpiece of a movie.

Have you tried your Totem yet?

Then how can you be sure?

Top-10 Cyberpunk Novels You Must Read Before The Corporate Dystopia Is Upon Us

Cyberpunk is the cross between the genres of Science Fiction and Hardboiled Noir. Since both of its parenting vectors have always been considered marginal to canonic literature, it enjoyed more freedom to point out societal shortcomings and attack instances of collective shortsightedness.  

It had been foreshadowed for some time (mainly by the giant of SciFi literature, Philip Dick) but did not find the confidence in its step until the mid 1980’s, after Bruce Bethke coined it as the title of a short story of his, published in 1983.

There is no set recipe for cyberpunk yet there seems to be a number of requirements to be met before a novel is to be considered to belong to the genre. The story has to be set in the not too distant future. This future world must be dystopic for the masses, while hedonistic for the ruling elite. Technology has advanced asymmetrically, its abilities far outweighing its safeguards, and the computer/brain barrier has been breached. Said technology has completely different uses in the street, where hacking is a required survival trait. Said ruling elite consists not of politicians but of interconnected corporations. The Tyrells, the IOIs, the Maas BioLabs, the Ono-Sendais. The zaibatsus and the keiretsus. More often than not, cyberpunk novels come with an underlying message or a warning. Envisioning dystopias approaching in the horizon often does.

Obviously, I could not include any pure Science Fiction or Space Opera novels (such as the Dune or the Void series). I only included the novels that have the street moves down pat. The ones that come fully equipped with the hard and the soft. The ones that bring you into the near future and, there, brick up the door back to reality for you. The ones that will cut through all the Black ICE holding each and every one of us into place.  Crack open the spine of any of these books and the sound they make is the sound of a world ending. Do so at your own risk.

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10. PHILIP K. DICK: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the novel that the movie Blade Runner is based upon. And by “based” I mean loosely. Do not expect to read the movie. Regardless the differences though, the basic concept remains intact: how fragile is humanity from loosing itself amongst technological simulacra. When these imitations approximate us in both form and function, what is the remainder of the human essence that will carry our uniqueness? And, at the end, does such uniqueness actually exist?

I felt I had to include this as I consider it the most clear cyberpunk precursor.

9. PIERRE OUELLETTE: The Deus Machine

Set only ten years into the future (The Deus Machine was written in 1995) this is a unique cyberpunk novel in the sense that it relies heavily on biotechnology and the consequences of its abuses. How well do we understand the power of life? How secure is our hold over it? And just how bad can things go when the greedy wizard’s apprentice is overwhelmed by the power he unleashed? Is our ever-scheming, striving for power and instant gratification, murderous species a biological oddity about to be evolutionary corrected?

The story is set in a crumbling society where middle-class has been replaced by interchangeable drones that barely scrape a living. The novel has its rough edges but it is also unforgettable.   

8. CORY DOCTOROW: For the Win

Virtual economies within vast in-game worlds and third-world gold-farmers scrapping a living in internet cafés. Economic and political oppression in the process of merging into the Beast envisioned by the cyberpunk tradition. The author is not light-handed when it comes to slipping in his political views (with which you will probably come to agree with at the end). More importantly though, For the Win is a book that will not only make you give pause the next time you engage in any Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming, but it will also make you reexamine your structure of our global investment-bank economy.   

Congratulations! You have just completed Level 8! But are you playing the game – or is the game playing you?

7. NEAL STEPHENSON: Snow Crash

The future is this: franchises. From the pizza-delivering Mafia to the city-states (“burbclaves”) America managed to fraction itself into, everything has been turned into incorporated franchises. Including drug running. So when a new drug, called Snow Crash, kills a friend of the protagonist (and only Neal Stephenson could name his main character …Hiro Protagonist and get away with it!) while logged into the Metaverse, he decides to take action.

Some readers are put off by the juxtaposition of the futuristic story and Sumerian mythology, however, for me the worlds contrast brilliantly against one another. Also, prepare to laugh quite often. Snow Crash is a funny book.   

6. PAOLO BAGICALUPI : The Windup Girl

The world is getting smaller. Not because of a cataclysmic cosmological event but because the shortage of fossil fuels made us revert in relying on animal labor. Collapse of the economies of entire continents, chronic malnourishment, religious cleansings and an endless string of resistant terminal infections have pushed humanity to the very edge of existence. And yet, human greed and blind ambition still offer the impetus for the endless power-games that care not how many lives get trampled under its threads.

An American investor/spy after Thailand's only remaining bio-treasure; a shrewd and ruthless refugee trying to rebuilt his empire lost to murderous fundamentalism; government factions locked in a power-struggle to the death; and a seductively-designed Japanese Windup Girl that will unwillingly serve as the catalyst for the brewing explosion. I do consider The Windup Girl to be a cyberpunk novel as it depicts the aftermath of our ongoing technoeconomical binging. 

5. JAMES S.A. COREY: The Expanse Series

Even if this may be one of the rare occasions, where transferring a book to the screen actually enhances its impact, The Expanse novels are still well worth your time. An expansive adventure that perfectly blends unbridled futurism and technological meta-humanity with basic vices and familiar motivations. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (the collaborating authors behind the pseudonym James S.A. Corey) took cyberpunk and shot it to the reaches of our solar system - and beyond. While, at the same time, they managed to convey the smell of a well used spacesuit, the uncertainty of moving in freefall, the taste of cheap printed protein paste and the terminal terror of the vacuum.  

Bite down hard and let the juice carry you through the gs.

 

4. WILLIAM GIBSON: The Bridge Trilogy

The three books consisting William Gibson’s vision of a near future West Coast are: Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. The technological futurism of the 20th century is on the cusp of emergence (even if the flavor we are getting is much more bitter than expected) and the corporate powers are elbowing for position. America has been Balkanized into numerous fractions while life tries to paint over the cracked pavement a thin coating of the normalcy people grew up in. Meanwhile, in depressingly upbeat Japan, the first crude attempt is made to treat personality simulations as real persons.    

The Trilogy gets its name from the first book, in which people have turned the earthquake-condemned Golden Bay Bridge into a makeshift habitat for the homeless. It is always creepy to realize how good Gibson is in predicting nodal points in both technology and societal progression.

3. RICHARD MORGAN: The Takeshi Covacs Trilogy

Handle with care, for the testosterone levels of these novels needle into the red. The Trilogy (so far) consists of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies - but it would be an omission not to mention Black Man (released as Thirteen in the US) as a very worthy prequel. 

Dive into Takeshi Covacs’ world and you will crave resleeving your backed-up consciousness into fresh bodies, enlisting into the Envoy Corps, dreaming of Martian Artifacts (that are not Martian after all) and you will try to find a way to book tickets to Harlan’s World. My advice: start saving for a needlecast, the only way to travel!

Morgan has meticulously created a world that feels, sounds, looks and smells real. As a result, the story only grows richer and deeper every time he revisits it. 

2. NEAL STEPHENSON: The Diamond Age (A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer)

Mid 21st century Shanghai. Imagine a nanotechnology book-shaped supercomputer designed to train and morph any upper-class privileged girl into the proper young lady the neo-Victorian microsociety of her enclave demands. Now, imagine that this very valuable piece of technology somehow ends up in the hands of an underprivileged orphan girl instead. The Diamond Age is Stephenson’s tour de force in cyberpunk that manages to grab your attention from the very beginning and never lets go. A book worked to its finest detail, an impressive body of work that is extremely entertaining to read while leaving you with a thought provoking aftertaste that lingers on for years.

1. WILLIAM GIBSON: The Sprawl Trilogy

Neuroromancer. Count Zero. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Together with the collection of short stories, Burning Chrome, these are the Four Gospels of cyberpunk. 

A bleak world of nerve/biochip integration; ICE-cutting cyberspace cowboys and jacked up razor girls; artificial intelligence entities holding citizenships and striving to be more; immortalized billionaires spread single-cell thinly over acres of support vats. The constant grey drizzle condensing under the unfinished domes of the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area urban sprawl tries to hide a world of drugs and hustlers and players – all losers and all winners in their little games. And Freeside, the Babylon in the sky, the rotating space station that serves as off-world data heaven and money-laundering banking shelter and houses a byzantine family of clones, locked in an endless power struggle.

In a world where knowledge and abilities is the insertion of a single biosoft away and media stars share their entire fine tuned sensorium with their fans, ambition and murder is the only aura to radiate. And William Gibson’s prose is poetic and hypnotic.

Welcome to the Edge. That is the Future. And it does not get any better, the closer it gets.     

The Dream Will Be Collapsing. Again and Again

Dive into Nolan's labyrinthine worlds-within-worlds with only music as your guiding thread. You will get lost - and you will love every second of it. The Inception SoundTrack is an extreme musical trip into the unknowable.

To anyone who has not yet seen this epic movie I would strongly recommend to do so. Nevertheless, the soundtrack stands on its own. Zimmer only had the script to go by so his compositions reflect his own take on the characters and events of the movie and are not simply there to complement the pictures.

The album starts off ominously with the short Half-Remembered Dream, reaches an early peak with The Dream Is Collapsing, turns playfully threatening with One Simple Idea to end with my favorite, Time, a majestic closing piece, full of new found hope and open sunbathed vistas.

If you think of buying this because you were blown away by the trailer music keep in mind that it is not included. That piece is called Mind Heist and it was actually composed by Zack Hemsey, not Hans Zimmer.

This is the music of the worlds within, the sound of our subconscious fears and most secret dreams; the sound of the pulsating thread that connects us with the Universe.

Epic!