Comment by LarsDu88
1 day ago
Still my favorite game of all time. The difficulty scaling was absolutely ridiculous though. In the first level, you're supposed to be a cyber augmented super soldier, but in the first level, they give you like 2 magazines for your pistol, and if you don't max our your small weapon skill, you have worse aim than a toddler with a nerf gun.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
I was also completely blown away by something I only discovered years after playing the game when the sequel landed.
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 game implements this in a funny, low-tech way: you enter through Paul's window, and if you exit back through his window, the game treats it as though you've chosen to abandon him, so he dies. In order for him to survive, all you have to do is exit through the front door of the hotel before he is killed by any enemies, which you can do by running as fast as you can past all the enemies.
In my replays I just line the front door with LAMs so as soon as the goons enter they blow up. Then it's a massive shooting gallery all the way down. You can also use your leg augmentations to jump down the elevator shaft, and sneak your way to the front door.
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.
Indeed he does. There are many of these hidden things.
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!
Fallout: New Vegas wins the award for allowing you to kill seemingly plot-essential NPCs. As far as I know, there are only two characters in the entire game you can interact with that can't be killed, both robots. One is a vendor, so you always have at least one shop, the other is the head of a faction that allows you to complete the game even after alienating (or killing) all the other factions.
She disappears without a fight from a single lam placed at the entrance, but you have to know to put it there before entering the cutscene.
Haha, nice. Which reminds me of my first playthrough as well, and I was very much on-rails brained (just do what the game tells you to do, because most games give you barely any agency). In the plane where Anna goes to kill Lebedev, for whatever reason I tried killing her, it took a few tries but I ended up LAM'ing her and I was confused that the game continued afterward.
Deus Ex and Alice were both games I wanted to play when I was in high school, but they didn't have Mac ports.
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.
Deus Ex absolutely had an official Mac port at the time! It worked on OS 9 as well as Classic mode in early OS X. Came out a month or so after the PC version in 2000.
I've still got an old G4 tower with a working install.
> https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3777-deus-ex
> https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/mac/562944-deus-ex/reviews/108...
Edit: Quick google suggests Alice also got ported by Aspyr (same people who did the Deus ex official mac port), released 6 months after PC version in 2001.
It is funny to go back and play some classics like that.
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.