The end of summer is here, which brings with it all sorts of neato downloadable releases and the first trickling of the Triple A titles which will become a full blown deluge once November hits. So here are some brief thoughts on what I’ve been playing:

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: This game has been incredibly, surprisingly good. I didn’t follow it extremely closely before it was released, but thanks to that I was able to go in with pretty much nothing in the way of expectation. I also never played the first Deus Ex, which was one of the more celebrated PC games ever made. Graphically, it hasn’t aged well (the first Deus Ex game, I mean), but a lot of games made during that era haven’t. Anyways, this new Deus Ex game is quite good. It’s cyberpunk, but more in the gritty serious way of Neuromancer than the goofy nerdy way of Snow Crash. The game is set in an alternate future where human augmentation has been the hot button issue for years. Some are for it (like your boss, the CEO of a massive biotech company), others protest outside of augmentation clinics. You get groups like the Humanity Front, who are against the transhumanism that augmentation implies. The world of the game is incredibly well realized, with a huge amount of work put into environmental detail, nitty-gritty history, and such. You can pick up ebooks that contain snippets of fictional lectures given about new augmentation technologies, and NPCs talk to each other almost constantly – I haven’t heard the same conversation twice. You play as Adam Jensen, the chief of security for that Sarif biotech corporation mentioned earlier, and as the game progresses you can upgrade a full range of augmentations, which allows some pretty extensive control over the kind of character you end up playing. I focused on hacking augmentations and also picked up the “CASIE mod,” which is basically a human reaction reader and pheromone spritzer. It adds a series of meters and graphs to the conversations you have, giving you an edge in influencing other characters. After a good ten hours with the game, I’m still saying “wow” pretty constantly, which is an excellent sign.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online: Previous review is still a good indication of what I think of the game. Not finding games online is kind of a bummer, but that’s why you convince your friends to buy it instead. The menu screen contains a rotating assortment of character art, so as you decide between single player and multiplayer you can also look at a portrait of Akuma, or Chun Li, or…Gill. Gill is a giant version of Fabio with red skin on one half of his body and blue skin on the other. And he wears a tiny little man thong. And sometimes you boot up Third Strike and it’s right there in your face. Sometimes it’s hard to convince your friends to take videogames seriously.

Rock of Ages: Haven’t had too much time with this one, but it’s promising. It’s sort of like tower defense in vs mode, and you get to control a giant boulder that acts as your attacker, rolling it down a hill into your opponent’s base. The concept of the game is fun, the gameplay is satisfying, and there’s also a healthy dose of Monty Python-esque humor and visual style thrown in as well. It’s worth the ten bucks if you’ve got some time to kill.

Besides that, I just saw this trailer for Fez, the upcoming indie-darling platformer. I'm incredibly excited for Fez based on audio-visual stylings alone. Looking forward to this one.