Or why Descent is awesome and Earthworm Jim can go fuck himself.

Recently you've reopened and called for new developers to revitalize your classic properties. Names like MDK and Earthworm Jim have been bandied about. Let's be honest; those weren't your biggest sellers. The one people recognize is Descent.

Now Descent 3 was good. It had pretty graphics, fun weapons, and clever robots. But you spend too much time in Descent 3 looking for something to shoot and too often that leads to trips to the surface, outside of the labyrinth confines Descent is best known for. When (not if) Descent 4 is made, please take the game straight back to its roots. No helper bot, no outdoors. Just you, your weapons, a maze full of robots lusting for your death, and a really good soundtrack. These are what made Descent and Descent 2 great.

Furthermore, the Material Defender works best as a the silent type. I've gone over this before (somewhere), Descent 3 ruined the Material Defender by giving him a voice and making him anything more than a faceless mercenary. Using the lame story to string along the levels was lame. This time, keep it simple. There's the mine, there's robots in there somewhere. Here's your gun.

Please Interplay. Make this happen. And don't fuck it up.

No, I'm not deployed again, I'm just playing Clive Barker's Jericho! Ha!

Seriously. Can this game get more brown? I'm in the World War 2 period of it and I'm not shooting undead nazis, I'm shooting big brown monsters with chainguns and flamethrowers. At one point I was shooting a dead woman with a German accent named Lichthammer whom I assume was in nazi regalia but I can't be sure because everything was brown. I could only tell by her stylish hat.

And the voice acting. It's god awful. I want to strangle Father Rawlings and Delgado and I'm positive I only don't hate the rest of the characters because they don't talk as much as those two. The best one so far is Arnold Leach and he has barely spoken at all.

This is all such a far cry from Undying it's unreal. Undying was a colorful, well voiced, genuinely scary game. The best I can say about Jericho is that the fiction is pretty good (but not as good as Undying so far) and Leach is a well designed monster. He looks like he's straight out of Hellraiser. The concept art is impressive but seeing him in motion at the end of the first section of the game is damned near terrifying.

I game at work. Big shock, right? Only when there's really nothing going on though. Today I was revising the original System Shock. I've never beaten it but maybe I will this time. It's amazing. I get back to my room and I'm still hungry for more System Shock. I don't want to start over so I figure I'll fire up System Shock 2 and beat it again. I couldn't get the disc ripped properly so I downloaded it off bittorrent. It's cool, I bought the game ages ago, I just want to play it without having the disc in Iraq. But what I got wasn't the game, just a single executable that won't run. Awesome. So after I find another download and get that started I start to look at alternatives. Games that are often compared favorably to System Shock 2. I know! I'll try Deus Ex. Again.

I've owned Deus Ex for a long time. I probably even paid full price for it. I've never finished Deus Ex. Whereas System Shock deals with being a space hacker fighting cyborgs and mutants, Deus Ex puts you in the shoes of some superhuman CIA agent uncovering every conspiracy theory known to man. The games play relatively similar except that one of these games is fucking awesome and the other game fucking sucks. I finished the one that's fucking awesome.

Here's the myriad of problems I've found with Deus Ex:

• The first fucking level. It might be the worst opening level to a game ever. It's huge, it's intricate, and you're thrown in there with little explanation why.
  

• The graphics. I'm not a graphics whore. I'm playing System Shock enthusiastically and it's basically Doom era graphics, or worse. Deus Ex might be the ugliest Unreal engine game ever made. The model textures all look like they're rendered too big and the models themselves are incredibly blocky and poorly animated.

• It's SO FUCKING HARD. There's never enough health packs, there's never enough ammo, and there's never enough energy to make use of all you're wiz-bang high tech gadgetry. There is a lot of neat shit in the Deus Ex environments that I would love to see more of, if I weren't always being shot at or spotted by a camera, or crawling around in the dark because I don't even have enough energy for my flashlight, which since I'm a cyborg guy IS MY HEAD. I need more batteries for my goddamned head!

So keeping these in mind since my last attempt to play through Deus Ex, I fired up the installer. Installs fine, patches fine, throw in the Shifter mod (which claims to take the Suck out of Deus Ex), fire it up. I fix my resolution (which maxes at 1024x768, what the fuck), fix the color depth (which requires the whole game to restart), and quit out. It quits with an error. Oh well, whatever. Back to desktop, which is noticably lighter. Like the gamma setting within the game is now stuck in the real world. Awesome. Start it up again. Name my duder (Hank Rearden), pick my skills (Advanced Rifle, Trained Lockpick), start the game. Crash to desktop. What the fuck. Do it again, another crash, fuck you Deus Ex. Uninstall.

Take a breather. Maybe the Shifter mod is doing it. Google the mod, find a newer version, find an enhanced OpenGL renderer. Awesome. Install Deus Ex, patch, start it. I do everything I did last time up to the crash to desktop except this time everything is working. Quit out, install Shifter and the renderer, start up again. It's working! Thank god.

I've played the first level a hundred times so I'm in no mood for sightseeing. I'm killing every NSF trooper that looks at me. I get to the upper base of the statue and I'm trying to disarm a gas grenade and it blows up in my face. Awesome. Chug a medkit, start up the stairs to the duder I'm there to kill and I get a communique from HQ. Hermann is still in the basement. Goddamnit. Go all the way down, kill some duders, break out Hermann. Back up the stairs, I'm spotted by a camera and now I'm being riddled with bullets by a turret. Run up some stairs out of its' range and it's back to getting to that duder I'm killing. Another communique, I'm not paying attention, I get to the top of a staircase and I'm greeted by two NSF agents. I backpedal down the stairs and one of them gets off a lucky shot and brains me and I'm dead. I haven't quicksaved since Hermann. Fuck this fucking game.

And that's that. I'm done with Deus Ex again.