And once you’re inside that club, well.Īnd sometimes it’s really smart. I’m pretty certain this wasn’t intended as a satire of the terrifying nature of the Chinese police force, but rather the AI misfiring. But this is stupid.Ī member of the Chinese military police in Hong Kong accidentally broke a window near the entrance to the Lucky Money club, causing the alarm to sound and all the cops to start shooting at me.
#Deus ex hong kong full#
Come on, scripting! How can you not have seen that as a secure route for Paul’s life? Sure, if I’ve left him in a building full of armed lunatics – as I so cowardly did in 2000 – then yes, he’d be dead. Much as how I was accused of murder for walking through the wrong door at the start, here I was without a sibling because I’d taken the sensible route out of the hotel once I’d assured Paul’s safe exit. And gosh, what a dent in the side of Deus Ex’s polished memories. Sure, I still get caught by Gunther, but what difference could it make? It was a daft way to go, when I could escape to the roof, sidle down into an alley, and sneak my way to the subway via the sewers. I didn’t go that way, because there were squillions more guards that way, and Paul pings out of existence as soon as I go through the doors anyway. It turns out, from a spot of research I’ve done since, that it’s because I didn’t go out the hotel’s front doors. I was sent to the infirmary, and there he was, dead on the slab. Then others, upon my escape in UNATCO, told me the same. I’d done it! Paul was alive!Įxcept when I encountered Gunther Hermann in that forced scripted sequence in Hell’s Kitchen, he immediately told me Paul was dead. Then I filled the lobby with gas bombs, and – accepting that I was now a murderer anyway – killed every last green guard in the building, until Paul was safely alive in the lobby, instructing me to head out and make contact with Tracer Tong. The MiBs were dead before they could utter their lines. Fifteen years ago I’d believed he simply could not – that the attacks from the Men In Black were simply too strong to escape, and all I could do was flee through the window as Paul demanded I do. In that hotel, I was ready for the big firefight, and I was determined that I would see Paul survive it. I’d lost him when I first played through the game, and I’d never seen the version of events as it plays out with him alongside. So, of course, this time I was determined to save Paul. But our motivations were dramatically different. We were, in the end, playing the same game, in the same order. For me, I was heading to Hong Kong to meet Paul’s contacts, to break the news of his death to Chow. For Kieron, he was heading to Hong Kong to help Paul escape his kill switch, and to eventually learn more about his relationship with Maggie Chow. For me, I was breaking out of UNATCO HQ, via the medical facility to collect a chip from Paul’s corpse.
For Kieron, he was breaking out of UNATCO HQ, meeting Paul in the medical facility along the way. But it does have a major impact on your experience of the game. Now, looking back at it, Paul’s living or dying doesn’t have a genuinely major impact on the game. Kieron stopped me mid-sentence and said, “Paul didn’t die?!” And it dawned on both of us, on a new level, quite what a game we’d just played. I mentioned, off-hand, how disappointed I was that JC’s brother, Paul, died. We were talking about Deus Ex, having both finished it, and enthusing about our favourite moments. And he was my extremely forgiving editor.
#Deus ex hong kong Pc#
I was a freelancer for PC Gamer based in Guildford, he was a voice on the phone I’d never met, but seen many pictures of in the pages of PCG. It was the time I talked on the phone to Kieron Gillen about Deus Ex for about an hour. Okay, I’ve been resisting writing this yet again, for fear of the groans of re-re-re-sharing an anecdote I’ve told probably more than any other, but I need to, for context. In this fourth edition, I once more fail to save my brother, become increasingly frustrated with the limits of the game's intelligence, and ponder whether real choice is actually usefully conveyed to the player. And so continues my chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I'm right when I tell anyone who comes near that it's the best game ever.