Video Gamers Podcast - Video Games Quick Take - Deus Ex Series

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

From video games hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more video games content each week.  Video Games Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hello and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast where we break down all things gaming. We cover things on this show like first impressions on new releases, deep dives, gaming news, and tournaments like figuring out the best gaming dad of all time. And on Saturdays, we have these Quick Take episodes. These are a little bit older. They were recorded by us back in the day under our old name, the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And the Quick Take episodes were initially only available to Patreon and Apple supporters, although there was a little bit of demand that people were requesting to hear them as they got a little bit older.

So we started releasing these to the public for everybody to enjoy. These episodes are pretty short. They are generally about 10 to 12 minutes long, and they are recorded by just one of us at a time. Usually, it's us wanting to talk about something that just didn't really fit the format of the main show, so it always gave us an opportunity to maybe record just a few minutes about something that we've always wanted to talk about. Just keep in mind that as you listen to this episode, if you hear any announcements or upcoming dates, plans, anything like that, just take that with a grain of salt because you're listening to this quite a bit delayed.

All right. I think that covers everything here. We hope that you'll enjoy this episode. Let's do it. Hey, everybody. It's Josh. I'm back. I hope you missed me. I missed all of you out there. These quick takes are a lot of fun to do. And honestly, it's a phenomenal way for us to say thank you for supporting the show. You are the few, the proud, the elite, the only people in all the world that get to listen to these episodes.

They are exclusively for our supporters, our squad mates, and we hope you enjoy them. So if you're listening to this one, obviously you've enjoyed them in the past. I'm going to try not to let you down today because I'm going to be talking to you about a series that is near and dear to my heart. And the first one in this series is to this day, one of my favorite games that I have ever played in my life. Now that game is not going to hold up well today. So don't go watching videos of it. And if you go to look it up, you're not going to be impressed. But man, let me tell you back in the day, back in my day, this game was phenomenal. That is a series that is called Deuce X. You have probably heard of Deuce X at some point. You've probably seen cover art or maybe even a snippet of gameplay, and there's a good chance that you haven't played any of these games. It's kind of like Bioshock for some people, where they've heard great things. They've just never checked out the series before. But man, let me tell you, the Deuce X series is one for the ages.

It is very unique in a lot of what it does. It has fallen short occasionally. And I think that's why maybe it's not a little bit more well-known or well-regarded. But for people that have dove into this world and the story and these games there is an awful lot to love about it and remember about it as well okay so the original deuce x uh released in the year 2000 i know that's a long time ago um maybe even before some of you that are listening

were born but if you're an old geezer like me, then you probably remember the original Deuce X taking the world by storm. The original Deuce X came out around the time of like System Shock and System Shock 2, which is another amazing game. But the original Deuce X had one of the best stories that I've ever been a part of. It had that choice where your choices mattered.

And something it did back in 2000 that was fairly unique at the time was that it allowed you freedom of choice. And you could go about approaching a level or a puzzle or a boss or a quest in a multitude of different ways, whether you wanted to approach that with guns blazing, you wanted to go in with stealth, or you wanted to go in with maybe technology and hacking and things like that. So the Deus Ex universe is a cyberpunk type setting. It's not as cyberpunk-y as some games try to really, really be with all the over-the-top stuff. But it is humanity.

There's cybernetics. There's floating cars and stuff like that. There's a lot of those cyberpunk aspects to it. A lot of neon lights and those sorts of things. I'm not going to talk about the original for very long because, again, I do not think that that would hold up to today, but just understand that back in the day, this was a mind-blowing game and really, really got me hooked into this game series. I was going to call it a trilogy, but there's actually been a couple other games that I didn't play in it and I think are fine to miss out on. Okay, so Deuce X comes out in 2000. It shakes the world. It's amazing. I played through that five or six times.

And then we go all the way up to, I believe it was 2011. So we went a little over a decade before we got to dive back into the world of Deuce X. And that was with the sequel called Human Revolution. Human Revolution came out to a very warm reception. It's currently got a 92% Steam score. So that tells you something. This is a beloved game that is a lot of fun and well worth your time to take a look at. But Human Revolution takes place in the year 2027. Man, back then that was a long time in the future. Now it's five years from now. So we better get to cracking on all this cyberpunk technology. But you play as the character Adam Jensen. And that's the character you play through the whole series, by the way. He's the main guy there. You're a security officer for Serif Industries, which develops controversial artificial organs dubbed augmentations. And yes, you are going to augment

the heck out of yourself if you so choose. Part of the deuce X series was the more that you augment yourself, the more you lose your humanity. So you can actually not do any augmentations whatsoever in the game and you stay completely human and there's benefits to that, but there's also detriments to that as well. So the augmentations play a huge part in the game and the series of Deuce X. So after an attack on Seraph, which is the company that you work for, Jensen undergoes extensive augmentation and investigates the shadowy organization behind the attack. The story explores themes of transhumanism and growing power of mega corporations and the impact on social class. Does this sound a little bit like cyberpunk to you guys? Because guess where cyberpunk got its influence from? That's right. It took it from the deuce x series. So if this sounds familiar, there is a very good

reason why. Because this has been done prior to cyberpunk. Cyberpunk did a lot right. It also did a lot wrong. We all know that. But if you want to know where Cyberpunk got its influences from, look no further than Deuce X. So Human Revolution is a lot of fun. It came out, like I said, I can't, I'm not, there's a ton of story and stuff that, you know, I don't want to get involved in because this will turn into a deep dive episode. And it's not supposed to be. So the overarching theme of all of the Deuce X games are that they are action RPG games. Things are happening quickly. They also blend first person shooter and the stealth genre.

So if you like action RPG, you'll probably like Deuce X. If you like first person shooters, you'll probably like Deuce X. And if you like stealth games like Splinter Cell, you'll probably like deus ex. And you can do any combination of those or all three of them. And it does all of them very equally well, in my opinion. The deus ex games have amazing stories. You saw this in Cyberpunk. I mean, the story in Cyberpunk is top notch. And again, you see that through the deuce X games. I talked about freedom of choice and that you have a hundred different ways that you can approach any situation in these games. There is a very large world with different areas to explore. There's quests and optional quests. There's progression. You get stronger, you unlock new augments, you unlock new weapons. And so you definitely feel that kind of

RPG progression as you play through these games. I highly, highly recommend them. So Human Revolution came out. Everybody really liked it. And then just a couple of years later, well, I guess five years later, they came out and said, hey, we've got another one. We're going to release Mankind Divided, which came out in 2016. Now, Mankind Divided, when it came out on IGN, which is one of the premier gaming websites, it got a nine. Back then, they actually did the decimals, so it got a 9.2 on IGN, but since they've changed their system, it got a nine. And that's set in the year 2029, two years after human revolution took part. And the world is divided between normal humans and those with these advanced controversial artificial organs that they're calling augmentations. I'm just going to call them

augmentations because, hey, we all know what those are. After a violent event known as the Aug incident, augmented people have been segregated. This prompts heated debate in an era of mechanical apartheid. So what happens is the premise for Mankind Divided is everybody with these augments kind of goes crazy, started slaughtering everybody. It's not their fault. It was like a virus that was planted. And everybody with augments kind of went evil for a little bit and did some atrocities, even though they couldn't control it. So the world and all of the non-augmented people went augments bad, everybody with augments bad, and you have this huge presence of prejudice, segregation, and stuff like that.

And that is kind of the underlying theme in Mankind Divided. So this prompts heated debate amongst the humans and the augmented. And as Adam Jensen, which is the character you play, you're equipped with advanced new augmentations after Human Revolution, which is the game that I just talked about. And you're a double agent for this hacker group, Juggernaut Collective, to expose the Illuminati. You can kind of see where this is going. I mean, the story really just starts to kind of go out there a little bit. You know, and you're trying to uncover these super top secret, you know, organizations and stuff like that. It's really

cool. The stories in these games are honestly phenomenal. I don't want to spoil anything. And again, I can't get too, too deep into it. But if any of that stuff sounds interesting to you, I guarantee you in the game, it is played out very, very well. And uncovering the Illuminati, you know, and actually finding out how they're controlling things is an amazing kind of feeling in this game. So, you know, Mankind Divided, not quite as popular as Human Revolution. Graphics got updated, you know, some of the gameplay got updated. It definitely is, feels a little bit more current and modern. I'll say this, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided both hold up to this day. Even though they're a little bit older, the graphics were top-notch at the time, the gameplay was top-notch. These were developed by, you know, they were considered AAA titles.

And they're really, really good games. If you want to go back and just watch a little bit of gameplay or video from the original Deuce X, prepare your eyeballs for bleeding. It does not look good. But that's where they really got the storylines just down pat. And they carried that theme through all of the games. So Deuce X, one of my favorite series out there. If you haven't checked it out, man, go check it out. Watch some video. These games you can probably pick up for dirt cheap too. So if you're hungry

for something a little bit different and you're thinking, you know what, I feel like I missed out on that series. I highly, highly recommend that you look into them because they're all very, very well done and they're a ton of fun to play, to be honest with you. All right, that's it for this Quick Takes episode from me. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you again for the support. I am out.

I will see you soon on the next one. Goodbye, everybody.