Deus Ex – Official Guide

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I’ve always been a fan of Warren Spector’s games so it was something of a surprise that when I came to play the game usually held up as his masterpiece for this blog, I didn’t like it all that much. The main reasons were the dialog and voice acting which stopped me from being able to take a deadly serious game, at all seriously.

I had played it already back when it came out, and I certainly enjoyed it more back then. I suppose it must reflect my tastes changing as I get older, which isn’t a pleasant thought. Perhaps, it’s simply the case that other games have offered similar but improved experiences since and I went in with my expectations too high. Either way, I’m clearly in a tiny minority with my opinions and there is still plenty to like in Deus Ex.

I didn’t exactly explore the game thoroughly on my playthrough which left me interested to have a look at this guide and see all the things I missed. It was published in 2002 by Prima and is actually for the PS2 version of the game, although there is little (if any) difference to the PC game if this guide is anything to go by.

It starts with advice on how to develop your character including descriptions of all the various upgrades in the game. There are then lists of all the weapons and opponents followed by a brief section with various general advice on combat and other aspects of gameplay. The tips on character advancement are the most useful section but it’s all decent advice.

The last 2/3’s of the book are taken up with a walkthrough of the game. This does mention all the various options you can take, although it tends to only go through one route in-depth. This walkthrough is very pictorial with 100’s of screenshots throughout. It’s not that dissimilar to reading some of my own posts in that sense. Because of all those pictures, there isn’t all that much description and the plot of the game is barely mentioned. It’s strictly about the actions that you need to take.

This means there isn’t really anything in the way of plot spoilers, but I’d like to have seen all the differences in the story described in full. The 3 endings are mentioned but you are clearly expected to play the game to find out what happens when you try different things. There is a 3 page section on the story of Deus Ex at the end however, which doesn’t deal with events in the game but does give the history of events before the game starts. The story isn’t especially plausible when you see it all written down like this but it’s certainly got more depth to it than your average game.

The guide suffers some of the same issues that the Thief guide did but to a far lesser extent. I might have expected a list of all the experience bonuses, more detailed maps and where to find equipment. Most of the information you actually need is probably in the walkthrough though and it does pack a lot into a fairly small number of pages.

As usual I’ve scanned and uploaded this. I’ve also been scanning other guides in the meanwhile, and have added pdf’s for a Curse Of Monkey Island, Magic Carpet 1 & 2 and the Pandora Directive since the last post. I know at least one person is waiting for it, so I’ll probably have a look at the System Shock 2 guide next.

Strike Commander Strategy Guide And Flight School

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I’ve already looked at the Strike Commander Playtester’s Guide but in 1994 Origin and Prima created another. This one has a larger format and takes up nearly 400 pages making it about 5 times larger than the Playtester’s Guide. It’s described as supplementary to that, however, and doesn’t even contain mission descriptions for the main campaign. This might leave you wondering how it fills all those pages, and it does it with a comprehensive guide to every aspect of flying an F-16 in Strike Commander.

Comprehensive is definitely the word here. Any guide that includes a definition of diving and how to achieve it by pushing forward on the joystick is clearly assuming that you know nothing. I suppose that there must have been people still struggling after buying the Playtester’s Guide and this book was aimed at them. It splits every aspect of flying missions into smaller chunks, such as basic flight, unguided bombing, smart weapons, etc.. and talks you through how to become expert at each one by one. This bite-size approach is a good one but it does mean you will need to work through nearly every chapter before you have covered everything you need to know.

There are 300 pages of this and no aspect of the game is left out, except for the actual mission descriptions and tips on how to fly them. After this the book has several appendices including a description of all the Tactical Operations add-on missions but without any specific advice on how to tackle them. Other appendices are less useful such as a printout of the readme file from the game and a short extract from the Playtester’s Guide, and could be described as filling pages. In terms of background information on the game, there is not much in the entire book and apart from the Tactical Op’s section the whole guide is simply about teaching you how to fly and blow things up.

I suppose I could consider myself the target audience of a book like this. Strike Commander wasn’t quite what I was expecting after coming from the Wing Commander series and I never did finish it until playing it for the blog. There are plenty of tips in here that I would definitely have found very useful, not to mention useful features of the HUD that I wasn’t even aware of. You would have to be prepared to spend a lot of time with the game to work through the tutorials in the way it suggest but if you do this you should be in very good shape to play through the game without needing tips for individual missions.

If you want to invest the time and are struggling with Strike Commander this is definitely the book to go for. It’s not entertaining though and with no extras to speak of can be considered an extremely extensive user manual. In entertainment terms, it’s quite possibly the dullest book I’ve read for the blog which is why it’s taken so long for me to get through it.

It’s scanned and available to download for any aspiring Wildcats. I’ve also uploaded a scan of the excellent X-Wing Strategy Guide in the non-Origin section which is far more fun from what I remember, although I’ve not looked at it in about 10 years. The Deus Ex guide will be next, probably later in the week.

Ultima The Second Trilogy Scans

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I’ve uploaded scans of the second Ultima Trilogy documentation. Obviously most of this will be familiar from the original manuals but it was repackaged for this game and may be of interest to a select few. Rather than including 3 maps like the fist trilogy, it just includes the one map of Britannia which is paper rather than fabric in this case. The manuals and reference cards are combined into one booklet each with some original artwork. There was a foreign language version of the reference card included with French, German, etc… but I didn’t scan that one.

I’ve also added a section at the bottom of the downloads page with some other scans I’ve done for replacementdocs recently. They aren’t relevant to the blog but I figure I’ll host them here while they are awaiting approval. Since I’ve got the book scanner, I was planning on contributing anything I own that is missing. For now, I’ve just added scans of the documentation for Timegate (a relatively little known follow-up to the Alone In The Dark series by the same team) and the Monkey Island 2 hint book.

The snag with the MI2 book is that you need something red and transparent to look through to be able to read the clues. I had thought that drawing a rectangle with the right opacity in Acrobat would have worked but it doesn’t implement the opacity in any way that relates to the real world. Instead of washing out the red text, it just makes it darker.

Unless it’s something to do with Origin, I probably won’t post on here as I add manuals. I just want them to be available somewhere if I’ve going to go to the trouble of scanning them in.

Ultima The Technocrat War Book 2 – Masquerade

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Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I’ll go into the reasons why later, but I’ll stick to the subject of the post first which is the second book in the Technocrat Wars series, Masquerade. This was published by Pocket Books in 2001.

The book picks up two years after the events of the previous one. The war against the Technocrats is still raging in Jukaran. Both Thullan and Montenegro are amongst the battles searching for information about the enemy, and their paths cross when hunting down some schematics for a Technocrat weapon. In the middle of this, the saboteur Raveka is still on the run from Thullan, whilst trying to stop them getting the plans. There is an unlikely romance brewing between her and Montenegro and he is helping her to keep Thullan at bay whilst keeping the plans for himself.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but most of it is based around 2 central points. The first of these is the super-weapon that the plans belong to called Braum’s Needle, which is being built by the Technocrats to attack Britannia. This is a giant airship which creates a monstrous hurricane around itself. Much of the book deals with the attempts to defeat this behemoth.

The second major plot device is a pact between 4 high-ranking members of the various factions involved in the war. They are trying to maneuver events to benefit each other, but possibly have the interests of their own races in mind as well. This is definitely a book where nearly all the characters in it are in shades of grey. Even the Technocrats themselves don’t necessarily come off as evil, and appear to want peace with the exception of their leader Blackthorn (who doesn’t appear in this novel). The novel is definitely at its strongest when dealing with these characters and their relationships although there is plenty of action also.

The journey of the main characters is continued and Montengro and Thulann have an even rougher time of it than in the first novel. They both come out of the book worse for wear in some ways, but possibly wiser for their experiences.

In the nature of most fantasy that I’ve read, the second novel tended to spread out and follow some of the other characters, with part of the novel following the adventures of the thief/minstrel Toria who was under the care of Thulann at the end of the last novel. It stays focused however, and all the individual paths interweave throughout the tale so it never strayed far from the central plot.

I very much enjoyed Masquerade and it’s at least as good as the first entry in the series. The story moves along rapidly and it would take a lengthy explanation on here to cover all aspects of it. I’m not normally wary of spoilers on this blog given the nature of all those playthroughs on this site but I’ll try not to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. I will say the book doesn’t have an entirely satisfactory ending but it’s not too much of a cliffhanger for the middle book of a trilogy and sets up the next book nicely.

These books have been head and shoulders above the Ultima Saga, and barring something going wrong in the final part, they are my clear favourite from the novels produced from Origin games. I’ve enjoyed them enough to seek out more books by Austen Andrews but it appears that this trilogy is the lot unfortunately. I’ll have to make the most of the last part which will be coming up as soon as I make the time to read it.

To get back to the reason for the delay in posting, apart from holidays, it’s mainly due to other gaming distractions. The Steam Summer sale has certainly contributed to this. Some of the prices were too good to refuse and I’ve bought a stack of games on there which have been keeping me occupied.

Before the Steam sale started, I’d been playing Darkstar (Website) which I’ll give a mention to. This is a fairly new indie adventure game and is a complete throwback to the days of FMV adventures like The Journeyman Project or numerous others. The scale is unprecedented with 13 hours of FMV and the production quality of the video is great, but the actual game engine and gameplay is less polished. It hasn’t learned any lessons from the games of that time and it really does feel like a throwback to the mid 90’s as a result. For instance, you would be hard pushed to find an adventure gamer who ever wanted to see another maze of any sort, let alone one with unskippable FMV every time you move. If you can see past its weaknesses, then Darkstar is still well worth looking into, if like me you enjoy this style of game. Where else are you going to find a new FMV extravaganza these days? If nothing else, any indie developer showing this level of ambition deserves supporting.

I’ve also been reading the book recently published by hardcoregaming101 on classic adventure games. This is a giant collection of reviews and interviews covering as far as I can tell every major and most not so major adventure game before 2000 and many later titles also. It’s basically the definitive book on adventure games and is a great coffee table book for when you have a few minutes to kill. I’ve only read through the section on Sierra games so far (about 200 pages) but the reviews are well balanced and detailed. I’m expecting to find a few things to put on the shopping list when I get to the less familiar games but it’s already made me want to dig out the Sierra titles that I never found the time to play.

I had been planning on playing Freelancer for the blog after Darkstar but that’s on hold for the moment and I’ll stick with the books. I’ve only got 3 left from my original list but I have picked up the guides for most of the non Origin games I’ve played through on here namely Deus Ex 1 & 2, System Shock 2, Freelancer, Thief 2 and Terra Nova which will be making an appearance eventually. It will probably be one of those next before I start on the final Technocrat War novel.

Starlancer – Official Guide

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I had a request for this guide along with a couple of others a week or two back. It’s in the downloads now but the other two could be a while. It was published by Sybex in 2000 and written by Doug Radcliffe.

There is some nice artwork throughout the book but the rest of the content is fairly run of the mill stuff. There are a couple of chapters to start with on general tactics, followed by two more on ship and missile stats. These chapters give a general guide to the game but do very little to expand on the Starlancer universe.

After this there are lengthy mission descriptions. These are extremely detailed and if they can’t get you through the game then it’s just a case of more practice.

Next are a couple of short sections on the multi-player aspects and tactics. I never tried multi-player in Starlancer but it sounds like it could have been fun with some varied game modes.

At the end of the book there is a 4 page interview with some of the developers. This mainly covers design decisions that were made and nothing in it grabbed my attention. There is also a poster of some of the ships which I couldn’t unfold without ripping it out of the book, so it’s not included in the pdf.

There isn’t a lot to say about this guide. Much like the game itself, it is professionally put together but slightly dull and uninspired.