I crawl through the vent and emerge in the Groundskeepers office. He doesn’t object to me crawling through the vent and assumes I’m a reporter or something. He even offers to sell me a code to the door but if I know anything from playing this game so far it’s that there is always a free alternative so I don’t take him up on it.

Sure enough I can crawl up onto the roof and make my way in through the obligatory vent. I have to take out a lot of guards before I can get this far . There is a medical bot near the groundskeeper which helps.

Finding the mag-rail designer doesn’t take long. There are security system and guards to worry about on the way there. I stick my head out of a door and wait for them to rush through it so I can chop them down with my sword. I’ve been building up my strength biomod which is making the sword a much more viable weapon.

I have a choice of mission here depending on whether I just want to get the weapon’s schematics for the WTO or to kill the scientist. I can’t say I like the orders mission much so I go for the WTO’s orders. Dr Patton is not entirely happy about who his weapon will be used by and actually helps me out by opening the container and letting me just walk out with the mag-rail.

The Order aren’t entirely happy about me not following orders although they do appear to keep communicating with me so they may not have abandoned me yet. My next mission is to try to find out where Dr. Nassif is by heading to the biolab.

In the group directors office I find a message from Nassif. Apostlecorp look to have a base over in Cairo and she is over there. I need to get back to my helicopter now and see if my pilot fancies a trip to Egypt.

I find a captive grey on my way out. I decide to open it’s cage and it thanks me and sets on the scientists that are still around but doesn’t do anything else useful. I’m thinking this would have been a nice way of taking out the security that I had to deal with myself earlier.

I get to my helicopter and it’s off to Egypt.

This was another fairly short session but not as short as it would appear from this entry here which has to be one of the briefest I’ve ever posted. The loading times really are getting on my nerves in this game now. You can die very quickly and in a combat heavy area like the mako factory it can make progress extremely slow. I’ve no other major complaints about the game but this on it’s own could be enough to make me dislike it. I’m hoping now that I’m in Egpyt it will be less about combat and more about exploring.

One of the bums hanging around outside the Inclinator is a mine of information. She says that the WTO have taken over the facility and no one can get passes out of Lower Seattle any more. She also points out the Greasel Pit nearby where I could hire a pilot if I want but I’m heading to check out the Order first.

The Orders church is just down the street. I also pass the coffee shop I was asked to set on fire a while back but I’ll ignore this mission. Billie pops up on a communicator when I get to the church and says that the Order will still accept me despite me carrying out a mission for the WTO.

The order hang out in what looks like a monastery. Having decided to pick this side early on, I could change my mind as I don’t think much of organised religion which is what this comes across as. The cause may be a good one but I don’t like dogma in any form. It’s not too late to change my mind yet anyway but I head on in to see what the leader here has to say.

She talks about how the new biomods which can be used on anyone, could be used to standardise the race and effectively turn us into machines. She wants me to help to defeat my creators and sends me into the side room to talk to her High Augur for more details.

The High Augur Lin-May wants me to find her Captain who has turned traitor and is pinned down in the Inclinator negotiating with the authorities for release. This is presumably the same captain who disobeyed orders and took Tarsus apart at the start of the game. This all lends their story about the casualties not being intentional some credibility and I’d assumed till now it was a lie.

I head for the Inclinator and fight my way to where the Captain is having a discussion about his defection. It turns out he and others are being bought out by the Templars who are recruiting an army of mercenaries for their own purposes.

Lin May gives me a bit more info and everything seems to be drawing towards this Mako weapons factory which the WTO already wanted me to go out and have a look at. She wants me to assassinate the lead scientist there who is developing bio-mods like my own and also to destroy the plans for the new Mag-Rail weapon.

Next stop the Mako factory then. I head for the Greasel Pit to find a pilot. This place really is a pit and not it says something about Lower Seattle that anyone would come here. Aside from drinking, you can bet on Greasel fights if you want but I give this a miss for now.

I quickly find a pilot but I’d need to retrieve his jet which has been impounded. He would also charge me 500 a flight still.

In a nearby room, another pilot is being held by the WTO in the air terminal. She would fly me for free if I can rescue her. The choice seems pretty clear cut so I take the long walk to the terminal.

The long load times are starting to bug me a bit by now. Walking over to the terminal should take no time but with 20 seconds loading every time I change location it isn’t all that quick. When I get there I run into Klara who has got a job with the WTO and seems glad to be shut of Tarsus.

Rescuing the pilot means disabling two missile batteries and then activating the pilot beacon. The place is crawling with bots and guards and I don’t have much ammo which makes this all a bit tricky but I sneak and chop my way through to the first missile battery and take it out with a grenade. I’m guessing the WTO won’t like me much after all this.

The other missile battery is a couple of seconds walk away. I destroy it in the same manner, then head up to the control tower, activate the beacon and then make a run for the chopper.

The pilot is true to her word and agrees to fly me around for now but she won’t take risks or provide air cover. It’s possible that I may have received a bit more help if I’d gone for the other pilot then but I’m sure this will be ok.

She drops me off near the Mako factory and I spy a likely looking duct to crawl down.

Thats all I had time for yesterday. I’ll attempt to get a longer session in today as I’ve barely spent any time on this game for the 3 days of blogging. Some major news for retro gamers today is that Activision have signed up with GOG starting with a first day release of Arkanum (which I’ve never played but will be doing soon) and Gabriel Knight (which I have played and rate as one of the best adventure game series ever). It’s not just the games that they will be bringing with them that makes this significant for me, but the fact that a company that large would sign up for a DRM free distribution system. Let’s hope it makes Activision a load of money and that EA are paying attention.

Before I start out, there are a few things I forgot to mention yesterday. First off getting the game to run in widescreen. I was pretty surprised in a game this recent and with subsequent patches that it didn’t have this built in but it is possible to get it running manually by editing two text files and then hex-editing a further file. The process is described on the widescreen gaming forum and seems to work very well from what I’ve seen. The movies are stretched out of size as the black bars are encoded into the video. It would be possible to re-encode them but more hassle than it’s worth. It seems to work near flawlessly in the game itself although I have noticed a few cutscenes where I seem to be zoomed in on torsos and peoples heads are cut off.

Secondly, the loading times. Every time I load a save game or move between levels the game drops to the desktop for a few seconds before slowly loading the level (taking maybe another 10-15 seconds). The PC I’m using is way above standard specs even for 2010 with a 3 drive striped RAID array so I really don’t expect load times like this for a 2003 game. If I get into a situation where I need to frequently reload this could be a real problem. God knows what it was like on your average 2003 PC.

Thirdly, after going through the grief of moving my blog and all the images when I changed ISP, I’ve just migrated back to my old ISP this morning. I won’t go into names or details as its not relevant here but lets just say that I wasn’t exactly impressed with the service I received from my new ISP despite them supposedly being the highest rated in the UK. I’ll definitely leave the blog here now it’s moved so the address won’t change again but I probably ought to cancel my webspace with Freeola and move the images & all my webspace back to IDNet’s server. The quickest way to update the links will be to export the blog, do a search and replace on it, delete all the posts here then re-import it. Don’t be surprised if all the posts and images vanish again for up to a day this week while that is going on.

Onto last nights play then. I only managed about another hour but made some progress. I start out trying to get into this penthouse apartment. I find my way onto the roof of the building and since it is guarded by a large robot this looks like a promising spot. I’ve got an EMP grenade which takes it down and I jump through a vent in the roof into the apartment below.

The apartment I find myself in turns out to belong to a lawyer. I knock out the bodyguards and have a search around in here. I don’t find too much but he does have a vault which I hack into and steal the weapons inside + get a look at this interesting note. This completes a side mission which I haven’t actually been set yet but will find out about later.

I still need to get into the penthouse then. Back in the corridors outside I talk to a janitor who offers to sell me the key to the penthouse door for 300 credits. I’ve got the money so I take him up on this.

The penthouse initially looks well secured with laser beams everywhere. I don’t have the skill to hack the security console but it turns out I can just jump over all these beams. I’m surprisingly bouncy and get some serious height when jumping, presumably due to biomods. I also have to sneak past a camera. Something I do like here is that I can hear the camera’s motors and when it reaches the end of a sweep and changes direction. It’s a small detail but vital when you are hiding out of sight round the corner and it’s little details like this that make sneaking worth the effort.

Through here is the vault I was looking for. I discover a shipping receipt mentioning a new weapon called the Mag Rail which is being developed for the Templars. This is what the Order were looking for and completes this mission.

Also in here are a load of glass cabinets. One contains an energy sword which was one of my favourite weapons in Deus Ex but doesn’t appear to work as well here. There is also a weapon mod which I use to give an EMP effect to my pistol. This means it will use ammo up quicker but it should be more useful in dealing with bots.

The Order want me to head to Lower Seattle to meet up with them next. To get there I have to pass through the Inclinator facility which is where I go next but there has been a radiation leak that needs fixing. I offer my services as a contractor. There are a host of ways to go about this mission but I choose to go for the nearest air vent. I have to take out a spider bot first but then its just a short walk to a switch to flush the system. I report this to the Inclinator boss and get paid for my trouble.

There was a nightclub outside that I couldn’t get into before since I didn’t have the money. I decide to have a look around there before I go any further. The club is a bit sparsely populated but it’s more convincing than the bar in Deus Ex with some half decent background music.

I bump into the culture minister who appears to be into men in a big way. He offers to give me the key to his apartment so I can meet him there after I run an errand asking out another bloke on his behalf but since I’ve already broken in I turn him down. I do like the fact that there is another very different alternative to the one I used earlier even if I discovered it too late for it to help me out.

I have a good explore around and by climbing a wall near the dance floor I break into another vent system and into a restricted area. Strictly speaking I probably shouldn’t be here as I have to knock out a couple of guards but I inadvertently complete another mission I haven’t received yet when I find evidence of tax evasion by the clubs owner. The Order want me to tell the WTO and receive a reward for grassing up on him.

There is more of the club to explore first and after taking out another guard I meet someone or something that is apparently called an Omar. He is operating the local black market and among other things he has a black market biomod he will sell me. I’ll get better prices off him if I take the trouble to carry out a favour for him first. He wants me to go to the clubs basement and get a tissue sample from a mutant body that is being held there.

I found a key to the clubs basement when I uncovered the tax evasion. I just need to find the door. On the way, I run into the clubs owner who wants me to kill a lawyer for him who lives in Emerald Heights. I’ve already been in there and taken out everyone I saw although I used non lethal force at the time and that can’t have been enough to complete this mission.

I find the body in a tank in the basement without much incident. It is a grey left over from Versalife. In return for the info, I get a free black market biomod plus reduced prices which I use to buy another of these biomods.

I discover now what the red biomods are about. They are unofficial options only purchasable/upgradeable with unofficial mod cannisters. There is a leg mod that has the option to heal from dead bodies. This sounds interesting so I decide to give it a go. In hindsight, it’s a bit too similar to my regeneration skill so it was a bad choice.

I find a nearby body and give it a go and a big red blob emerges and sucks up the body whilst regenerating my health. This thing chews up energy pretty quickly. If I upgrade it enough, it also works on live bodies and would become an offensive weapon.

I have to use the Metro station to get to the WTO base. I’m not sure I take the route I should do but I end up breaking into the ticket office and disabling the barrier that stops me taking the train. I think the ticket clerk was being held captive by some thugs but I may just have taken out the legitimate security for all I know. It gets me a free train ride anyway.

I talk to the WTO leader Donna Morgan over the communications system in her office. She wants to know about the attack on Tarsus but I don’t have a whole lot to tell her. The WTO motives appear seriously corrupt and she is surprisingly honest about it as she tells me about wanting to control the biomod corporations and restrict who can get what mods.

She gives me another mission to check out a lab that has been illegally doing weapons research. I’m going to need to charter a pilot to fly me out there and I can meet up and pick pilots (at varying prices) down in the local bar.

While I’m here, I inform the civic manager about the club owner and get a bit of cash for my trouble.

I head back to the Inclinator now, to attempt to meet up with the Order once again before I start chartering planes. I discover a very useful recharge bot behind a locked door here. I’ll probably be back here quite a bit for recharges now given the chance.

The inclinator appears to be a huge freight train which transports me to Lower Seattle. I don’t get to see it move but flicking the switch transports me instantly. Lower Seattle isn’t in the best of condition by the looks of things but I leave exploring it for my next session.

I was expecting the plot to branch but it appears that I can play all sides for the moment in this game. I’m been given missions all over the place and each location is so thick with plot and goals that I’m completing missions I haven’t even been given yet. The multiple options for each mission are a bit more advanced than anything I saw in Deus Ex. They do feel hard to believe at times with vents everywhere but overall I’m impressed with the level design and really enjoying IW.

It’s been a much shorter break between games this time and its straight on with Deus Ex 2 (Invisible War). This is a game that I’ve managed to avoid just about every review for and I don’t know a whole lot about it other than it didn’t go down too well with a lot of the Deus Ex fans. I’ve heard things about it being far too short and also too console oriented but I’m going into this with an open mind. I’m guessing that a lot of expectations will have been sky-high when this came out and it was always going to suffer no matter what.

The game starts with something that we never saw in Deus Ex – a rendered cutscene. It shows a kamikaze assassin destroying most of Chicago with a nano-technology bomb while a lucky few (including me) escape from the roof of a security facility in helicopters to Seattle. This cutscene is extremely well rendered, but in typical Deus Ex fashion doesn’t really tell me much about what’s going on at the start of the story. Steam doesn’t appear to provide a manual and replacementdocs is still dead as I type this so I’ll have to plough on regardless.

I begin the game waking up in my apartment. I have the choice of a male or female character this time and I go for the male character (Alex D). I’m guessing the unisex name means the female character is also Alex D. Strange having a letter for a surname. Maybe this characters been grown in a tank also and is the 4th model or something…..

A nice little communications system on my desk springs into life and the Director of the Tarsus Academy introduces herself as Leila Nassif. I’m told there was a terrorist attack in Chicago and we were evacuated just in time. She wants me to check in with my fellow student Billie Adams who also escaped at the same time. From what I can gather throughout today’s session, this game takes place after the destruction of communications ending in Deus Ex and I’m a student for a security company called Tarsus.

I wander around my apartment a bit trying stuff out. The interface is very similar to Deus Ex although there is a much upgraded HUD. My quick inventory slots now appear transparently around the center of the screen in a circle. It doesn’t come across in a screenshot so much but the interface feels very large and chunky like it was designed for use on a TV screen. It’s still not a bad system and the keyboard can still be used with the number and function keys corresponding to either items or abilities (which I’ll be getting later). The graphics themselves are a huge improvement and better than I expected. This must have been up there with the better looking games back in 2003. It’s only a gap of 3 years between the 2 games and the difference is enormous.

When I step out of my apartment I see an explosion and a janitor gets killed. Seems like Seattle isn’t all that much safer than Chicago. The building appears to be shaking also.

I head over to Billie’s apartment down the corridor. She hasn’t been able to find out what is going on and wants me to have a go at finding out myself which doesn’t sound like a bad idea. She give me the elevator code so I can head downstairs.

I meet the boss when I go downstairs. She still won’t tell me anything and suggests I should go and talk to the local trainees. Billie was less than impressed with them but I don’t seem to have a choice.

This place seems a bit undermanned and there are only 2 other trainees. Klara Sparks is friendly enough but doesn’t have a lot to tell me other than that this academy is where you finish your training which suggests the possibility of missions coming up later in the game.

Leo is running around the track. He appears to have a mammoth ego and considers himself something of a legend already. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him being placed in a Gunther like role later in the game assuming that Tarsus are as corrupt as the government in Deus Ex. I’ve barely started talking to him when the facility is attacked and I’m told over my communications to go fetch my equipment.

I go into the locker room and grab my pistol. On the way out, I talk to a security guard. A Seeker is apparently on their way in. I’m expected a Seeker to be a robot of some sort but it turns out to be a hooded terrorist that belongs to an institution called the Order. I don’t learn a huge amount about the order but I think they are an anti bio-modification semi-religious sect. I have a few options here as part of the conversation to either sneak out, or let this guy deal with it. I go for my usual violent approach and go out and shoot the seeker who only takes a couple of shots. The long locking procedure that was in Deus Ex is gone here and it plays just like a standard FPS for this combat.

I’m supposed to be evacuating but Billie tells me I should go back to my apartment, go through a breach made by the order into the labs and grab a load of biomods. I don’t appear to have any option again and free biomods sounds good so I head back up the lift.

Billie also tells  me a little about the Order although it’s all a bit vague. It sounds a little as though she may have led them straight to this facility but if that is the case I don’t find out today.

I have a few options of how to proceed through the apartment block and in standard Deus Ex fashion. I can sneak, crawl through ducts, or just blast my way through. I end up doing a combination of the last two. I gun down one of the Order but since I may as well explore while I’m here I crawl through a few ducts and explore but I don’t find anything especially interesting in the other apartments.

When I reach my own apartment, Billie contacts me and tells me to watch my ceiling while the power is cut. My roof flickers revealing a load of watching scientists like I’m some sort of lab rat. I crawl through the breach mentioned earlier and make my way into the labs.

There is some curious looking equipment in these labs but I can’t do anything with it at least for now.

When I approach the table, Nassif contacts me again. She says her methods are unconventional but she has our interests at heart and the observation was for my own good. She even gives me the code and instructions to get my biomods.

IW appears to use a slightly different system for upgrades. I don’t need to use a medical bot for one. Also, all the upgrade canisters are identical and can be used to either install a new level 0 upgrade to any system or to upgrade an already installed upgrade to the next level. Other than that things are fairly similar with me having a choice of upgrades for each body part. There are 3 rather than 2 choices here but one is red and I can’t pick it. These tend to be the most useful sounding upgrades also. I must need a super biomod of sorts for these. I decide to pump all my biomods into healing skill as this is what I found most useful in Deus Ex by a mile. I’d also like to leave my options open for some of the red upgrades and wouldn’t like to block these off by opting for one of the other two options at this stage.

I make my way through the labs helping out a few scientists on the way. The Order have hacked the turrets so they have turned on everyone here. I can’t do much about that other than avoid them but I do take down a couple of Order soliders on the way and hack a security panel with a multi-tool to let a scientist out of his lab.

On the way out, a woman who I’m assuming to be the the leader of The Order contacts me trying to talk me over to her side. She claims that I would have been killed if I had tried to leave the training at any time and that I am being manipulated by Tarsus. She says her captain was over-zealous and the casualties were not supposed to happen.

She wants me to meet her in Lower Seattle. Not sure if thats a good idea but its the only mission I’ve got so I head out of the base.

On the way out, I’m stopped by a couple of WTO soldiers. I think that the WTO is responsible for security and anti-terrorism and is presumably the sort of place I could end up if I complete my training. They appear heavy handed and don’t want to let me out at first until one of them recognises me. They tell me to head to the WTO enclave but they don’t do it in such a way that I feel like obeying the order. I appear now to have conflicting missions and a choice to make.

To make things more complicated, Billie then wants me to go and check Nassif’s apartment to find proof of Tarsus treachery. Billie has gone fully over to the Order it seems but this doesn’t seem like a bad plan as it saves me from making a decision for now and could get me more information to make a decision with.

I have no idea where I’m going so I just wander around and stroll into a cafe. I hardly need another mission right now but the owner wants me to break into a shop and see fire to its inventory because of some little grudge he has. He seems to think Leo would do this without question. I’m not about to take this mission as I can’t see any reason why I’d want to commit arson for some guy I’ve never met.

I carry on exploring and run into an Order member while I’m walking around. She is doing a soapbox act and trying to recruit members and claims that Tarsus and people like myself are used to control the population so a select few can retain power. This sounds like something the Illuminati would do and they are no doubt still around but I’ve only got her word for it. Her society does appear to have just wiped out all of Chicago as well as attacking the Seattle base which doesn’t make them appear like someone to be trusted.

I find the apartments I’m looking for and no sooner have I stepped in than I get another mission to go and snoop around the Minister of Cultures apartment. That can wait for now as I try to find Nassif’s home first.

Breaking into the apartment just requires 1 multitool. I’ve not noticed any sort of multitool skill in this game and it appears to be 1 tool, 1 lock for now. The training stats section appears to be gone in this game and there is nothing except biomods for me to advance in. Presumably skill points are gone also. This is a step backwards really and takes the game further away from being a role playing game. Being rewarded for exploring or finding different solutions was one of the better aspects of Deus Ex. I’d like to have seen this system improved on and not removed.

I find some notes about transporting something or other in Nassif’s apartment which is strange but not all that helpful. Billie comes clean as a full order member and tries to talk me over. At this stage I don’t have any idea who to believe so it looks like I’m just going to have to pick one of the options and go with it.

I’m certainly being given enough choice’s on what to do so far anyway but not neccesarily enough information with which to make them. It looks as though there are two paths in the game depending on which side I pick now although I can’t say that either side has endeared themselves to me at this point. I appear to have a choice between a load of city destroying terrorists and a controlling, secretive corporation. I think I’m going to go for the Order just on the basis that trusting any official organisations in a Deus Ex game is never the right choice.

I’m impressed with Invisible War anyway after my first hour or so playing it. The graphics are excellent, the story is interesting enough so far and the controls are simple enough. The gameplay appears to be surprisingly open ended with far more options to the player than there were in Deus Ex. I’m interested to see whether the story is going to branch off completely depending on my choices or whether the stories keep merging together along the one path. The dialog and acting have certainly improved over Deus Ex which can only be a good thing. I’ve slight reservations about some of the simplificiations to the stats but so far this is looking very promising. I’m looking forward to seeing what life in the Order has to offer tommorow.