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Comment by mdrachuk | Hacker News Reader

I really hope they will make a remake of the originals. I loved Deus Ex: Human Revolution when it was out, but it’s a challenges to enjoy older games most of the time.

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Human Revolution is an older game? Geez, I must be really getting old then. That game certainly holds up just fine, and does not need a remake.

I mean I did play HR, and I’d like to play a remake of a Deus Ex from 2000.

I feel the same. I want to play the originals, but they are just so clunky and even the mods do not fix the fundamental problem of how old the games do feel.

I went back to human revolution a couple months ago. I loved it the first time, but I was really surprised how clunky a game from 2011 felt. I think there were also some scaling issues with my 4k monitor. it's really too bad; mankind divided had a much better "feel" to it, but the story was not as interesting or well developed.

Mankind Divided was such a letdown...

I played HR for the first time last month and couldn't finish it, because it bored me to death and then gave me stupid boss fights. It's so dumbed down and just doesn't come close to the first Deus Ex. And yes it felt clunkier than the first game (I lost count of how many times I fell to my death trying to jump onto some platform to perhaps find a secret or hidden route, only to hit a stupid invisible wall)..

At launch the boss fights were much worse. They updated it to provide alternative solutions to most or all of them, at some point.

Somehow it got away with the same “click a button, get a cutscene” ending as Mass Effect 3 without the same level of outrage. Deeply boring game even at the time.

The original DX, on the other hand - it took me years to get past the first level, but once I did it was really engaging.

Deus Ex went downhill over time. First was great. Second was not much meh. Third had stupid boss fights and I decided that trying to finish it is not worth time.

The director's cut provided non-combat solutions to some of the boss fights. But at launch, yeah, those were a huge miss if you had optimized stealth or hacking skills. It felt like a huge slap in the face to anyone that managed to bypass the boss fights in the original Deus Ex by finding the killswitch words.

Penny Arcade captured the sentiment at the time pretty well:

https://arewenewatthis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/deus-ex1....

(Sorry this is not officially from their site--their archive search system is terrible)

In my opinion, there wasn't really an option other than to optimize for a stealthy gameplay style in DX:HR since ammunition was ridiculously scarce. (Intentionally so: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/08/17/why-i...) There is rarely the opportunity for a stand-up gunfight, very much unlike the original Deus Ex, to break up the monotony.

The ammo problem wasn't much of an issue for me, as I went for a strictly non-lethal playthrough (for which I was annoyingly denied the achievement, as one of the guards I tranq'd immediately fell unconscious...off a roof).

The unavoidable boss-fights were certainly something of a shock at the time.

Yeah, the main problem is that HR encourages much more intense character specialization than the original game. The latter half of Deus Ex has a lot of situations where you're expected to fight (although you can generally cheese your way through, run past enemies, etc.) but there's a limit to how much you can overinvest in non-combat skills, and the inventory is spacious enough that you can afford to tote around heavy weaponry to get through tough spots (any character can effectively use mines/grenades and they take up very little space).

That’s funny, Deus Ex is probably the oldest game I re-played that I actually finished again (with mods) as it felt far less clunky than even some games only 10 years old.

Have you tried the older games? Maybe I'm biased since I played them when they were new but I believe they're still very much playable.

There are overhaul mods like GMDX, New Vision and Deus Ex: Revision (which I'd rank from best to worst in that order) that are meant to make it a bit nicer too.

What's the oldest viable game to you, now?

I just played the first Mass Effect for the first time, and was really impressed by how well it had aged for a game from 2007.

I replayed the first Bioshock (also from 2007) not long ago, too, and it, too, holds up IMO.

Could we get further back than 2007?

I think 2007 is exactly the year. I’m playing Bioshock now, so much fun. But Deus Ex from 2000 is clunky.

I’d say 2004:

- Half Life 2. I recently started playing it again (for catharsis, when DC was under military occupation a few weeks ago—drones, helicopters, gas-masked cops and all), and woo boy is that game still jaw-dropping to me. Plus, games built on its engine, like TF2 and L4D2, are still popular.

- World of Warcraft. I never got into this game at the time (was still a recovering EverQuest addict), but sometimes I pop on the free edition and level a character to 20. It’s still the largest MMO by player base.

- Also: Knights of the Old Republic II, The Sims 2 (best Sims imo), Metal Gear Solid 3, Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2

Probably not what you're really asking, but many of the Infocom text adventures are still pretty playable. Yes, the parser is quite dumb but the writing and plots are still quite compelling. Graphical games through at least the 1990s probably don't hold up as well, except as nostalgia.

I still occasionally play Total Annihilation (97) and, somewhat more amusingly, Populous II (91) via an Amiga emulator.

IMHO Perfect Dark is one of the oldest shooters that holds up (play the version on the Xbox 360, maybe also the XBone, not sure). Yeah yeah it's a console shooter, but it's outstanding and hi-res + dual-stick controls make it feel modern-enough. Do note that it has two two-player campaign modes in addition to regular single player: co-op, and... versus. Yes, versus. Also be aware the difficulty modes change the objectives significantly, and sometimes also your starting position, so if it seems weirdly short bump up the difficulty.

I think some of the original frantic shooters hold up alright, for what they are. Quake, stuff like that. They're kinda niche genre now, though. Not sure about the early Dooms, hard to judge those as easily. I like them, still, but...

The Half Life remake in the HL2 engine (Black Mesa) is very true to the spirit of the original and smoothes its rough edges off very elegantly, but the original's probably still fairly playable, too.

First mass effect, oof. It suffers from a lot of "which of the three buildings they made will this quest take place in?". Also having enemies walk right past your AI teammates, who are busy doing nothing, to shoot you in the back over. And over. And over. Gets really frustrating after a while. Two is so much better. You're in for a treat.

[EDIT] on reflection the one mechanic that probably feels off to a modern player in Perfect Dark, and indeed in many older shooters, is having thrown weapons treated like ordinary weapons, rather than a secondary attack with a separate set of items to cycle through. That is, you have to switch away from your gun to arm a thrown weapon, then throw it, then switch back. That's a little clunky. IIRC throwing-is-separate model wasn't popularized until the first Modern Warfare (I've played the first Call of Duty recently and I don't think it was in that, yet—man, talk about one that doesn't seem nearly as good on re-visiting)

> (play the version on the Xbox 360, maybe also the XBone, not sure)

Perfect Dark on the Xbox One is a lovely bit of emulator stacking: it's running in the Xbox 360 VM on the Xbox One, and the 360 game is itself running a custom Microsoft N64 emulator. It works much better than you think it should given the layers upon layers of indirection; many kudos to Microsoft's game VM and emulator teams for some of the hoops they've gone through over the years.

A good way to pick up Perfect Dark for the Xbox One is the Rare Replay pack. Sometimes you can find it for surprisingly cheap given the wealth that exists inside it. In addition to Perfect Dark and its 360 launch title prequel Perfect Dark Zero, it's about as complete a set of Rare's extensive back catalog as Microsoft's lawyers could muster the licenses for (so none of the games with Nintendo owned characters, though it sounds like they almost succeeded in convincing Nintendo, and also not Goldeneye which was bogged down with licensing issues between both Nintendo and EON Productions, the Bond license owners, and apparently truly scuttled at the very last minute based on intended behind the scenes features that wound up on YouTube anyway), plus some fun Behind-the-Scenes featurettes.

despite the clunky interfaces i had not much trouble replaying fallout 1 & 2 recently (1997-98). I've also often replayed Master of Orion 2 (1996) and SimCity 3000 (1999).

And if you're willing to go with simpler games Pac-man (1980) and tetris (1984) both still hold up, as does Arkanoid (1986).

Depends on the type of game I think. I recently played a few older adventure games like The Dig[1] (1995) and enjoyed them a lot, but early 3D games are a rough deal.

I did replay Tron 2.0[2] (2003) a few years ago and it was passable, though I think the art direction helped a lot. But I've also tried to play some games I really enjoyed back around y2k and yeah... mostly had to give up even though I got them to run fine.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dig_(video_game)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_2.0

I recently replayed the original Halo (2001) and it holds up fantastically (although it's more obvious how long the samey corridors are between the brilliant set-pieces). The original Half-Life (1998) probably would as well. LAN Quake is still entertaining.

If you expand the remit to 2D games since they depend much less on tech, the retrogaming community has lots to offer.

I was riveted by Half-Life in 1998, but I recently picked up it's well regarded remake Black Mesa (which updates the graphics to approximately 2006 levels) and IMO, it doesn't hold up at all.

Nothing about it is epic - it feels like a cramped dungeon crawl. The gameplay and puzzles are extremely simplistic (lots of slow moving enemies crawling down a hallway). The story is a bad B-movie compared to some of the compelling modern games that are raising world-building to new levels. When you compare it to modern games, I don't see how anyone could justify spending more than an hour or two on nostalgia playing.

Your wish has been granted. Look for “Deus Ex Revision” on Steam, it's even free.

It's Windows only, but I managed to get it running inside Wineskin on my Mac :)

Wait, is HR part of “the originals” now?

Nope, looking forward to remake of original Deus Ex.

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