There’s no denying that I'm a huge fan of the original Deus Ex. Released almost eleven years ago, this title pretty much defined how a crossbreed between first person shooter and role playing experience should play like. The game’s branching storyline with a strong focus on player choice, its dystopian near-future setting and gameplay mechanics that strayed far from the linear nature of other shooters made Deus Ex one of the most acclaimed titles released in the last decade – and rightfully so.

Considering that the 2003 sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War – while not a bad game by itself – couldn't quite live up to the high expectations set by its predecessor, I was all the more excited to see the series’ newest installment, Deus Ex: Human Revolution being received with almost universal acclaim. While I usually manage to resist the urge to buy games at full price, the promise of a yellow-tinted re-imagination of the Deus Ex universe was just a bit too tempting. Now that I’ve completed my first playthrough, I’d like to lose a few words on my impression of how well Human Revolution measures up – not only against the original, but also against today’s genre standards.

A world to live in

Human Revolution takes place in the year 2027, roughly 25 years before the events of the original Deus Ex. True to the franchise’s cyberpunk setting, its vision of the future is not exactly utopian: Powerful international corporations have taken over many of the responsibilities previously fulfilled by governments, the gap between rich and poor is widening continuously and the consequences of global warming have turned into a very real threat to a considerable part of the population. Despite these bleak circumstances, technology has advanced in great strides, leading up to a point where even the wealthy have little choice other than to artificially “improve” their bodies and minds with implants in order to keep up with the demands of this highly competitive society. However, enhancing one's abilities with these so-called augmentations not only comes at the price of a life-long dependence on immunosuppressive medications, but it also carries a considerable stigma in the eyes of a semi-religious anti-augmentation movement.

You take the role of Adam Jensen, an ex-cop, who – after some troublesome events in his previous career – now works as chief of security for Sarif Industries, one of the leading manufacturers of human augmentations. Just as Sarif was preparing to announce a breakthrough in augmentation research, their labs are attacked by mercenaries of unknown affiliation. The prologue ends as Jensen’s attempt to interfere goes awry and he is left for dead on the lab’s burning premises.

Jensen should have become suspicious when they installed built-in sunglasses as part of the life saving surgery.

Unlike most of his fellow employees at the lab, however, Jensen is saved at the cost of sacrificing considerable parts of his body for artificial counterparts. Six months after this involuntary transformation, he is called back into action as another attack strikes an off-site research facility. Determined to find out who is behind the assaults, Jensen is about to face an overarching conspiracy unraveling in a globe-trotting search for the truth.

To shoot or not to shoot

At first glance, Deus Ex: Human Revolution plays like a solid first-person shooter, but with a plethora of additional mechanics. While both, the original Deus Ex and its sequel never left the first-person perspective except for showing dialogs, Human Revolution introduces a cover system that makes the camera pop out into a third-person view as soon as Jensen takes cover. Hiding behind walls or sufficiently large objects not only offers protection from gunfire, but also provides a wider field-of-view that allows you to scout your surroundings without the risk of being detected. Moving around behind cover and hopping from one barricade to another works smoothly and enables you to confuse your opponents while moving into a favorable position for blindfiring at them or quickly popping out to take aimed shots.

Fortunately, the cover mechanics are not just a mere attempt at adopting modern genre standards, but rather turn out to be an absolute necessity once bullets start flying in your direction. Even though Jensen slowly regenerates from the injuries he suffers, he is still a human being and thus can’t take more than two or three hits before going down. This also means that – at least on the highest difficulty setting – careful planning is a must, even if you choose to play aggressively.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Deus Ex title if combat couldn’t be avoided altogether throughout most of the game. Sneaking past your opponents is almost always a viable option, thanks to the fact that the designers took care to provide an abundance of different paths leading to each mission objectives. If you prefer a stealthy approach, entering a building through the roof or a sewer access might be preferable to marching right through the main entrance, but even if you are detected, there’s always a dark corner or an air duct to hide in. Alternatively, closing in on enemies (or letting them close in on you) allows you to perform a takedown that will instantly incapacitate or kill them with a quick (and beautifully choreographed) melee attack. Non-lethal takedowns produce less noise than lethal ones, but they are also less permanent due to the fact that – unlike in the original Deus Ex – incapacitated enemies can be woken up by their buddies.

Speaking of enemy AI, it is worth mentioning that this is one aspect that has improved considerably compared to the original. While enemy guards still follow predetermined patrol paths, they now act a little more unpredictable and a lot more natural by looking around or suddenly turning to check what’s behind their backs. It’s always a good idea to hide bodies of fallen opponents, because once they are spotted (either by a patrolling opponent or a camera), most of the remaining enemy force will be alarmed of your presence.

While relying on stealth is a viable tactic throughout most of Human Revolution, it is worth mentioning that there are moments where you are forced to resort to violence: The game’s much loathed boss fights. Following a design decision that breaks with the premise of free-form gameplay, Human Revolution’s boss encounters strip you of all options except for the one that is one-on-one combat. Given that the boss fights have been subject to scathing criticism, I was a bit surprised that I found them rather enjoyable. – but even if you don’t, you’ll be glad to hear that they are not only few and far between, but also fairly easy even if you’re playing a stealth oriented character.

For players that don’t intend to avoid enemy contact, Human Revolution offers a huge assortment of weapons to choose from. In addition to a standard fare of pistols, shotguns, and various rifles, Jensen will also stumble upon more exotic armaments like a laser rifle that burns through walls or the non-lethal P.E.P.S. gun which knocks entire groups of enemies off their feet. Considering that most of the weapons are also upgradeable in various ways, you’ll probably stick with a few tools of choice throughout most of the game rather than experimenting with different loadouts – especially since the limited inventory space would otherwise force you to drop an already upgraded weapon just to try out a new one. A bit more inventory space (or weapons that take less of it) would have been nice.

Pheromones to the rescue!

Weapons are not the only thing that is upgradeable in Human Revolution: Faithful to the tradition of allowing a certain degree of character customization, Jensen gradually gains new abilities as his body adapts to its artificial limbs and organs. Gameplay-wise, this process is implemented through experience points earned for pretty much any successfully performed action, be it knocking out an enemy, hacking a terminal or simply finding a hidden passage. Every time a certain amount of XP are accumulated, a new ability can be picked from a tree of augmentation upgrades. Just like in Invisible War, there is no skill system, making the augmentation tree only way to customize your characters abilities.

Although some of the upgrades simply enhance existing skills by improving your aim or increasing sprint duration, there are a few really interesting ones as well: The Icarus landing system, for example, allows you to jump from arbitrary heights without incurring falling damage. On the rare occasions where its usage makes sense tactically, jumping down on unsuspecting opposition makes for great gameplay moments. Improving the arm prostheses to a degree where you can break through weak spots in walls or lift heavy objects opens up the way to hidden passages, while the cloaking system conceals your movements even from the most vigilant observers. Upon activation, many of the augmentations eat away at your energy meter which is separated into multiple bars, only the first of which regenerates over time. Filling up your energy reserve in full requires constant nibbling on consumables, which gets a bit tedious over time.

Considering that not even Jensen’s brain is free of implants, there are also augmentations designed to help with two gameplay elements that haven’t been discussed yet: Hacking and social interaction. The hacking mini-game is a bit hectic, but never to a degree where it stops being fun – an achievement in its own right, considering that its in-game purpose is limited to granting access to terminals, security hubs and previously locked doors when Jensen doesn’t know the corresponding passwords. Thankfully, there’s also quite a bit of hidden content to uncover, including hilarious email conversations that add a lot of personality to your otherwise nameless opponents.

Dialogues also play an important role in Human Revolution. Even though typical NPC conversations only give you a very limited set of choices on how Jensen reacts to his counterpart, there are a few key dialogues that are considerably more elaborate. These are usually triggered at important moments in the plot, typically when Jensen tries to convince someone of acting against his or her own interest. I found these arguments highly entertaining, especially since they provide enough subtle hints as to which persuasion tactic will be successful. If that’s not enough, there’s also an augmentation that gives you additional leverage – and even allows you to spray a few pheromones for good measure. Personally, I deemed using the (aptly named) “social enhancer” hardly necessary, considering that even without installing it, I was able to succeed at all but one of the “dialogue battles” in the first attempt.

All in all, Human Revolutions’s gameplay mechanics seem like a solid foundation to build upon. Other than the energy management, which can get a bit annoying at times, there’s not a single aspect of the game that feels broken or badly designed. The shooting mechanics and cover system are functional and fun, the stealth aspect is thrilling and the dialogue battles are among the most suspenseful gameplay moments I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. Yet, being a story-driven single-player game, Human Revolution needs more than just polished gameplay mechanics in order to be a convincing title.

A shiny dystopia

While Human Revolution’s presentation isn’t flawless from a technical perspective, its distinct visual style with recurring motifs and a rather unique color scheme works hard to make up for it. As it is apparent from the screenshots alone, the game’s vision of our bleak future is almost exclusively painted in different shades of yellow – an artistic choice that doesn’t fail to convey the dreariness of the populous cities and industrial complexes visited throughout the game.

The overall feeling invoked by strolling through a bustling metropolis bathed in yellow neon light is – intentionally, I presume – reminiscent of genre-defining works like Blade Runner. Nods to this particular movie are even more apparent in the recurring origami theme that manifests in the game’s vision of future architecture, fashion and industrial design. As an additional cue, Human Revolution’s premise of a society at the brink of a fundamental transformation finds its expression in the ubiquity of renaissance motifs.

Given how hard it must have been to craft this beautiful world, it is all the more unfortunate that, due to technical limitations, the game struggles and sometimes fails to uphold the player’s illusion of actually being part of it. While it’s true that the cities depicted in the game no longer feel as empty as they did in the game’s predecessors, it is also very apparent that most of the people you encounter aren’t doing anything other than standing around or strolling back and forth on pre-defined paths. Trying to interact with non-essential NPCs will just cause them to greet you with one of many one-liners, which – paired with the robot-like facial animation – contributes little to the game’s immersiveness and makes you wish it would do a better job at pointing out those NPCs that provide actual dialogue.

The plot thickens. Constantly.

The conspiracy-laden plot is certainly one of the things that the original Deus Ex is most famous for – and it’s a trait well preserved in Human Revolution. That said, I’m under the impression that not only the ridiculousness, but also the overall complexity of the plot has been toned down a little – which is a good thing, considering that the game certainly doesn’t feel dumber for it. The overarching theme of transhumanism and its implications for both, human identity and society as a whole, is treated in a down-to-earth manner that only hints on the underlying philosophical questions instead of imposing them on players. The game portraits a number of fairly radical standpoints, but somehow manages to never take side with any of them explicitly. Considering that most of the portrayed ideologies are contrary to each other at a fundamental level, this is an accomplishment of its own.

Unfortunately, as a consequence, the player’s ability to side with any of the factions is also rather limited. While choice is indeed a big factor for how the game plays, its impact on the actual plot is minor at best. There’s no denying that story-wise, Human Revolution is not so much about choice as it is about giving the illusion of choice, since – again, like the original Deus Ex – the game will ultimately follow a fairly linear path regardless of your actions. Occasionally, however, in-game characters do react to the way you resolved a particular situation and there’s at least one point where a certain decision has dire consequences much later in the game. These moments are great – it’s just sad that there aren’t more of them.

Verdict

Deus Ex: Human Revolution succeeds at copying the positive traits of its archetype while avoiding many, but not all of its missteps. The fact that it suffers from numerous small annoyances ultimately can’t eclipse the quality of its core gameplay and art design. Blessed with a great setting and a plot that is genuinely interesting (if a bit corny at times), Human Revolution is a game that nobody should want to miss. If you enjoyed the original even a little bit, you most certainly won’t be disappointed by this one.

I’ve spent a bit of time digging into Bitcoin lately – heck, I even read Nakamoto’s self-published paper. To me, there’s something fundamentally fascinating about a system that has been thought out so well, regardless of its purpose.

In addition to being intrigued by the way Bitcoin works, I also find it interesting due to its boldness of attempting to create a currency system that is fairly hard to control by conventional means, such as a single government’s monetary policy. To a certain degree, Bitcoin implements an anarcho-capitalist’s dream of an independent monetary system, where capital cannot be created at will.

But there are also drawbacks inherent to the way Bitcoin works. From a technical perspective, one valid criticism aims at the fact that it consumes enormous amounts of computational resources (and thereby, electric energy): In order to prevent attackers from introducing false information into the global history of transactions (which would allow them to regain the money they have already spent), transactions are only considered valid after they have been confirmed using the combined computational effort of many participating systems. Confirming a set of transactions requires solving a “proof of work” problem that is scaled in difficulty such that, on average, the time it takes to find a solution remains constant regardless of the performance of all systems combined. In order to encourage people to dedicate their systems to solving these challenges, finding a solution is awarded with a certain amount of newly generated Bitcoins. In an analogy to mining gold, dedicating processing power to creating Bicoins is called “Bitcoin mining”.

Unfortunately, mining Bitcoins means dedicating processing power to solving a problem that – other than ensuring no one tampers with the transactions – serves no real-world purpose. It’s all about finding a signature that is considered legitimate only because it’s incredibly hard to create. While it would be great if Bitcoin’s "proof of work" would map to a task that actually serves a real-world purpose, it appears to be difficult to actually find such a problem without compromising Bitcoin’s needs. Such a computational task would not only have to incorporate the transactions it is meant to confirm, it would also have to be arbitrary scalable, highly parallelizable without relying on intermediate results and still provide useful solutions at predictable intervals.

Even when knowing why Bitcoin works the way it does, it is still hard to accept the incredible waste of processing power. At the time of writing, the entire network of Bitcoin miners computes roughly 12∙10¹² SHA-256 block hashes per second. Even when computed on the most efficient GPUs that are currently used for mining, achieving this hash rate requires a constant power output in the Megawatt range just for the graphics cards. The thought alone that several petaFLOPS worth of graphics hardware are constantly working on a problem whose must fundamental purpose is to be hard makes my heart bleed.

Now that Google+ does a good job covering all my social networking needs, I’ve finally decided to quit my Facebook account. I’m taking this step not so much because I think of Google+ as the superior product (which it is, in my opinion), but rather because I feel Facebook’s overall conduct and treatment of users is completely unacceptable.

It’s no secret that Facebook has a horrendous track record of privacy and security issues. Since I consider all my content there to be public anyway, this isn’t a huge issue for me personally, but it makes it pretty much impossible for me to put any trust in the product or the company behind it. From leaking private photos or video metadata to multiple incidents where they delivered private messages to the wrong recipients, Facebook just doesn’t look like it’s up to the job of handling sensitive information.

Even worse than the unintentional leaking is Facebook’s habit of silently introducing features from which you have to opt-out in order to keep your data private. This is just not a way I want to be treated by a entity that expects me to entrust them with all kinds of private information. In fact, I don’t think any Facebook user should be ok with that.

But the straw that finally broke the camel’s back, was Facebook Inc.’s attempted smear campaign back in May. Not only is it completely ridiculous for a company with Facebook Inc.’s background to accuse its competitors of violating their users’ privacy, but the way in which they tried to pull it off attests to behavior that I am not willing support by using their product any longer.

So, good bye, Facebook. Your services are no longer required.

Google+, Google’s most recent foray into social networks, certainly generates a fair share of hype, but does it live up to the praise and expectations? After just a few days of playful testing, I must admit that I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Given enough time and development resources, Google+ might actually put a lot of pressure on its competitors – Facebook and Twitter included.

The service is currently undergoing what Google calls a “limited field test“, so further improvements and additions to Google+ are probably to be expected before it goes public. At the moment, Google+ is not yet openly accessible, but there are already quite a few users who were lucky enough to get hold of an account before the distribution of invites was suspended.

Core features: Circles, the Stream and Hangout

The entire feature set offered by Google+ revolves around what Google calls your circles. Even though circles are little more than a way to group your contacts, the fancy UI and the fact that they are used consequently throughout Google+ make them a lot more useful than one might think at first. As the name implies, you are encouraged to group fellow users into different circles based on your relationship with them (friends, colleagues, family or whatever else you can think of).

Since some of your colleagues might also be your friends, it is of course possible to add the same person to multiple circles in order to express the different facets of your relationships explicitly. To this end, Google+ also supports the creation of additional, arbitrarily named circles as well as removal of the circles that are provided per default. Others will be notified once you add them to one of your circles, but since your circles are private and relationships in Google+ are asymmetric, they will not be able to tell which circle you’ve put them into and they are also not required to return the favor by in turn adding you to one of their circles. What’s exciting about this way of modeling relationships is that it is flexible enough to support mutual sharing as well as Twitter-style unidirectional following – definitely one of the conceptual strong points of Google+ so far.

All the bookkeeping pays off as soon as you’re trying to find something in the stream of content shared by other people. Just like in Facebook, posts, links and photos show up in a more or less chronological order, but – and this will be more and more important once the network grows – you can easily filter the stream based on the circle you’re currently interested in. Circles can also be used to limit the target audience for the things you share yourself. For every single item you post, you are required to specify explicitly the people that should be able to see it. This can either be done by choosing one or more circles or, if a higher granularity is required, setting the post’s visibility on a per-person basis. It’s even possible to add individual email addresses for people who are not (yet) on Google+ and to prohibit re-sharing of your content by others (though people can obviously use other means to betray your trust if they really want). Surprisingly, the UI for all that is still simple enough for casual users to understand, so accidental sharing will hopefully be kept to a minimum.

Probably included as an incentive for people to give Google+ a try, the stream tab includes a big red green button labeled "Start a hangout". Hangout is just the fancy name of Google+’ group video chat, which can be used for a quick private conversation (like Google Chat’s video call feature), or a straight out video chat party with up to 10 people connected simultaneously. By default, the hangout window shows small video thumbnails of all participants just below a big video widget that automatically switches to the person that is currently speaking. Thus far I’ve only been in a hangout with just three other users, so I don’t really know how busy it gets when the maximum number of participants is reached, but it seems that automatic switching and echo cancellation work well enough to support that number of people – at least if participants with particularly audible surroundings choose to temporarily mute their mics. Speaking of muting: Everyone in a hangout can mute every other’s mic globally, which opens up some possibilities for abuse by ill-behaved pranksters. But since you can restrict access to a hangout to individual circles or people, that likely won’t turn into an actual problem.

Unfortunately, I can’t really say anything about Huddle (Google+’ group messaging feature for Android phones) or Sparks (the built-in news aggregator designed to "spark" new conversations), since I’ve not yet played around with them extensively.

Initial verdict

Even though Google+ is still in its infancy, I already like it a lot more than the convoluted mess that is Facebook. Everything that’s already in place works as advertised, but there is also an incredible and yet barely tapped potential for integration with other services. The almost seamless ability to share photos from Picasa Web Albums is hopefully just a tiny glimpse at what will be possible once Google+ starts talking to other Google and non-Google products. Sharing items from within Google Reader, using circles to manage your contacts in Gmail and aggregating/feeding stuff from and to other social networks like Twitter, Status.net or even Diaspora are just a few features that I would really love to see in the near future. I guess it’s also a safe bet that Google Buzz will sooner or later be merged into Google+, since functionality wise, Buzz is just a subset of what Google+ will soon have to offer.

Of course, there are also a few things that most likely won’t make it, even though I would certainly appreciate them a lot: Google always had an aversion to threaded commenting, for example (they don’t even support proper threading in Gmail even though mail conversations are inherently threaded), so my hopes are not exactly high that this will be in Plus anytime soon.

From a more fundamental standpoint, I’m also quite curious about the openness of the yet-to-be-unveiled Google+ API and its respective policies. If Google puts any weight behind their alleged commitment to openness and avoids locking in their users, G+ might actually have the potential to change the game in social networking. While it remains to be seen whether it will be able to attract enough users to cause a serious network effect, I believe there is reason to be optimistic about the future of Google+.

As some of you already know, I became father of a daughter 26 days ago. Of course this newfound role comes with a lot of responsibilities, but on the other hand it also entitles me to go completely nuts with posting cute baby photos all over the web :)

On a more serious note, being a parent feels great so far. Luckily, we haven’t encountered any serious problems yet, so it’s smooth sailing (and a lot of cuddling) for now. Despite being subject to the obvious limitations inherent in being a newborn, the little one already shows an interest in her surroundings that goes beyond searching for either the nearest source of food (ma) or the means of near-range transportation (ma or me). Patience and manners leave a bit to be desired, though ;)

Long story short, these are great and exciting times.