It's many months in the past now, but you probably remember watching the title sequence for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and thinking "This game is going to be awesome." That's exactly what it was supposed to do.
When you think about it, title sequences are an oft-ignored part of a video game that still needs to do important work to sell a player on the gameworld that they're about to enter. Film enthusiast website The Art of the Title talks to the creators from Goldtooth Creative and Square Enix who crafted the reel for Square Enix's game and find out about the inspirations and methods behind it.
The Art of the Title's in-depth article breaks down the process and inspiration behind the DXHR title sequence, teasing out obvious callbacks like The Six Million Dollar Man TV show and more elusive references from master painter Rembrandt. The whole thing's worth reading, so head on over to The Art of the Title and read their first game-related post.
Did you buy, rent, or steal a game last year expecting the worst only to be pleasantly surprised? Commenter DerpiestShazbot wants to know, and you'll tell him in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.
Heyo Kotakuites! So which game(s) from 2011 ended up being better than you expected?
Not asking which games you thought were good but instead which games actually surprised you by even better than you thought!
Right now the only games I can think of are Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Battlefield 3, and Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat probably surprised me the most seeing how my friend and I each bought a copy for ourselves as a sort of joke. I wasn't expecting anything more than just a fun little fighting game with hilarious amounts of gore. What I ended up getting was actually, in my opinion, a very deep and engrossing fighter with an entertaining story mode which never took itself too seriously AND hilarious amounts of gore!
So how about you guys?
About Speak Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say has nothing to do with the stories we run. That's why we have a forum on Kotaku called Speak Up. That's the place to post anecdotes, photos, game tips and hints, and anything you want to share with Kotaku at large. Every weekday we'll pull one of the best Speak Up posts we can find and highlight it here.
Seems to me that fan films inspired by video games can go one of two ways. Either they try to perform the stunts and action in titles like Batman: Arkham City or they focus on recreating the look of the fictional worlds in the games they draw from.
Extraction Point—sent in by its director Simon K. Jones—falls into the latter category, using Deus Ex: Human Revolution as its jumping-off point. It's a nice visualization of what Adam Jensen's enhancements might look like in the real world. Would you know if there were a cloaked someone walking right by your desk? Maybe's there an invisible cyborg there right now. No sudden moves, okay?
We're not sure exactly what this is, but it we like it. It looks like a highlight reel designed to show off the skills of the ENSO team of stunt designers and performers, but it includes lots of shots of scenes involving Deus Ex: Human Revolution characters. There's a convincing likeness of Jensen at 1:55 and Human Revolution boss Yelena Fedorova appears at 00:23. It's not hard to imagine the big guy in the car park as Barrett.
There's evidently a bit of a budget behind it. It may well be part of an official ad campaign or upcoming short film licensed by Square Enix. It could even be a fan project. Either way, we want to see more.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
Right, Deus Ex is back on its feet and looking hale and hearty, whether it asked for this or not. What vintage PC game shall the electro-paddles be applied to next? Why, it’s Thief IV, a game about which we currently know all but nothing other than that Eidos Montreal are pulling the strings again and, I am 99.99% sure, it’ll have some sort of funny subitle rather than a number in the name. Well, anything’s better than ‘Thi4f’, right?
An industrious fellow on Neogaf has done a spot of digging around the quiet info-goldmine that is LinkedIn, and turned up a couple of starting, tantalising facts. Let’s have a look, and then hear what assorted Thief fans want to see from the new game. (more…)
In this recurring video segment, three editors go head-to-head-to-head as they take on the same section of the same game with dramatically different strategies and play styles. Once they've put their methods to the test, the editors reconvene to survey their colleagues' trials and exercise their inalienable right to copious wisecrackin'.
In this edition, Evan, Logan, and Dan "Former Reviews Editor" Stapleton attack Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a stealthy vent-crawler, a persuasive chatterbox, and a gun-slinging murder machine, respectively. Check out the introduction above, and watch the team's attempts in the videos that follow!
Deus Ex: a game so good it gave us actual neuroses about its sequels. Invisible War, a shonky but interesting and sometimes hilarious shooter, became reviled as a crime against gaming for declaring itself to be Deus Ex 2. And when Human Revolution started looking seriously, seriously good, none of us could quite believe it.
But it happened. This third game has the wealth of alternate routes and versatile tools that made Deus Ex great, and expands it with huge city hubs, packed with more sidequests and background story than the original ever had. It reworks the system for augmenting yourself to give you trickier choices between more powerful abilities. And all of those abilities are more slickly designed and satisfying to use. It’s not better in every way, by any means, but nothing else comes this close.
It’s an action game, which our neuroses tell us is automatically bad, but most of the concessions to blockbuster accessibility are genuinely, and surprisingly positive. Melee was almost comically unconvincing in Deus Ex 1: now it’s jaw-droppingly brutal and consistently satisfying. A cover system seemed like a frightening departure, but it ended up making for a much more developed and complex stealth option.
Mainly, though, it’s just so good to have it back. It’s Deus Ex! But shinier! And we haven’t played it through 26 times yet! And DLC is coming out for it! And everyone’s sharing stories about the incredible things that happened to them, and all the ways the quests can play out, and all the people they punched in the face, and what aug builds they want next. Deus Ex 4 is bound to be shit, though.
Read our Deus Ex: Human Revolution review for more.
I liked a whole lot of things about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, chief among them the way it felt like a loving tribute to so many different games that I love. It successfully combined a ton of familiar mechanics— Metal Gear-style stealth, Mass Effect-style dialogue, Deus Ex-style open levels, and even L.A. Noire-style interrogations.
But it made all of those things its own. This was due in large part to the its two most distinctive aesthetic attributes: Its glowing, gorgeous art design and its menacing, melancholy musical score.
Composed by Michael McCann, the soundtrack for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an understated triumph. It recalls (and even occasionally quotes) Alexander Brandon's iconic score from the first Deus Ex while combining synths, electronic beats, and sampled vocals into a distinctive and evocative aural stew.
The Human Revolution soundtrack is an understated, brooding affair; even when the shit hits the fan, the music rarely if ever reaches the melodramatic highs of Batman: Arkham City or inFamous 2. But all the same, it presents a thicker, more atmospheric vibe than either of those games.
Here are three favorite tracks, though with this game in particular, the entire soundtrack is more than the sum of its parts.
"Icarus"
The main theme from Human Revolution captures much of what makes the soundtrack great, while laying out a harmonic and sonic template for the rest of the score. Most of the pieces in the game do a steady build, from ambient synths up through layered vocals with an eventual beat, and finally, a chord change. (Usually to a chord based on the flat sixth—in this case, it goes from a G minor to an E-flat major.) That particular chord change is kind of compositional shorthand for "epic" - it turns up in many a superhero game (like, say Arkham City and inFamous 2) and conveys a uniquely intense, heroic vibe.
"L.I.M.B. Clinic"
It's not the most explosive track on the soundtrack, but "L.I.M.B. Clinic" might be my favorite. More so than most games, the music of Human Revolution is tied to the places and experiences of the game. This is, of course, true of most games, but it's even truer of this one. The first time I entered the Detroit L.I.M.B. Clinic was probably the first time I felt the vibe of this game. It reminded me of nothing so much as the brilliant (and occasionally overlooked) Spielberg film Minority Report, all clean whites, locked hospital rooms, muted robotic clicks and aseptic menace.
"Everybody Lies"
This mournful track plays during a major revelation about 70% of the way into the story—it's another slow burn, with an even more paranoid, dark churn to it than "Icarus" before it. Notice some of the same tones from "L.I.M.B. Clinic," the high-pitched synths carving room for the sorrowful female voice. Then, the darkness sets in and builds, builds, growing synth stomps paving the way for the beat to drop. Distorted strings and ripped-up vocals mix together with a sweet electronic beat as past themes make their way into the fringes. It's a dense-as-hell track, and a great example of strong electronic music design and mixing; somehow, there's room for everything amid the dirge.
You can download the soundtrack on Amazon, and it makes a great accompanying track for any computer hacking or digital lockpicking you may have to do. It's also cool to listen to in less intense/futuristic settings.
We'll have more of the best video game soundtracks all this week!
"The Best Game Music of 2011" is a multi-part series highlighting the best video game soundtracks of the year.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (RPS)
Gameworlds have become ever-more lavish, but has there been a dark price paid for this? Craig Lager believes so. Production values are up but these worlds don’t seem to react to players’ actions as fulsomely as they once did, he worries – are we allowing games’ strange logic to take us for granted? But there is yet hope. Frowned at: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dragon Age II, Skyrim. Smiled at: The Witcher 2, Dwarf Fortress, Outcast. Please note these are Craig’s views, not necessarily those of RPS.>
In my version of Human Revolution, the police station should be surrounded. There should be SWAT teams, negotiators, probably even an evacuation zone. Adam Jensen’s face should be being projected from every single screen that litters Detroit’s streets as Eliza explains him as being a more-than-prime-suspect in a new, horiffic incident. An hour ago, she would explain, Jensen asked for access to the police morgue and was declined. Now the back door has been broken into, and a path of corpses and hacked computers lead to the morgue in which a body has been clearly tampered with. Instead, Jensen walks into the main lobby and is greeted with “Hello”. (more…)
Some of gaming's most cunning foes have been computers. Think GlaDOS from Portal, or Shodan from System Shock 2. At least part of what makes them so memorable is that their artificial intelligence is brought to life by a cold, calculating, female voice.
Friendly artificial intelligence usually skews female as well. Anyone who's played Deus Ex: Human Revolution will know this, while Halo and Mass Effect are two other big franchises with prominent computers voiced by female actors.
Actually, when you think about it, a lot of real fake robot voices sound like fake women as well. Apple's new Siri, for one (at least she is for American users). Or just about any automated subway announcement system. Or default GPS navigator.
Ever wonder why this is? Why designers and engineers the world over choose a woman's voice for their systems and not a man's? A great piece on CNN seeks to answer this question for the ages.
Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass has an idea. "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," he says. "It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices."
While this is a primal theory, there are more historical ones too, such as the fact early telephonists and aircraft navigation aides were voiced by women, creating a precedent.
Silicon Valley analyst Tim Bajarin has a cooler idea, though: He reckons HAL, the evil computer from 2001, is the reason most artificial voices are female. He was so evil, and so memorable, that he scared companies off using a male voice. "A lot of tech companies stayed away from the male voice because of HAL," he said. "I've heard that theory tossed around multiple times."
It's many months in the past now, but you probably remember watching the title sequence for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and thinking "This game is going to be awesome." That's exactly what it was supposed to do.
