When Layton Shumway asked us to tackle our backlogs, he said, "Time for a shameful confession: I didn't beat Deus Ex: Human Revolution when it came out last year." And I had to laugh, hard, because I have spent the last year trying, unsuccessfully, to get through the original Deus Ex.

My wife's out of town for the weekend, and Bitmob gave me the excuse to finally finish it. So, how does Deus Ex hold up after more than a decade for someone unhindered by nostalgia? Not well.

Some quick complaints that relate entirely to age: the graphics are from the awkward era between artistic 2D and photorealistic 3D that's painful to look at. The voice acting is worse (especially the "Chinese" accents). The controls are just close enough to modern FPS's that it's mostly okay, but unexpected actions occur (zoom in... no don't put it away).

But the problems of Deus Ex go much deeper than that. For a game that teaches you to be stealthy and non-lethal in the opening levels, it fails to support non-lethality later when all the enemies are giant robots and mechs.

But above all, Deus Ex has terrible pacing. Want to get around those guards without killing them? Sit for ten minutes in a dark corner until their patrols sync up just right. No map for this level, hope you like exploring the same areas a lot as you travel in circles! Even the moment to moment pacing of firing a gun was unpleasant. Sniping, which I find the most fun in games that do it right (like Borderlands), was the part of Deus Ex I hated most.

By comparison, Thief II: The Metal Age did all of this correctly the same year and the same publisher (while having graphics that weren't eye-gougingly bad and a light system that made sense).

Further, the mythological references were baffling, at best. One AI (the "good" one) was Daedalus, the Greek who created the labyrinth for King Minos (after having created the wooden cow that, uh, facilitated Minos' daughter's, uh, creating the minotaur with Poseidon's white bull).

Daedalus had a son, Icarus (the "bad" AI). The two of them were locked in a tower by Minos so the secret of the labyrinth didn't become known, so Daedalus created wings for Icarus and himself to escape. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high (the Sun would melt the wax in the wings) or too low (the ocean would dampen the feathers), but Icarus got carried away, flew too high, the wax melted, and he fell to his death.

Helios drives the Sun chariot through the sky every day.

So when the Daedalus and Icarus (father and son) AIs merged, somehow they became...the Sun God? They flew too high, and instead of dying, became the Sun? I think the symbols have accidentally gotten their wires crossed.

Other than the mythological shenanigans, Deus Ex did have a well written story that I enjoyed. If only that story lived in a better game. A game where I didn't turn on God-mode three-quarters of the way through just so I could finish it without tearing my hair out.

At the end, I felt Deus Ex was trying to tell me that the "good" ending was JC merging with Helios (which, as it turns out, is the canonical ending). But the message of the Daedalus myths was the (often unintended) negative consequences of invention, and by that time I was so frustrated by the gameplay that I wanted to watch the world burn.

I decided to blow it up.

Welcome to the new dark ages.