THIS IS A STORY ABOUT TWO HUMANS NAMED ADAM, TWO VIDEOGAMES WITH COLONS IN THEIR NAME AND A STINGING DISAPPOINTMENT.
My name is Adam Harshberger. I am 23; I was born in Norwalk, OH, in the year 1988. In 11th grade, I had a girlfriend named Megan Reed. On the day that I am writing this, it is the year 2011.
The protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is Adam Jensen, approximately 34 years old. He was born in America, somewhere, in the year 1993. He had a girlfriend named Megan Reed, but she is dead. When the game begins, the year is 2027, and this Adam is in Detroit.
***
Sometime in the month of November in the year of 2001, I played Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in a hellish, Mountain Dew fueled rage-state and beat it effortlessly in less-than-the-duration of a rental from the shitty place next to grocery store at which I can only assume the first group of canned beers that made me puke was purchased.
And really, I might have gotten a little carried away. I started getting delusions of grandeur. I began to honestly think (because I’m pretty fucking good at MGS games) that I could be a secret agent. I thought that my future occupation could be that of SUPERSOLDIER. I was 12.
The end of Metal Gear Solid 2 is insane. Shit gets real. And if you’ve been playing for circa 14 hours, drank 15 Mountain Dews and are practically receiving liquefied IV injections of Fritos, it’s fucking creepy. It scared me. Remember when the Colonel says you should turn the game off, you’ve been playing too long? Yeah, I turned it off – I’ll admit it.
That’s when I realized that I was a little deluded. I was not cut out to be a special operative, I ain’t no Solid Snake. I’m not sure, but I think I went to bed and beat the game the next morning.
***
You probably know that the beginnings of both Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2feature a protagonist rising clandestinely from the water into a hostile facility. These scenes are burned into my memory – moments that radiate excitement and action. These opening moments got me stoked, and that excitement propelled me through the game.
I’m sure you remember that moment when Snake emerges in the watery depths of Shadow Moses, or maybe even Raiden in Big Shell. If you have a soul like mine then even thinking of those sequences makes you feel something. Just read the words Shadow Moses. That is a place, man, and some fucking stuff happened there, dude.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a relatively robust offering of locations to not-kill or kill in. There is grim future-Detroit, Midgar-esque Heng Sha and even Canada. It has elaborate rat-maze level designs that vary wildly in quality, from ‘inspired’ to ‘I think Red Faction did this in like 1989.’ It has a skillfully implemented experience point system that vigorously dumps rewards on players, though slightly in the favor of the stealthfolk.
But it doesn’t have Shadow Moses.
Shadow Moses is an event that happened that I had a part, emotionally and “physically”, in. Shadow Moses lives in my gut, not the scratched up PSX discs at my parent’s house. Even at the time – for once, I’m positive this isn’t nostalgia talking – I knew that the level design, mechanics, plot and atmospheric characterization were in such a blinding harmony thatthis game matters.
ATTENTION, TROLLS: I am not arguing that DX:HR needs a larger, over-arching mission or environment to take place in.
WHAT I AM ARGUING: is that the game lacks magnitude, impact, or meaning. Sons of Liberty and Human Revolution have a lot in common but they do not share the sameswagger. DX:HR feels like a system that you get to be a variable in; Adam Jensen is just an integer. Adam Harshberger does not want to be an integer. Harshberger, that devil, he wants to be legitimately creeped the fuck out by a maniacal ending. He wants to be so enthralled by a game’s mechanics that he honestly thinks he might be cut out to be a member of FOXHOUND – or whatever the 23 year old translation of that is.
Sons of Liberty is a story – albeit an absolutely ridiculous one – that you get to be a character in. Every move you make with Snake reverberates with narrative consequence and urgency. And even for as whacked-out as MGS2’s plot is, it still feels more honest thanDX:HR.
They tried, though. There are cut-scenes in DX:HR. One of the most blatant artistic missteps here is the fact that the cut-scenes suck right out of Jensen and start showing stuff from all sorts of nifty angles (and the graphics magically get better). They scream, “YOU ARE OUT OF THE SYSTEM NOW. HERE’S SOME STORY. HOPEFULLY IT’S COMPELLING. (It’s not.)” For a game that places an uncanny amount of emphasis on its main character, you‘d think actually seeing everything from his perspective would be an obvious way to tie the story more firmly into the players realm of control.
There are the conversations, too, of course. These are in first-person. They involve a nauseating amount of people swaying weirdly and starting their sentences with “Jensen…” – and they are soporific. I have a hard-on for the Mass Effect conversation system, which HRobviously apes. Unfortunately, Jensen is a cardboard asshole who has no meaningful emotions towards anything but pseudo-anger.
Liquid: A review of Adam Jensen
In 2001, while I was playing Sons of Liberty, Adam Jensen was an eight year old. Or he would have been. His parents (does he have those?) probably let him play MGS2 at that young age. They must have. Homeboy doesn’t care about violence; he doesn’t flinch and doesn’t feel remorse or anything at all (except sterile, impotent anger). He is, truthfully, the digital actualization of Jack Thompson’s paranoid fears – a mindless death drone, in my hands at least. (Sometimes he might not be into death, but I assure you, he is always mindless and drone-ish.)
In other people’s hands, he might have been a pacifist, killing no one – except the bosses. Regardless. Adam Jensen is a moribund asshole and he’s boring. Like me, Adam Jensen is no Solid Snake, but not for want of a killing propensity.
That’s a problem. For a game that desperately asks us to care about its protagonist, Deus Ex: Human Revolution does little to make him compelling.
A CONFESSION: I stopped caring about the plot and I think it might’ve been the first time I’ve consciously done that. It’s overwrought video game bull shit; MGS2 without the auteur-istic balls that make it a masterpiece.
I don’t mean to damn condemn my namesake here, but a lot of it is his fault. Snake’s rough countenance is fantastic and engaging. He seems grizzled and real. You care about Snake. We all do, and I have proof – the outrage over Raiden’s prominent role in Sons of Liberty.
A QUESTION: would anyone be upset if Adam Jensen was not the (or even central) protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution 2: The Sequel: The Colon? No.
I can’t help but think that Jensen probably didn’t turn off his PlayStation 2 when I did. He probably kept playing – and he was probably wearing fucking sunglasses the whole time. Too many video games, Jensen. “Turn the console off now!” is what I want to say to this whole game. It is too much a video game for its own good. I spent my play through longing for it to aspire to something not typically associated with games – and it flirts with this in the transhumanism theme, but instead woefully chickens out. An “exploration” of transhumanism is marketing-speak, I suspect, for, “Our corporate overlords won’t let us make any overt statements or meaningful gestures” OR “I dunno, man, dude, look, he hasblades in his fucking elbows.”
A DIGRESSION: I get that many movies, games and novels give us central characters that are purposefully unlikable or flawed. However, I do not think that is the case here. Jensen is not only unlikable, he’s boring. A deadly combo.
A DIGRESSION, PT. 2: Is it offensive if I say that Adam Jensen is a lot like what I think many video game journalists and developers think of when they conjure up their own mental self image? If it is, fuck you.
* * *
MEANWHILE, IN DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION.
Sometime in August 2011. Approximately 10 years after Adam Harshberger played Sons of Liberty.
I am playing on my computer. A few mouse clicks and the game simply begins, hurling me into a smoggy, yellow-tinted Michigan of 16 years in the future. I meet his Megan Reed and then I watch her die. I meet his boss, David Sarif. He is fatherly and a bit slimy, simultaneously. When he says, “Adam,” it feels weird. I have never had a video game call me by my own name before, or kill off a digital person named after my ex-girlfriend who just happens to be the current girlfriend of a digital person who shares my first name.
Like I said before, Adam Jensen and I are really nothing alike. He wears those Goddamn sunglasses, but they make me self-conscious. It doesn’t matter. After the initial, game-opening explosions and such, he is mine to customize. I cannot remove his sunglasses or stop him from dressing like a douchebag – but I can choose his path through the game’s environments and augmentation tree. There is a lot of choice, and it overwhelms me.
At first, I attempt to play through the game without a dogma. A reactionary Jensen – but I find it too muddled. I want focus. In a moment of contrarian fever, I decide to kill everyone. It is en vogue to play DX:HR as a stealthy do-gooder. My Adam, though, is a murderer.
I make him borderline indestructible and a real computer whiz – he is a dichotomous man – and mow through theDetroitsections with relative easy, murdering and hacking , annoyed only by time wasted in the navigation of the labyrinthine future Detroit. Jensen and I are quite the team. I point, he kills. We crawl everywhere; pick a lot of shit up. He has blades that pop out of his elbows or somewhere near there. It’s cool.
Later, some stuff involving shady mega-corporations happens. Me and Adam travel to a lot of places that are different geographically but similar visually. We continue to shoot people, pick stuff up, crawl through vents and stab people with elbow knives. The game ends.
* * *
If you’ve read a Pixels or Death review before, you’ll know that they normally read something like the above section. They tell stories about game experiences.
I don’t really have a lot to say about my game experience. I have a lot to say about thegame, if you can’t tell, but not my experience. And you’d think I would – it’s a game of (hypespeak incoming) UTTERLY LIBERATING FREEDOM AND LIMITLESS GAME PLAY POSSIBILITIES EXCLAMATION POINT – but when I played it, I didn’t feel liberated. I don’t feel like my experience left me affected enough to recount it to you guys – so I didn’t. I wrote the above section to illustrate a little bit about what you do in the game, I probably owe you that at least – but I didn’t want to turn it into a plot synopsis.
As someone who doesn’t really get much joy out of exploring game systems, the game became meaningless. The story and characters are really, really bad – especially for a game of this status. The shooting/stealth/whatever sequences need a story to make them more meaningful – they’re not powerful enough in and of themselves to be effective (like, say, Minecraft) – and because the story fails, DX:HR becomes a horribly bland and unaffecting experience.
A CLOSING THOUGHT:
I felt like a mouse in a maze, chasing the next path; the next glowing vent or hackable terminal or destructible wall.
Giving a mouse three different paths does not take him out of the maze.
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT HTTP://PIXELSORDEATH.COM