I like my coffee like I like my Jedi: more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

— Death Star PR (@DeathStarPR) January 25, 2013

Would you rather wear crocs just once in public or be mauled by a polar bear?

— jon(@senderblock23) January 25, 2013

“Dreams of a Father: The Collected ‘If I Had a Son’ Sayings of Barack Obama”

— Sasha Issenberg (@sissenberg) January 27, 2013

And $1B+ for a presidential campaign based on it. “@wowfactsoflife: It cost $7M to build the Titanic, and $200M to make a movie about it.”

— Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) January 28, 2013

So I played through Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I had previously played the original Deus Ex (one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played), Deus Ex: Invisible War (which I know people didn’t like as much but I played it through twice), and the cheap, Central America-made ripoff, Deus Mex.

Anyway, Human Revolution was good. Not great. Good.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

* The graphics! Particularly the character models. Usually I don’t care much about graphics other than being impressed by really good graphics, but this was a dialogue heavy game and the character models all made it seems like this game was from a decade ago. I know 3D graphics isn’t easy (I tried fiddling around with it once — lots of complicated matrix math), but this was just distractingly bad to me. Most of the people were all just weird (like some small heads and big shoulders) or just clunky looking and there was lots of clipping with their limb movements. And the facial animations were just passable for the main characters they actually put work into and bad for everyone else. If you want me to sit through lots of dialogue, the people can’t all be just a slightly more flexible C3PO.

* In the future, people apparently just leave guns and ammo lying around everywhere. Desk drawers. Bathrooms. Janitor supply closets. I’m not usually for gun control, but the future could really use some regulations on proper storage of weaponry.

* Also, apparently there are no legitimate stores in the future, only shady black market dealers with cheesy dialogue.

* The whole battery system for your enhanced human special powers was done really stupidly. You start out with two battery spaces, and a partially drained one will automatically recharge (but the most common power, the takedown, drains one whole bar), but only the last battery bar will always automatically recharge. And what recharges the rest? Common candy bars. So of course you can you go to the store and buy candy bars whenever you need a recharge, right? No, they’re this limited resource you only get so many of and never know when you’ll find more. So I spent most of the game with just one battery bar since I felt I needed to save eating my candybars for some future event where I maybe I would need to turn invisible for a long time. And adding extra batteries was one of the last things I upgraded since it seemed like I’d only ever use another battery bar than the first one rarely.

* On the upgrades you can choose, there are a lot of completely useless ones. There are a few that are very game changing (move heavy objects, punch through walls, better hacking abilities), and then just a bunch that you wondered why they would ever think was useful to anyone, like extra radar and tagging abilities when your default radar already shows enemy position and the direction he’s facing.

* The story was really forgettable. Thinking back on the previous Deus Ex games, they also had forgettable stories; they were just tons of conspiracies and twists and turns. It’s just that each of the previous ones had some twist that really struck out to me. **SPOILERS** In the first Deus Ex, you find out the terrorists you were fighting against for the first part of the game are actually the good guys and your brother has joined them, making me feel bad I was so kill happy with them. In the 2nd Deus Ex game, there are two main factions opposing each other, but then you find out the Illuminati controls both sides and were manipulating everyone including me, which made me kill happy in that I killed an important character out of anger. This Deus Ex had nothing that jumped out like that. The only memorable part was a sub quest where you meet a senile woman who had been your guardian angel your whole life you never knew about. That was actually pretty touching.

* Like the previous Deus Ex games, there are multiple endings, and you get each of the different ending by choices made on the very last level. But all the endings are just a voice over on top of random stock footage. Being a prequel, I guess they were kinda locked from doing too much with the endings since no matter what, you end up with the scenario of the first Deus Ex game. Still, it seemed really cheap. Unlike the previous Deus Ex games, how you played through the game overall does have some affect on the ending, but it just changes the voice over slightly. I’m guessing it’s based on how many people you killed and subquests you completed (and how you completed them). I got the “good” ending, though I did kill a lot of people. I really tried to role play and only kill the people that seemed really evil to me, though, and just stunned the rest (I ended up lugging an assault rifle around for the whole game which I barely ever used).

So, I enjoyed the game — at least after I convinced myself to not be a 100% completionist and not try tediously hacking absolutely every door and computer I saw. But the game was leagues away from great.

UPDATE:

Oh yeah, forgot one thing I meant to make fun of in this game — Apparently the rules for the police force are as follows:

You can use lethal force when:
1. When your life is in danger.
2. When someone else’s life is in danger.
3. When you see someone hacking something.

Steven Crowder lists five reasons why a man should get married. Looking back on my life before SarahK, I’m not exactly sure how I even survived before marriage.

Strangely enough, Newsweek (I thought it was dead?) had something worth reading: an article by David Mamet on guns and freedom.

It really got me thinking, though, we spend so much time on these individual issues like guns and health care, but what we need to take on as a country is the topic of freedom overall. What are rights? What is the purpose of the government? All our arguments are because we disagree on those questions, but that’s not usually where the discussion is. If we want to change things, we need people thinking on these fundamental questions.

So what conservatives need is not what particular policies will help — we’re not to the point that most people will listen yet. We need to keep engaging, like Mamet is, on these questions at the core of our society. When people understand what rights are, then they understand what government should and shouldn’t be. And when they understand what government is, the specific policy questions follow rather easily.

So let the liberals play the small ball of trying to ram through particular policies; we need to play the long game of where is society headed. We don’t want to go back to the old statist ideals; we want to go forward to the nation based on freedom we’ve never quite achieved before.

How do we do that? I dunno. But put me among those many voices saying the focus of conservatism needs to be culture.