Latin is a gay language for academics and naval gazers

• Borderline illiterate bigots

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

Check out Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio on Steam. Aesthetically and spiritually it scrys into the future on the same level Deus Ex did and delivers an even more dire prophecy that feels as disturbingly prescient. It takes the open ended levels of DX and adds insane verticality and mind bending traversal. It plays more tactically than Deus Ex but the augment system is really rewarding and enables the player to munchkin their way to their target.

You may notice it looks artistically like a 13th century Christian piece with a Jackson Pollock splotch of New Years Eve stomach soup all over the canvas. I retort that so did DX1 most of the time. The CS playerbase refers to our ability to parse and navigate this style of level design and eclectic color composition as the ‘CEO mindset.’

But seriously I am a big Deus Ex enjoyer and other than Thief nothing has come as close to the full breadth of experience that world evokes in me. It is both terrible and beautiful to behold.

By the same token gait recognition.

Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?

Thank you! ERR UH Long days and pleasant nights, stranger!

Roland Deschain saves you from being harassed and mugged while you’re visiting the Big Apple and couldn’t get a cab after drinking with your girlfriends. With one hand missing half its features and the brutal butt of his antique looking pistol, he pummels the men to within an inch of their respective lives.

In 2011 in a movie theater, the homophobic ringleader of the men who hounded you, whose name is Geoff, goes to see Drive in theaters with his daughter and his daughters friend. They both think the lead actor is cute. That meticulous calm, that dread and serendipitous violence hidden behind the wistful eyes of the lead as portrayed by Ryan Gosling, stirs something in him. Geoff breaks down into tears remembering the girl he and his friends would’ve… he cast an askance glance at his daughter, reaching out to him, and the girl she brought, No, he realizes, they’re in love, how did couldn’t I see that?

Geoff’s old shuddering limp returns, a reminder lain dormant all these years that the butt of the gun that shattered his L2 vertebra hadn’t just broken him for the rest of his youth. (Psychosomatic the doctor said. Bullshit, Geoff said. My ass still hurts.) It hadn’t just taken years of physical therapy. It hadn’t just wiped away the group of friends (shitheels, he realizes). That mad diseased looking cowboy motherfucker had saved his soul. He had given Geoff time to become someone else.

In your present, the whirling madness continued and by the end of it, you weren’t sure this interloper had even been in your life longer than that black-sounding-white guy song you heard in the bar. How did it go? Baby can you–? (But he’s a righteous man!) Baby can you dig-- (Righteous man!)

He crushes hands, he kicks a knee in. You see the ringleader, whose hate you could see shining right through his eyes, collapse into a broken heap on the sidewalk pavement, unable to move. But you know he is not dead because the ungodly wail that comes ripping through him makes you almost wish this had never happened. Wished you were a worm that had died in a rotten hole in the Big Apple.

“You,” the satanic cowpoke offers raggedly, “have received my aide and now I must ask of yours. I am dying and there’s a quest needs doing. Many things hang in the balance, worlds upon worlds.” Though he didn’t seemed strained during the fighting you realize now he was deathly sick to begin with.

The longer he talks, the more words he says, the more the hellish dream land he describes as his home country reminds you of where you came from. Even when there is nothing in parallel you ken his heartbreak and his resolve and he kens yours. You are enveloped in a grand quest to find some Dark Tower. He merits that there may be “iron in you yet” and you may even have “the makings of a Gunslinger they would have sent west in shame”. Your training begins as he leans on you more and more to hunt food and fend off wildlife.

As hard as it all is to bear, as alien and terrible as this world is, as cruel as he is, he is one of the only people who truly ever saw you.

He saw you very well.

Another of the Unfound Doors that let the savage dying cowpoke into your world approaches on the horizon like the black silhouette of an army marching in single file. Roland’s only chance of survival may be the antibiotics found in any American pharmacy on the other side. If there is someone like you, or utterly unlike you, you pontificate, it is by the Way of the Gun and in the name of Arthur Eld and the White that you must be there for them. Like he was for you.

And will you be there with him when he blows his horn at the foot of the Tower, when your Tet has lain waste to all that opposed you and your worn through moccasins grace the roses at Can’-Ka No Rey, the red fields you’ve begun to dream about? A sick feeling in your gut tells you that although he has come to love you and you him, father and daughter after a fashion, you are just one more cartridge to be sent into Ka’s wind. And that feels so sickeningly right.

You know that when he speaks the dozens, perhaps hundreds of names he’s sworn to speak before the threshold of the Dark Tower itself, your true name, the one you gave yourself all those years ago, will be among them. The word that means you will shake the foundations of existence itself.

Surely the spell restores your functioning homeostasis priror to death rather than 3d printing some kind of magically made repository of all your “healthiest” body parts right? So surely gods and magic don’t care about your foreskin or untransing your gender.

PUT THAT ORC WOMAN BACK IN HER ASSIGNED SEX AT BIRTH BODY AND REINSTALL THAT BITCHES’ APPENDIX AND DORMANT CANCER TISSUE. MYRKUL DEMANDS THE RESTORATION OF THE APPENDIX.

This kind of silly shit is on brand for Pagliarulo.

Sorry, it’s just you know how this has to go. “But komrade, surely you know many Unix and GNULinux operating systems are free”? and there’s probably although not guaranteed to be a distro that suits your needs and has analogs for Windows apps. If you’re opinionated about it, that’s fine, but on first blush, it’s confusing. Bring your own hardware and it’s free, right?