I have actually been playing quite a few Games for Windows® lately, thanks to my purchase of, amusingly, one of these, which has replaced the PC I built after graduating high school and has shat its pants upon encountering 3D games for the past few years. After getting Windows installed and running as optimally as possible, I began to see what kind of games the feeble Intel integrated graphics could handle, which turns out to mostly be things I missed years ago, which is really okay with me.
I've gotten through what I suppose were three missions in Deus Ex. It's astonishing how well it has held up over the years in some ways, but in others it is really dated. The core gameplay can still stand with the best of them – it in fact stands far above many others that have come after it. There are countless ways to perform even the first level's objectives, and this is before you really get into customizing your character's abilities and find all sorts of neat toys. This is truly sandbox gameplay and it's astonishing that this was accomplished eight years ago. The world feels very organic for an Unreal Engine 1 game, thanks largely to the open level design and light RPG elements.
What isn't faring so well in 2008 is the character models. They look silly. (Perhaps they would look better if this computer actually had a dedicated graphics processor.) The presentation overall, however, is very competent, if a little boring. The cutscenes don't feature any kind of flair, like moving cameras or any sort of advanced character animation. However, the writing is amazing, and astonishingly relevant and resonating considering the game was made before the 9/11 attacks. Must play more, as UNATCO, the counter-terrorism agency you work for, is seeming more and more evil of late.
Thanks to Gametap, I was able to find out that Civilization IV runs astonishingly smooth on this hardware. (Frankly, I was amazed it ran at all.) I only played a few turns, and I'm told that it slows down late in the game, but it was very pretty from what I saw, and I could feel the tendrils of addiction creeping out of the monitor and wrapping me in their cold, uncaring embrace. For this reason, I have placed it on hiatus until I can tear a sizable chunk out of The List, at which point I might have a more capable computer that could to the game justice. (A few games on that List this computer could not do justice: Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Rise of Legends.)
Next time (probably): More Planescape: Torment.
Lately, I've been playing Planescape: Torment on the PC. I really felt like a more slowly paced game after all the fast-paced action games from this fall. I greatly enjoyed Halo 3, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, and the like, but I felt like playing something a little more thoughtful. This 10-year-old RPG is doing the trick.
I can't imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I've visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.