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.