Hate is indeed a strong word, and maybe after all these years... I'm not sure if I can still use it, but I do have a huge inertia on my opinions.

You need to realize the effect of overexpectactions on my 20 year old self when the game came out, back at the time when games started "going bad", so to say. It was a massive letdown: I expected far too much and got far too little, plus I took it as a personal affront. As I write this, even after all this time, I'm starting to feel the flame rising again inside me, so I'll leave it there. Sufficient to say my bias against consoles was created that day and still remains in place.

Also, over the years I tried to give it a fairer chance 2 or 3 times, and I always found myself getting bored. Maybe I'll give it yet another chance now that I got the GOG version, because I really want to like this game. Not being able to despite wanting it so badly is the main reason I hate it, me thinks.


EDIT: have you tried Outcast? It's a game that called out to me back in the day, but I never got to play - first my PC was too old, then it was too new. I finally got it on GOG and was able to play at last. It was ok, but nothing particularly great by modern standards. However, when I think of what was out there at the time and what would have been to play that then, it must have been awesome. That's the kind of experience I had with Deus Ex, which generated feelings that cannot be replicated by playing the game today for the first time.

I see. I did not grow up experiencing the series, and I only have the chance now. There was this period of time from around 1997 to 2002 when I did not have a gaming rig at all. So I missed out on all games during that period. Heck, I have not even played Fallout yet (thanks to GOG I have it in my backlog).

So I guess I came to experience this Deux Ex series from a totally different angle. In fact I normally have motion/simulator sickness with first-person perspective games, so when I gave Deus Ex series a try, it was with not much expectations (not even sure I would not get the sickness in the beginning). Same thing with the Thief series I played before Deus Ex series. Only when I found out I could play these games without motion sickness, then and only then I continued.

Bottom line is that maybe because my expectations are quite low, I can accept this Invisible War better than I maybe able to were I to play this game back in the time it was released.

About Outcast, yes I had played it sometime last year I think. Again it was one of the games I missed out during the 1997-2002 period, so I was more wondering what the fuss it was all about when I gave it a try, didn't have all that high expectations. I liked the game.

Funny you should mention Fallout, I finished it for the first time while traveling around your country a couple of years ago.

Yes, expectations are a big part of the impresion a game gives you. My expectations of the sequel of THE game that I loved most were understandably high, my rationale at the time not so high, and the aftereffects don't seem to wear off for whatever reason. I daresay most of the DX2 haters are on a similar situation to mine.

Deus Ex had pretty steep hardware requirements in 2000. It was running very slow. That turned many off and isn't an issue today.

You can really see the influence of Matrix, which came into cinemas one year before.

Deus Ex has many, many bugs and some things don't work without a lot of configuration. But that is not surprising, when you look at the scope it has. It grants a lot of variability. In fact I haven't seen so much variability before, though is also suffers from occasional logic errors and it reminds me more of a real task than a computer simulation.