Sup pimps,

I posted the following topic on Reddit and it seemed to get a lot of support but no... discussion. Maybe my target demographic was too broad and they are mostly there for Conspiracy Game Simulator DX3 instead so here it goes with you guys:

I've been on a nostalgia train for the past few weeks about Deus Ex 1. During my breaks at work I've been playing DX, at home I've been working on a multiplayer map for some reason and been trying to connect with old clan members. Here's a little bit (I lied, a lot) of my story:

In the glorious year of Deus Ex's release I was in middle school. I started playing DXSP and due to hardware problems I always GPFed when trying to transfer to Tonnochi_Road from the Canals. I tried going through that little 128x128 hallway so many times in a desperate hope that I may make it through once. My god, I still know the Canal's layout like the back of my hand because I would just play it over... and over... and over; even that was enough to keep my Deus Ex fix going. Every day after school I would plant my butt in front of my computer and explore every nook and cranny of that place. I couldn't move on, so I was gonna enjoy what I had. But there was always that one obstacle in the back of my mind... haunting me... taunting me... I was never able to cross that threshold to greatness until I finally got a graphics card for Christmas.

best Christmas ever.

Fast forward a bit and I started playing DXMP. I ran into this guy named... sigh Playerbigdick and for some reason started joining servers with the guy regularly and we would always be on the same team (usually NSF).* I ran through the hood by the name of "FBI" around this time and yes... that was "Female Body Inspector." But anyway, we decided to create a clan called... [NSF]. Can you guess the meaning of our version of NSF? If you are as big of a cheese ball as I was back then you guessed correctly: "Never Stop Fraggin'." I remember it like it was yesterday, we were exploring the map DXMP_Oilrig and we just decided to start this unholy pact for whatever reason. This guy, who is uh... "Edwin" from here on out introduced me to the Unreal Editor and I took to it like crazy.

Here, ZeroPresence was born and I went on to create probably hundreds of multiplayer maps. Be them functioning releases like DXMP_Deepblue or just cool maps that the other [NSF] members and myself would create and host on the server to fart around in. Great group of guys and we just had fun in the server most of the time checking out our creations. Around this time that Edwin fellow just sort of lost contact with all of us and started doing his own thing whatever that may be. Also, something I wanna get off my chest: some of you folks may remember some junky maps created by a player that went by the name of Jazz...

I want to formally apologize for him and his maps such as... "Jazz's_Torture_Castle_v1" v2, v3, and whatever other horrors he unleashed upon the world. Especially if you were one of the poor souls with a glimmer in your eye for cool custom maps and ended up being murdered by an elevator mover that lowered you into a waterzone with no escape. Cool kid, but come on...

Anyway, I met my best friend of 8 years now through [NSF] and we chat about DX from time to time and sometimes jump into a non-dedicated server and just run through our old maps. For some reason this is always fun and we have some good laughs remembering those days and the people we met along the way.

Sometime during all this I started working on TNM. Which you gentlemen are quite aware of. Some of my worst and best mapping was done in this mod and I'm happy I was a part of it. You know the rest of this part of the story...

I'm always gonna wonder what happened to Edwin and the other guys from [NSF]. I know that Edwin went by another name "Gheist" on DeusExEditing and created that Tactical mod that I still see on servers from time to time to this day. If any of you goof balls are here give me a shout. Also, I would love to discuss some of my fellow Redditor's own examples of nostalgia for this game!

*: You have no idea how many times I rewrote this sentence.

Also one last thing I remember about my horror story near the beginning about the GPF due to graphics card: I cried once because it just GPFed one too many times while trying to get through to that damn Tonnochi_Road and I just lost it.

DX man... freaking DX!

I want similar horrifying, touching, interesting what have you stories about THE NOSTALGIA TRAAAAAIIIIN.

Mm, this might fall under the whatever section. It was way back in 2002 and I had not long actually learned how to use a computer without worrying about causing some catastrophe to it. I had been dicking around with, of all things, some Golf related games...sheesh. I started to get into shooters, Medal of Honor and such, but I felt bored after a couple of unremembered arcade type games. I then discovered Ghost Recon and really liked it. This led to my trying out Deus Ex and I wasn't sure if I liked it. After reading what others were saying about it I persevered, and it was in my second playthrough that I finally "got it." I think Jock's message about Smuggler changed from my first playing, and it was an epiphany.

Anyhoo, that eventually led to my discovering I liked the FPS/RPG genre. Years later it led me to a fabulous Total Conversion and a community with lots of cool members.

I miss working on TNM.

Fucking huge project, so many people involved, total freedom to do whatever we wanted as long as we could figure out how, and that feeling of being intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of such a giant, enormous game.

Feels like a goddamn lifetime ago, man.

Yep, right on the money. I liked working on everything but I must admit such a huge project and always having so much workload made my maps suffer some.

For instance, I was looking at the Llama Temple with a friend recently and I was almost embarrassed. Besides like the main entrance (and I still have some issues with it) most of the map looks sub-par to me now.

EDIT: By the way... do a lot of people still post here? It seems like threads in the top three spots in some forums are months old.

No the Llama Temple looks fine, shut up

And yeah people still post here. It's not a super busy forum, but we do have daily discussion.

We don't post very often about DX though. Mainly general gaming.

I remember playing DX as a kid. I loved the game a lot but I hadn't realized there was a quicksave key and I always got too engrossed in the game to save manually. Because of this, I don't think I ever got further than china. I did like to cheat to get the "lasersword" though, I remember that clearly . Back then I was playing on a macintosh(iMac to be precise) and at some point DX had to be deleted because hard drive space was limited, and then the cd broke so that it would not install properly, causing a CTD in battery park whenever you spoke to someone(dodging anna at the start is hard on inferior hardware btw). Then a few years later I got the pc version and played through it properly.

I probably replayed the demo 20 times... then with mission 2 added a few more times before actually getting the game years later (no steam and such back then, all relied on finding hard copies)...

so you never actually got into Deus Ex right around its release but later some time? If that's true, I'm sorry on what you missed out on.

DXMP... it was a team deathmatch or deathmatch game with augs and that was it. But I've yet to come across a game with similar or better multiplayer mechanics or experiences!

Sigh, I was a dumbass and skipped college just to play DX. I hated it at first (Liberty Island giving wrong impression + close mindedness) But then I was blown away and have been obsessed ever since. Perhaps a little TOO obsessed.

Looking Glass are fucking geniuses. If the world was fair, they would be in activision's position of power right now.

Too bad Looking Glass didn't make the game...

No but Warren and Harvey, the main minds behind the game, came from Looking Glass.
It's like Irrational and Arkane too, they are not Looking Glass in name, but the design of the FP/RPGs they develop are near exact (Except Bioshock) and the design philosophies spawned at Looking Glass, or more specifically Origin Systems with Paul Neurath, but he did get to realise them until he formed Looking Glass and headed the development of Ultima Underworld.

Another funny story is how I even obtained Deus Ex which occurred while I was at Best Buy with my dad. You see, my father and I had kind of a "dudes hanging out" as he called it when I was young. We would always go to an Arby's and then go browse around at Best Buy just to look at all the games and computer gadgets out at the time. We rarely bought anything as it was just him and I as he said... just "hanging out" on his day off. But one day I was looking at the Deus Ex box and he commented "hey that looks cool, you wanna get it?" well, obviously yes father why would you have to even ask, silly man. This was also a rare occurrence as I was a momma's boy and my father rarely just bought me stuff outside of holidays.

Funny how things change. Us "dudes hanging out" is now him and I going to a shooting range or taking care of an important errand in a common area of town together, lol.

I got into the game about 2001 I think. I only know the exact year because I was staying with my Uncle at the time.

He went out one day and came back with three Sold-Out games (apparently they were on sale or something): Tomb Raider 3, Pharaoh and Deus Ex.
I was fairly young at the time and didn't quite grasp that not everything in an FPS was your enemy. So I tried shooting Paul and the bot on the dock. Needless to say, I didn't understand how the first level of a game could be so hard.

Anywho, I think I left it for a bit and came back to it later, where, suddenly, this massive interactive world opened up to me full of friendly characters as well as enemies and choices and differing gameplay styles. I was amazed. And from then, it became my favourite game.

lol I'm picturing you trying to shoot Paul with the pistol you start with.

"Jackass..." *assaultgun to the face*

Haha! The stupid thing was, I'm sure I'd played the tutorial before then so I'd obviously been briefed on the IFF system. That made no difference. See a scary walker bot: shoot the fuck out of it.
So I think I just played the tutorial over a few times.