Well I tried to ignore Yakoob since he seems so lost all the time, but you know I love you SE, so:

1. I fail to see what is the point of having additional neutral and critical views of a videogame in an article which celebrates anniversary of its release. You'd think that's when you'd ignore all the flaws and cons of a subject and focus on celebrating. More likely scenario, they decided to make a celebration feature and whooops, turns out half of the team doesn't even like it. Oh well, our audience has heads far too deep in their asses to notice.

2. Deus Ex is an excellent game, period. It has few rough edges(like voice acting) but saying that it's meh or boring instantly flags you as an ignorant who doesn't know jack shit about videogames. The End.

As previous witnesses have attested, only now is it clear what an odd time DX emerged in: what now seems a mythical age of adventurous gamesmiths bending genres still warm from the forge backed by budget-unbothered risk-embracing publishers at a moment of rare convergence of hardwares and softwares. 3D First/Third Person Shooter/Hacker/Slasher/Bangers were still freshly amazing, and any environment or character that wasn’t a blank low/no-poly single-texture surface felt like an interactive Rembrandt. These days games look better, are eight, sixty-four, five hundred and twelve times as expensive to make. But they’re not twice as much fun. Granted, our expectations were different back then. Games were Hard. We’d stick with them until we got some enjoyment out of them no matter how Fawlty Towers-esque the initial customer service. Sometimes the rewards were grudging. But Deus Ex kept on, and keeps on giving.

Never mind the extraordinary elegance and number of equi-effective gameplay mechanisms that DX will let you switch between. Pull back and smell the themes. Before DX I’d never played a game that was about very much. I’d never heard of Steve Meretzky’s mind-boggling games for Infocom (such as the still brain-slapping A Mind Forever Voyaging). Indeed I hadn’t played Thief, so the stealthy start to the first mission nearly defeated me entirely. I’m still not sure how many prods of the stun baton it takes to stun a DX NPC, nor for how long: panicky and discovery-prone, I kept prodding and re-prodding them, my stimulus not significantly less spasmodic than their reaction.

I didn’t actually like the thematic stuff at first. My initial reaction when I found references to the Illuminati was pretty much “Pah. Smarty-Pants Game designers. Well I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum too, thank you very much.” It didn’t occur to me that once the meme had been introduced, the game would then DO something with it and then confront me with my reaction by forcing me to make a choice with no clear pantomimed binary right-or-wrong consequence. I’d never previously struggled to know what the Right thing to do in a game was. I’d always had to mentally change gear to play a computer game, in fact that had become a semi-ritualised part of the pleasure. Ahhh, computer game, leisure, I can now park my brain, or at least all but the problem solving/pattern recognising/reaction twitch parts of it, because I’m not going to have to intellectually or morally parse this game as a text as I would a novel, or article or the news. And suddenly, for the first time, my other brainular lobes woke up, startled from accustomed slumber, and had to Deal.

Replay Value is a Grail for designers, pursued by diverse and sundry paths. But I rarely replay RPG’s all the way through, because just a few tastes of the alternate dialogue-options/mission choices usually give me enough of a flavour of the proceedings; I don’t feel like if I continue, I’ll learn startling new things. But Deus Ex, it’s a whole new You. And everyone changes around you as a result of what you do. And the redundant content paths! Am I right in thinking that lots of people just missed out on the entire Paris section because certain of their choices would remove the need to go there? Can you imagine being allowed to have that much content in a game that a player might, while still completing the game, just miss?

[...] Oh yes, and the music’s really good.

Emil Pagliarulo: I would. Certainly the types of games I was into. And for me, they represent the soul of Looking Glass Studios. What that means to me is these immersive first-person games which try to do more than just offer an RPG experience or do more than just offering an FPS experience. Again it’s that illusive buzzword “emergent”… which does mean something to some people, and is something to strive for. It’s a genre-busting sort of thing where you want to wrap the player in an experience – and first person is generally the best way to do that. To me, that’s what that represents.

RPS: What’s so powerful about the first person?

Emil Pagliarulo: It’s the feeling of do I control that avatar on screen, or am I that avatar? And for me, the first-person is always about being that avatar. And it comes with its own unique set of challenges. When you’re that close to an environment the simple act of pulling a camera in closely means you have to look at your visual fidelity, because it’s going to have to be so much better. Play a great 3rd person game… and if it gives you the ability to zoom in the camera, do that and then look at the environment and see if it looks as good zoomed in as it does zoomed out. Pretty much 9/10 times the answer will be no. But when you’re making a first-person game with the camera zoomed in and everything in your face you’re trying for the level of visual fidelity which convinces you that you’re in this world. And for me, that’s what it’s all about. It’s like… you don’t need all these 3D glasses for virtual reality! Virtual Reality is that sense of being involved in a world, and first-person is what does that for me.

Remember, the gaming press loved Invisible War too.

I don't know what this "DX2" is you keep referring to.