Have I ever made sound mention of how much I hate Eidos? I'm generally a non-participant, but for Eidos, the sleeping giant (or 'insignificant mouse with oversized head', who knows...) awakens. I do. I HATE EIDOS. They take the greatest stories and realms of the PC, rape them, writhing them free of the original design teams (it was a big deal when announced that Tony Garb would work on character design for Tomb Raider 7? Tell me that's not wrong...) and if we want to see them, we have to spin in our chairs to see our fair heros staring blankly, looking around, knocking on glass from inside the TV. What... the... fuck?

Gameplay takes a step back, controls are dumbed down, graphic innovation is retarded for the sake of the Playstation; environment size, shading complexity, texture size are held back, shoe-horned into the XBox.

Anyone remember how Deus Ex came about? There was only going to be a DX:IW if there was going to be an XBox version. Then DX got ass-slammed even further with an XBox oriented Unreal Engine making for a mere experiment for an XBox Thief. Deus Ex was a digital miracle, an anomaly of story telling in a video game presentation marred only by its faint association with John Romero. If you allowed yourself to be absorbed by the e-mails, the overheard conversations, it became as deep and involving as an American Ghost in the Shell could have been.

"Here come your chance to be a hero."
"Good."

^ A beautifully subtle moment of understanding between Herrman and Denton that Eidos' idiot moneymen couldn't possibly understand. This was a game based our most romanticized theme of literature - the heartaching inevitability of change, the transition between one civilization and the next and one lifestyle passing into obsolisence while the new lifestyle struggles to hold onto the old.

Eidos could never understand this and couldn't possibly understand the artistic potential of games. They aren't fit to participate and their games aren't worth stealing anymore.

-Z