This album will never leave my collection as long as I live.

I have owned The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking for 10 years now, and consider it the best album to come from the brilliant mind of Roger Waters--surpassing even The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon. The imagery of the lyrics transports you directly into the head of a man dreaming of love, loss, family, sex, and horror. The dream logic which melds one song into the next is smooth and flawless. If you are evaluating this album on a song-by-song basis, you have missed the point. To appreciate the whole picture you have to make time to sit down and listen to it beginning to end--as is the case with most of Waters' works. The lyrics are jarring, haunting, Blakean.

The music is similarly inspired. Even if you don't normally go for Eric Clapton's music, this album features him doing what he does best: slowhand improvisation. This album would be nothing, musically, without him. His guitar work complements and interweaves with the lyrics in the kind of musical partnership that you just don't hear much coming out of a recording studio. The man can speak through a guitar like no one else I know of. He is melodic yet unrestrained, prominent yet subdued. Listening to this album, you find yourself thinking, "wow, this is a great song," and only later, "wow, there's almost nothing happening but the guitar."

I heartily recommend this album to anyone who reveres Roger Waters and anyone who lives for a well-formed concept album from someone who actually has a concept. This CD has a plot and characters you feel you know.

This is an excellent CD for long car trips at night, nights spent sitting on the couch listening to the stereo and sipping scotch, or nights spent tangled in carnal bliss atop sweaty sheets.

Roger Waters' The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is a true masterpiece.

The first Deus Ex was, hands down, the best game I've ever played. I am a realistic person, however, so I tried not to go into this game hoping for a repeat of that experience. Even with lowered expectations, however, this game really does not cut it.

Following is a list of major disappointments:

1) The RPG-style skill system is gone.
2) Multitools are both lockpicks and, well, multitools
3) Ammo is generic (i.e. all weapons use the same ammo), which pulls a lot of the mental arithmetic of a first-person-shooter out.
4) I had played for 30 minutes before I had the pistol, the energy blade, the shotgun, the sniper rifle, some grenades, and the submachine gun.
5) Most weapon mods had no visible effect, since the lack of a skill system meant that you weilded your weapon perfectly from the word "go."
6) Scant few enemies
7) Terrible AI (worse than most FPSes, and worse, I think, than the original)
8) Cramped level design (the vast expanses of the original are gone, and it is necessary to change maps more than any game I think I've ever played)
9) On an Athlon 2700 with 512MB dual-channel DDR memory and an ATI 9600XT, this game ran choppily, even after tweaking video settings.
10) The storyline is almost identical to the original, minus the sense of intrigue and discovery. I don't want to spoil one of the endings, but given the first story, it was absolutely ludicrous because you needed to do something that you did as JC Denton in the first one--for the same reason.
11) Despite doing every sidequest I could find, and being a pretty lousy gamer, I finished this game in about 10 hours.
12) This is maybe a minor thing, but since you are a clone of JC Denton, wouldn't it make sense that when you meet him, you're the same ethnicity? I played as the black Alex D, since that is how I played JC Denton. But then when I finally meet JC, he's some white guy I've never seen before. And if I'm black, how am I a clone?
13) There was no innovation on the biomods. Yes, there are black market biomods, which are touted as super-cool, but honestly none of them really do anything important, and they're all you can find for most of the game. The only good one is the hacking biomod, which used to be a skill in the first one, so giving up a biomod slot for that rather upset me.
14) It was easy. Really, really easy.
15) There were plenty of times when I said "Hmm. Pretty level design." I did not, however, say "COOL!" even once. When you're playing a game for entertainment, you shouldn't be noticing design, you should be noticing content.

I suppose I should stop there. If you play this game, you won't be bored out of your head. It's still better than a lot of FPSes out there. It is not, however, anything too terribly special, and it is certainly no comparison to the original.