Deus Ex came out in 2000, and it remains one of the greatest PC games ever made. I’m not even kidding. It’s up there with The Elder Scrolls, Civilization, Ultima, and Portal where you should really pick out your favorite game in a given series, because if I name Morrowind, Civ 5, Ultima 7, and Portal 2 I won’t draw the ire of most of the fanboys of any series. PC Gamer actually named it its top PC game of all time. There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get into below. First, you need to know that you can and should play this game on your current PC. Yes, even if it’s a netbook. This is an 11 year old game with some fan patches that make it surprisingly usable on any system made in the last decade.

You can get Deus Ex on Steam or Impulse for $10. Already, from either of these services, it’s a playable game. Unfortunately, just installing it to your system won’t give you the best experience. For that, you’ll need the NewVision mod and a DirectX 10 renderer. Fortunately, these are very easy to get. Grab the mod and renderer here. Download it all, nearly a gigabyte, and put the textures and renderer in the right directories (Steam will have installed Deus Ex with your other games in the Program Files/Steam/Steamapps directory). Now just run the game normally after setting the launcher configuration menu to use the DirectX 10 renderer and your favorite resolution. It won’t improve the models or animations, but the high resolution textures and new renderer will make a world of difference.

Now, what makes Deus Ex one of the greatest PC games of all time? There are a lot of reasons, but they can be seen as two specific factors: gameplay and story. Dated graphics, stilted voice acting, and unforgiving difficulty can all be accepted when playing a game that manages to give the player so much choice and immerse them so much in a compelling story. Long before “cinematic gameplay” was a phrase, Deus Ex managed to offer a narrative where the player can really make a difference in the world, and where the story feels both genuinely epic and personal.

Deus Ex is a cyberpunk game. I don’t mean “it takes place in the future and there are a lot of computers and stuff like that.” I mean it’s a true embrace of the cyberpunk genre, looking at a dystopian future where technology has taken over our lives. Technologically augmented humans are used and discarded as new augments come along, everyone is online, and nanotechnology has bred gifts and dangers that can make or break the world. Corporations and conspiracies dominate the course of humanity, and as an agent of one of the thousands of tendrils of those conspiracies, you have to see exactly what your actions, and the actions of everyone else who has let themselves be controlled by others, have caused

From the beginning, nothing is what it seems. That is literally true, as everything you learn in the first few missions is turned on its head as you uncover the truth. Your allies aren’t. Your enemies aren’t. You aren’t even who you think you are. This unfolds brilliantly over the course of 10 to 12 hours, taking you all over the world as you find out why and who you’re fighting.

Deus Ex doesn’t just take you through the story. It puts you in the augmented body of agent JC Denton and gives you all of his choices. Every part of the game gives you multiple problems, each with multiple solutions. Do you lockpick or hack a computer? Do you sneak around or run in with guns? Do you help this person or ignore him? In terms of affecting the game world, your choices can alter how later missions will play in subtle ways, like different characters’ reactions or whether you have a key piece of information to make an action easier. Neither that nor the big choice in the last part of the game to determine how it ends is the big reason Deus Ex is so great in its gameplay, though. The real choices are in each mission.

Choosing between using a lockpick or hacking a computer is just the most basic dilemma the game offers you. Depending on your skills and what equipment you’ve collected, you might complete a mission in drastically different ways. The stealth approach might involve plenty of lockpicking and crawling around air ducts, exploring a completely separate part of a compound from the area you might shoot through, or the path a hacked door panel might unlock. I still have not yet seen a game that offers so many ways to solve the same problems, giving you very different experiences depending on how you play and build up your character. Each level is designed with so many options the game never makes you feel like you’re being railroaded. You’ll hit the same locations and see the same obstacles, but you’ll approach them all differently.

If you haven’t played Deus Ex yet, spend the $10 and do it now. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is coming out next week, so you have just enough time to play through the game before you start the prequel. Even though it’s old, it’s still a must for any gamer to experience. You can ignore Deus Ex: Invisible War.