My brain is entering meltdown as I wade through a cavalcade of bugs, so I blew everything off this evening and plowed into the new Thief: Deadly Shadows. This is the third installment of a venerable series that -- for a while -- seemed unfairly and untimely demised when reports that Looking Glass, the series' publisher, had gone belly up. In a bittersweet development, the folks at Ion Storm who had done Deus Ex (itself clearly in the Looking Glass vein of novel first person simulation thingy) had acquired the property and in fact some of the staff who had worked on the first two games.

Of course, that was years ago. And today, we finally see the fruits of their labor.

First, I'll calibrate you. I thought that Deus Ex: Invisible War was flawed but brilliant. And the brilliant outweight the flawed by a long shot. I was charmed by the fuzzy but well-lit graphics aesthetic, thrilled by the interesting and risk-taking AI behavior, and kept interested by both the twisting story and the ability to blend lots of different approaches together to come to solutions. So if you're one of those folks who found DX:IW some kind of weird betrayal, you're probably not going to be sympathetic to my ramblings.

Anyway. The short version of my reaction to Thief 3: Lovin' it! It seems to capture the flavor of the original series with a nice graphics overhaul and some interesting tweaks. However, just like Thief 2, this is not a reinvention -- it's a refinement.

Random thoughts in no particular order:

• The look, feel, and sound are all just right.
• Lockpick system replaced with something like Splinter Cell's "move the analog controller" thingy. Love it.
• I'd forgotten how I entertained I was by the word "Taffer".
• Perhaps I am lazy, but I like the little glistening effect on treasure. I could never tell the difference between gold and normal candlesticks in the first two and then you had to throw the damn things and make noise because they wouldn't go in the loot bag.
• Thief 2 added the whole "light blue to indicate where you've been" on the maps; why did you get rid of it?
• It's tremendously cool touch to see your own shadow get cast in front of you. This is a game that CRIED OUT for real shadows and real lighting, and thank the trickster they finally got 'em.
• I remain deeply entertained by the dialogue overheard in this series. In the first real mission, you get to hear the noble talking to a guard, and the guard backtalking him under his breath. Plus of course, drunken guards. Har!
• OK, where are those crazy weird magic electrical street lamps we saw in the very first Thief 1? Where's my ability to ranging about on the rooftops? Where my ever-luvvin' ROPE ARROWS?
• Apparently you get some kind of climbing gloves to replace the rope arrows. But what I loved about the rope arrows was the way you could use them to kind of chain your way across a ceiling. Le sigh.
• Can no longer pull out your own mechanical eye and throw it around corners. However, the ability to switch from 1st to 3rd person is (a) seamless and (b) surprisingly helpful. I normal keep it in 1st, but 3rd makes up for a lot of the situations where you'd use the eye tossing routine. Which I really didn't use that much anyway.
• There's this whole "you get to wander around the city and break into random apartments and pickpocket passerbys" thing that's kind of cool, since it's like a big freeform mission, but it's also kind of irritating, since you always have to look out for the watch, but you have to navigate it to get to the real missions. I expect the irritating part to outweight the cool part as the game progresses.
• I miss the enigmatic little Pagan/Keeper/Hammer sayings in the cutscenes. They now show up in the loading screens, but it ain't the same.
• Perhaps most importantly, that great Thief feeling of openness is still there. This isn't the Deus Ex "find the three ways through" -- these are maps that feel designed for real use, not for herding me from point A to point B. I mean, they do that too, but very elegantly. This is something Splinter Cell only does in the multiplayer; Thief has always done it, in the great bulk of their maps.

Anyway, to recap: so far, this seems like a fine and upstanding continuation of the series. Welcome back! I look forward to losing hours to you.  10:39:21 PM  (comments [])