Thief: The Dark Project + Thief II: The Metal Age (PC)

I wasn’t planning on doing a review this week due to exams, so this Bumper Giant Size edition has come as a shock to all.

Thief III: Deadly Shadows is one of those games you’ve probably seen a million times in game stores as a budget title (it’s usually next to Tomb Raider: the Angel of Darkness). I bought that for about a fiver, and it didn’t work. Two weeks later, I saw the first two thief games in one box for two pounds.

They didn’t work either.

However, I was able to eventually get them both working, after an extensive amount of faffing around, though it took the better part of a year for me to get Thief II working.

So, let’s start Reviewing!

First of all, I have the $old-out Software edition, so the cover leaves a fair bit to be desired; the boxarts for the two games combined only take up about a third of the front cover. Thief’s boxart reminds me of Assassin’s Creed, which isn’t really a good thing; the game emphasises not getting seen and discourages killing of humans. Thief II’s a little better in this regard; we see the protagonist (Garrett) standing in partial shadow, bow ready, eyes darting around, which is more the type of thing you’ll be doing.

I’m going to continue to compare and contrast the two for the remainder, though I’ve only played the first few levels of each so far (it takes me a while to get through most games, but hey, I get my money’s worth). Thief starts off with a thieves’ guild training course, which can be skipped, although it sets up the story a bit. The first level sees you breaking into a manor to retrieve a specific object, so it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Level Two, you need to spring your fence from prison. A bit high stakes for this stage, but I’m game. Except that the prison is located adjacent to a Haunted Mine. Full of Zombies. That can’t be taken down with your blackjack. Or Sword. Or ANYTHING other than holy water arrows. Which can only be made at certain points. I’m not saying that there SHOULDN’T be zombies(except I am), but not for the second level. Still, let’s see what level three has in store.

 

The third level sees you breaking into a tomb. It’s almost entirely full of the undead. Where there are no zombies, there are lizards who belch poison gas.

Thief II on the other hand is (I understand) almost completely free of non-human opponents, and the levels are much more focused on stealing things. You know, like a Thief would. What’s more, in the original Thief, to finish a mission on Normal Difficulty, all you need to do is grab the necessary loot. In Thief II on normal, one of those objectives is always to ESCAPE with the loot, which is far more realistic.

I was surprised to learn that during development of Thief (originally an action title called Dark Camelot), the plot was established first, and the levels tailored to fit, while in Thief II, exactly the opposite was done, and in my opinion, to better effect.

Now let me make this clear, this is not another MYST/realMYST thing. They are both great games. You play from a first person perspective, and use various tools to move around unnoticed, such as water arrows to douse torches to create more darkness, or wash away inconvenient bloodstains. The HUD has a little “light gem”, which shows how visible you are at any given moment, however you need to rely on your own ears to work out how heavy you’re footfalls are, or how close the guards are. Going unnoticed is its own reward, as you can eavesdrop on conversations between NPCs , which may lead you in the direction of treasure. But mostly they bitch about their bosses, which is still pretty entertaining.

My only major gripe is that they are next to impossible to run on modern PCs, and there is not (as of yet) one patch that just makes them work. Thankfully, there’s a pretty supportive community of fans out there, who have managed to get helpful links to fixes for whatever problems you’re having, and believe me, you will have at least two major ones. All Dark Engine games are incompatible with multiple processors, and even if you have a single core, chances are that it’s doing something called hyperthreading, which means that it’s acting as though there are two processors. Also, the video files used for mission briefings use a codec which needs to be registered, except that the company no longer supports them, so good luck with that too.

The only thing I can really say is it’s worth the effort.

Unless you only got Thief 1. That might be disappointing.

MYST (DS version)

Have you ever played a game and thought to yourself, “Do you know what could only enhance this gameplay experience? Microsoft Power Point”. 

Up until the massive success of the Sims (which has shipped more copies than WoW has subscribers, make of that what you will), MYST was the best selling PC game ever. Which I guess proves that Apple was good for something at one point. Not only did this game sell very very VERY well, it is also attributed to the success of the CD-ROM drive. It has been re-released and ported more than ten times, and there has recently been talk of a motion picture adaptation.

And now the question that you’ve all been bursting to hear answered; why then, is it so shit?

Well, part of the problem is that it’s on the DS. But let’s start with the cover. The box art is fine, but turn it over, and we see a fairly major warning sign; the back blurb is in English AND Dutch. This would be fine, if they were just trying to appeal to broad demographics, but the DS only has options for English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. And then there’s the blurb itself; “All source code has been re-written specifically for the Nintendo DS performance and gameplay”. Wow. How generous. I’d hate to think that I was purchasing a game that had been coded for a pocket calculator and stuck on a DS flashcard. THIS was what you used as the most IMPORTANT feature of your game? That’s not to mention that malarkey with the words “performance and gameplay” seemingly tacked on there for no logical reason.

Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to judge a book by its cover. So I’m going to judge it by its manual instead. It’s in greyscale, which is a real pet peeve of mine, especially when big companies like EA and Ubisoft, who so obviously have the money and resources to print in colour do it, but I digress. The content isn’t actually all that bad, it tells you how to use the interface, and even has few hints to get you started (believe me, you NEED them). The only reason I bring it up, is that the content is only about twelve pages long. So, they repeat it all in two other languages. Again, fair enough, this is the European version after all. Except that the languages chosen are Finnish and Swedish. Again, why? I am genuinely asking why those ones? And why not Dutch, since you seem to want to hook them in as much as the English speakers? THIS MAKES NO SENSE!

So, FINALLY, we get on to the game itself. And you know what? It’s not terrible. Yeah, kinda threw a curveball there. MYST is a very good game. It would take quite a bit to ruin it totally. You start out on a mysterious Island, and that’s pretty much all the info your given. By exploring the island and experimenting with the various books and arcane machinery, you can teleport to new areas, to collect special pages which can be put into one of two special books with a person trapped inside, and the plot is gradually revealed as you go along, mostly through inference. There’s surprisingly little exposition, but a TON of backstory. You’ll need to take notes as you go, and by about halfway, I started to find myself writing as though I really were exploring these places, writing down thoughts and feelings about the three characters in the game. But it was very difficult. Because this game should NEVER have been on the DS.

The DS screen is too small for this game, since most of the plot and puzzles are based around information in special books you find. Midway thoughtfully provide a magnifying glass button that lets you read them. VERY slowly. But then there are the machines. It’s very difficult to work out what you can and can’t operate, or indeed if you have done so correctly. This can make the already difficult puzzles just plain infuriating.

And now, onto the Big point I made at the very start, a problem common to almost ALL versions of MYST apart from the original on the Apple computers of the time. Whenever you move, there’s supposed to be a subtle fade from one still image to the next, the idea being that, since all worlds in MYST are contained in books, you are turning the page. I  imagine this would also evoke a more Dreamlike feel to the whole game. Instead, the stills cut from one to the other, with absolutely no transition, which makes everything incredibly disorienting.

So, to some up, MYST is a very good and incredibly immersive game. MYST DS however, is a pale echo of this. I didn’t even finish this game. I finished realMYST, the recent PC version that, rather than using pre-rendered stills, renders all the worlds in real time 3D. And it is stunning. The graphics are a far cry from...well, from Far Cry, but it’s a thousand times better than pre-rendered stills, squashed and distorted to fit the DS screen. Perhaps they should have spent less time on the source code after all.