Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

As Lore Sjoberg once brilliantly put it, video games and movies get along like cats made of oil and dogs made of water. Aside from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, there are no good movies based on video games. No! Shut up. I don’t want to hear about Doom, Resident Evil, or anything Uwe Boll has come within a furlong of.

On the flip side of the coin, you have video games based on movies. While the good ones may still be rare, they’re likely still countable on your fingers unless your name is Frodo. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is one of a rare breed: very good games that are based on movie properties. I’ve played through Escape From Butcher Bay twice now, and it’s likely that I will again. I can’t think of a shooter that has better stealth mechanics, although Dark Messiah of Might and Magic comes close. Lurking in the Pitch Dark (har har) and seeing every move your enemies make while they can’t see you at all is loads of fun. But that’s Riddick.

I just bought a copy of Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for $5 from Direct2Drive. I hope it’s as good as the original.

When I think of the best levels in the best video games I’ve ever played, one of the first that comes to mind is the Shalebridge Cradle level from Thief: Deadly Shadows. You’ve got to play through 80% of the game before you’ll see the game’s penultimate level, but it’s worth it. I’ve seen some fairly well done haunted houses in video games – the one in Vampire: Bloodlines comes to mind – but it’s nothing compared to the Shalebridge Cradle.

The Shalebridge Cradle began as an orphanage, and later became an insane asylum. Think of John Cusack’s 1408, with a little bit of The Shining, and some Thirteen Ghosts thrown in for flavor. That will get you halfway there.

I don’t have the writing acumen to accurately describe how well-designed The Shalebridge Cradle truly is. But in March 2005, PC Gamer Magazine wrote a ten-page article about it. A single level of a single game. Ten pages. And the article (pdf) should give you a good feel for what I’m trying to convey in my sonnet.

And now, my ode to the Shalebridge Cradle

Behind a rusted gate it looms immense
A sinister abandoned old estate
My heart feels crushed as if beneath a weight
As I peer up at stark malevolence

With heightened pulse I slowly step inside
And wait in vain for crushing fear to pass
Beneath The Cradle’s black foreboding mass
I feel my trepidations amplified

Forsaken children once wandered these halls
Mingling with the criminally insane
The wrongness of thy history brings pain
But gems and silver treasure herein calls

So long I’ve been the monster in the night
Crouched in shadow, knife or club in hand
Yet these inhuman puppets you command
Fill even this monster’s soul with fright

Evil resides within these halls malign
Canst be no shadows deadlier than thine

…well, it’s certainly one of my two or three favorites in the game. And it’s probably the hardest non-optional stealth room in the game. Because I couldn’t screenshot from within the game, I took this shot with a digital camera. You’ve got to climb down that ladder, hide behind the crates at the base of the ladder until the guard’s back is turned, then pull a U-turn around the center pipe to come up behind the two guards at the right. Now comes the hard part. The guard at the door stands still and pivots around every so often. The other paces in a circular pattern. You’ve got to wait until the pacing guard is moving towards the door, then follow behind him, making sure that the guard at the door doesn’t see you. You can then duck behind the whitish vent until both guard’s backs are turned, but then you’ve got to move within inches of the guard at the door to actually get through the door. Even on my fifth playthrough, I can’t get it the first time. I remember trying forever on my first run through the game. It just seemed like the right thing to post about for this site’s 100th post.

Anyone else remember this part?

Video game reviews are big business now. And while I really didn’t want to get into the games review business when I started Lungfishopolis, I feel a need to bring peoples’ attention to a few games which got a lot of terrible reviews, but which I found to be very good games. I’ve played all but one of them more than once, and I’ll likely go back and play most of them again. I’m silly like that.

Firstly, Enter the Matrix. It got an abysmal Metascore of 58, but I remember liking it. I haven’t replayed it for perspective, and I remember hating many of the driving sequences, but the combat was fun. Running up walls and diving through the air in bullet-time while shooting at enemies, then beating the snot out of them in over-the-top hand to hand is a lot of fun. The hovercraft-piloting segment was just plain stupid and broken, but that was at the very end of the game such that you could completely skip it and miss nothing.

You got to play the role of either Niobe or Ghost, and in a design choice similar to Resident Evil 2, this gave you two separate angles on the same story, adding to replay value. In the car segments, Niobe always drives and Ghost always shoots, so you’re either only shooting or only driving.

By far the best part of the game is the movie footage. They filmed footage for Enter The Matrix at the same time they were filming the second and third Matrix movies, so there’s a ton of movie footage that never appeared in the films. Some of it is pretty damn good. My favorite: the scene where Ballard fights Seraph. It’s great mostly because of the fantastic quote at the end. There was a funny scene where Ghost talks about onanism too.

Another game I really enjoy is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. PC Gamer panned it for being buggy and repetitive, and 1UP made fun of the kick mechanic and character development. But although I’ll agree that the plotline isn’t exactly inspired and the slutty demon chick is annoying, I liked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It has the best FPS swordplay mechanics I’ve seen – definitely better than Oblivion – and some fairly fun stealth gameplay. I actually really enjoyed the oft-maligned kick mechanic, and thought that the exhaustion meter and the fact that more powerful enemies can block a kick limited the kick enough that it was not overly powerful. The kick simply introduces a way to use the environment to your advantage. If there’s not a ledge to kick an enemy off, there may be a spiked wall or a support beam to kick him into.

I enjoyed Dark Messiah’s environments and level design, and really had a lot of fun sniping enemies from a distance with my bow. And somehow, sneaking up behind an orc and stabbing him in the neck or kicking him off a thousand-foot cliff just never gets old. There were some fairly intense chase sequences early in the game which at first annoyed the crap out of me. Somehow, going back through the game a second time, I’m not finding them nearly as bad.

I started replaying the game not long ago, and although I stopped when I started playing Crysis and Mass Effect, I’ll likely go back to it soon. Warning: I’ve heard that the console version of this game is far worse.

Next up, Fallout Tactics. First off, I’ve got to let it be known that I was huge a fan of the original two Fallout titles. The storyline and the open world were fantastic. The turn-based combat was excellent, and the only thing that (to me) could have made it better is to allow the player to control a party of characters, a la Baldur’s Gate. One of the reasons I loved Baldur’s Gate so much was because of the strategic combat. Fallout Tactics allows me that strategic combat that I crave so much.

Yeah – I’ll totally agree that the storyline isn’t nearly up to the standards of the first two games. But this game was largely about gameplay rather than story. I absolutely loved sneaking four of my men into position, having my shotgun guy lie prone and crawl around a corner into the raiders’ hut and blast him point blank, or positioning the guy with the rocket launcher up on a fire escape. Surrounding the enemy before they know you’re there is a lot of fun. And then kneeling behind a barrel or having a firefight through a window or standing in a trench for cover, trying to take out that Deathclaw before it gets close enough to rip your head off – it’s what makes the whole game fun.

I like being able to control an entire squad, and specialize the different members in different skills. Having one member who can drive the vehicles well and make tight turns, and another who can sneak up right under an enemy’s nose, a lockpicker/safecracker, and maybe a sniper. And having someone who’s good with landmines is always useful.

Temple of Elemental Evil, despite its many flaws, was a really fun game. My biggest complaints about it was that the a huge optional ending segment of the game was so buggy that I could never complete it, and that like Throne of Bhaal, the final boss is nearly unbeatable.The critics’ biggest complaints were the bugs and the complexity. There have since been many patches to fix the bugs and to correct the incorrect implementations of rules detected by a horde of D&D fanatics, but I still don’t think 100% of the bugs are gone.

Like Fallout Tactics, the biggest single thing that I liked about this game was the excellent strategic combat. It used 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, implementing rules that many D&D players may not even have been aware of, thus the complaints about complexity. but I loved it. You could wait to delay your initiative, ready your bow so that as soon as any enemy spellcaster started casting a spell you could shoot them to interrupt it, double move, run, charge, cast a counterspell, and perform many other strategic actions. You can even craft magic items using the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset.

I’ll admit that the coolest-looking fight in the game was one of the first, against the giant frogs. Watching them jump out of the swamp and hop up to your party, then snag your wizard with its tongue and swallow him simultaneously sucked and was awesome. You lose a wizard, but hey – at this point you’re first level and you can go roll up another one. Besides, didn’t that look freaking cool when he got… digested?

Once you’re in the temple, the game lets you pit temple factions against each other and play up the intrigue and politics, but I generally just run through killing everything. And yes, I’ve replayed this game, and added all the Circle of Eight patches. There’s actually a lot of really good user-generated content too. Now that I’ve got a 3.0ghz dual core machine, I’ll probably go back at some point and see if the game plays any better.

The final game on my list is Thief: Deadly Shadows. Although it generally seems to be considered the least of the three Thief titles, it’s the only one I’ve truly loved. I’m playing it now, and loving it.

Amongst stealth games, it’s in my top five, alongside titles like Beyond Good and Evil and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Worth a play if you’ve never tried it.

I’ve got a Logitech G5 mouse, and I just downloaded Setpoint from Logitech’s website. I couldn’t get the mouse 4 and 5 buttons to register my keyboard actions no matter what I tried. I even downloaded and installed uberOptions, which I believe ended up being totally unnecessary.

Then, instead of selecting t3.exe as the program that received the actions, I selected t3main.exe, which is another file in the system folder that you don’t actually run yourself. Voila.

It really works nicely. I guess the key here is picking not the program that you run to start whatever game you’re gonna play, but rather finding the program that will be running when you need to use the commands. Hope someone else finds this useful.

A couple nights ago, I decided to reinstall Thief 3: Deadly Shadows and give it another spin. The only catch: I’m running Windows Vista, and old games can be very iffy on this OS.

My problem was that after installing, any time I tried to run the game, I got the following error:

(Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library)
Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Program Files\Thief – Deadly Shadows\System\t3.exe
abnormal program termination

When this happened, the cursor would get stuck as a spinning CD, which normally indicates that the computer is accessing the CD. Only this time, it would stay that way until I restarted the machine. I don’t think I could open the CD tray either.

After a few hours of mucking about, I finally got the thing to run, even though some parts are a bit buggy. I figured I’d share all the steps I took to get it to run in Vista. I’m fairly sure that not all of these steps were necessary, but I’ll list everything I did just in case.

1- First, I should mention that I’ve had UAC turned off for a long time now. I never had any trouble with malware in XP, and the UAC was actually preventing me from running a lot of my software, besides being very annoying. According to this page, it’s important that if you turn UAC off, you do it before installing the game. If you’re installing the game, you might also find this tweak guide useful.

2- After installing, I downloaded and ran the Thief Deadly Shadows v1.1 patch.

3- I don’t think that this is any part of the fix, but I downloaded and installed John P.’s Thief Deadly Shadows texture pack.

4- I downloaded and implemented the no CD patch. I don’t feel guilty about it, since I legally purchased the game and I’m just trying to get it to work.

5- I right-clicked t3.exe, visited the compatibility tab, and set it to XP(SP2) compatibility mode. This was actually one of the first things I tried, but by itself it didn’t fix my problem. In the end, this step didn’t even matter for me, since I used the no cd exe rather than this one, and I haven’t set any compatibility on the no-cd exe.

6- Here’s one I put off until the end because I was hoping not to have to do it. I disabled DEP. Following the instructions in this forum thread, I went to a command prompt, typed bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff, and rebooted.

7- Lastly, when I actually run the game, I right click the no cd exe and pick “run as administrator”. Yeah, it’s a pain to do it this way, but the game runs. I should re-emphasize that I don’t have compatibility set for this exe, not that I’m sure whether that matters.

Here’s the other quirky thing. During every loading screen, this error pops up.

Every time a loading screen pops up, the machine goes back to the desktop and I see the error again. When this happens, don’t go within five feet of the mouse or keyboard. Just step away. The game will continue. The one time I clicked OK on the message, the game crashed. If you don’t touch anything, the game should continue normally.

Hopefully, this article helps someone else get the game running on Vista. It’s a heck of a pain, but Thief: Deadly Shadows is a great game, so it’s worth it.