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’d keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

This week, I’ll be discussing Thief: Deadly Shadows. As you can see from my shelf in the photo above, it’s the game on the far left of the shelf, beneath the girl scout cookies. It’s also a game that I’m currently replaying, so now seemed as good a time as any to talk about it.

I got Thief Deadly Shadows to run in Windows Vista, which was a bit of a pain, and then I managed to set it up so that I could use my mouse 4 + 5 buttons and my mouse’s tilt wheel. Since then, I’ve been enjoying the game quite a bit, playing it slowly, and savoring it.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is in my top 5 favorite stealth games, and stealth games are one of my favorite game genres. But for some reason, I couldn’t get into the first two titles in the Thief series. They’re hard to see, but they’re on my shelf in the above photo beneath “Ghost Master” and above “Crysis”. I got a special 2-disc set for cheap.

Maybe it was because of the difficulty, maybe because of the poor graphics, and maybe because the first level in Thief: The Dark Project had a layout that was more labyrinthine than nearly any other game I’ve played. I don’t know. But I just couldn’t get very far into the game’s second level before I gave up.

But I’ll heartily recommend Deadly Shadows to anyone willing to give a go to a five-year-old windows stealth game that you can probably pick up on the cheap. With some tweaking it runs in Vista, and it’s hella fun to walk up behind a guard, club him in the head, and dump his body in the harbor.