40-Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Arkane Studios, Windows, 2008)

Dark Messiah was panned in reviews because the plot was lame and predictable, and because the voice acting was sub-par. I won’t disagree with these assessments. But even so, there’s a lot to like about the game. The set pieces were easily as impressive as those in Oblivion and Half-Life 2. It was spectacular to watch from a first-person perspective as a twelve foot tall cyclops smashed a city gate to splinters and charged in, raking aside the city’s defenders and wreaking havoc.

The game also boasts a better first person melee system than Oblivion and a very good classless skill tree. The stealth gameplay was well done (and optional) and the game encourages you to make use of the environment during battles by placing a lot of destructible and throwable objects. Plus, defenestrating orcs is just plain fun.

39-Point Blank (Namco, Arcade, 1994)

It’s somewhat surprising that there’s been no Wii version of Point Blank given the cartoony light gun goodness that the game represents. My favorite aspect of the game was its variety. In some levels, you’d be shooting paper cutout ninjas, in others you’d be firing at targets which you had to hit in order one through twelve in under five seconds, and in other screens you might be protecting Dr. Dan and Dr. Don from oncoming tanks or an erupting volcano or invading aliens. Before the Wii, Point Blank was fun for very much the same reasons that the Wii later gained popularity. I still have my Playstation copy of Point Blank, and I still have my light guns. I’ll tell you – those old style light guns work way better than the Wii remotes for shooting accurately. Writing about it now makes me want to pull them back out.

38-Mariokart Wii (Nintendo, Nintendo Wii, 2008)
My introduction to the MarioKart series came very late: the first Mariokart game I ever played was MarioKart DS. But although I did play that game multiplayer with friends who were across the country, it wasn’t until I played Kart on the Wii with my wife that I really grew to love it. People may speak fondly of Mariokart 64, but I think that’s largely because it was their first exposure to the kart racing genre. For me, it’s all about Mariokart Wii.

37-Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (Hothead Games, Windows, 2008)

I’m lumping the first and second title in the series together here since they were moreso “part 1” and “part 2” than they were separate games. I’m a big fan of Penny Arcade’s sense of humor – I’ve been following Penny-Arcade.com for many years, and seen them rise from a simple webcomic to a gaming empire.

Their game is an over-the-top RPG where your three characters are battling robots, hobos, mimes, and barbershop quartets with fists and garden implements. A lot of the humor is very R-rated, but it’s truly hilarious.

36-Thief: Deadly Shadows (Ion Storm, Windows, 2004)

I’ve gotten a lot of flak for liking this game better than the original Thief game, but I think my preference is based largely on the fact that it’s difficult for me to go back to such an old game if I’ve not played it before. Nostalgia’s glasses do much to mute the imperfections of a game’s old age. After six years, even Deadly Shadows is now showing its age – the platforming is difficult to stomach, you can get stuck on the environment, and compatibility with newer operating systems is iffy at best. But control tweaks and texture packs help, and levels like Shalebridge Cradle make the game worth playing despite its flaws.

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

How much better would this be were there an achievement (or bronze trophy) for each level if you got 90% of the loot, and a different achievement (silver trophy) for getting 100% of the loot? Now, not only is the achievement tiered, it also doesn’t prevent you from completing the level should you end up short at the level’s end.

Creating achievements for a thief game would be amazingly easy. Complete the game without harming any noncombatants. Complete a level without being detected. Shoot moss arrows into every pagan cornerstone. Steal 50,000 gold coins worth of loot. Complete every mission on expert difficulty (I’d be getting that one. Guess I don’t suck quite so badly at games as I’d thought) Although the game was released before the existance of achievements, it seems to be designed with them in mind. I guess achievements are here to stay.

Similarly, I’m playing an import version of Prototype that’s unable to log into GFW Live. Normally, this game does have achievements, but I can’t get at them. Since there’s no way I’ll be manually keeping track of how many infected I kill or how many vehicles I destroy, I can just forget about achievements entirely. I’ll still enjoy trying to get gold on every challenge, but there’ll be no record. It’s really odd that such a thing should even matter to me.

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.

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.