GTBuzz on 15/7/2006 at 20:51

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Thief 1/G, I liked the atmosphere of it better.

ManzoK on 17/7/2006 at 03:18

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With no doubt: Thief The dark project.
I just fell into its mood

Eye on 18/7/2006 at 01:44

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obviously, i loved TDP (The Sword, Return to the Cathedral, Bafford) but i have to vote for TMA, for two reasons.

First is that one of my problems with games in general is the constant reuse of the same handful of environments, and while TDP isn't purely midevil, it was fairly close and i loved the headlong dive TMA took into an aesthetically unique world of midevil, victorian, art deco, steampunk elements. that really helped it stand apart.

Second is the larger levels. TDP surely isn't as linear as a lot of other games, but TMA took the idea of open ended level design a lot further. i've told my non-thief playing friends that most games are like getting on an amusement park ride or a haunted house. you go in the front, run a gauntlet of stuff that will come at you only because you're there, and you come out the back at the end, just like the guy before you and the guy after you. thief is like me dropping you off at an abandoned high school building at two in the morning with a map and saying, "there are four ways to get in, 20 people guarding the place and i need these five items. see you tomorrow."

p.s. one thing about TMA that was a definite step back was the mechanists. i like how they advanced on the idea beyond the hammers, but they just weren't as threatening. i did like the robots a lot, as well as the mask-wearing slaves.

Scholar on 25/7/2006 at 00:22

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I thought Casing the Joint/Masks held an innovative idea and I liked the mansion as a whole, I think it may have improved implimentation to have seperated the two levels a bit and maybe to have thrown in some more complications in Masks, nontheless I enjoyed both a great deal more then Escape or Strange Bedfellows, in which you are revisting previous levels, albeit much more altered in charecter then Gervasius' mansion is on the different nights. I cast my vote for TMA by a small margin. But to each his own.

Eye on 25/7/2006 at 06:17

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i've always assumed i'm alone on this one, but i really liked what looking glass did with casing/masks. here's why: as i finished "casing the joint" i was just starting to understand the layout and how to use the secret passage ways and hallway rafters to get around, and i was literally on my way down the stairs and out the door to finish the level that i thought to myself, "damn, that sucks, i was just getting the hang of this place." the level ended, i chose my weapons and saw the next mission and thought, "my god these guys read my mind."

now, maybe i'm an idiot and maybe i'm the only player this worked on but it was a pretty amazing moment as a player and i'm pretty certain that's what they were going for. reuse of space and cramming "a quart of gameplay into a pint of space" was a stated goal of the developers and i really thought they achieved it there.

at some point in "masks" i recalled at one point reading complaints about the reusing a level in a cheap way, but i couldn't disagree more. again, maybe it was just me (hell, it seems like it actually was just me).