GregHowley.com

I am a huge fan of stealth games. When I first played Tenchu: Stealth Assassins on the Playstation 1, I quickly grew to love it. There was something about hiding in a dark corner and watching the guards - the fear of being spotted, along with the thrill of remaining unseen - I just love it. Years later, I would try a game called Beyond Good and Evil which would become my new benchmark for good stealth gameplay. Chronicles of Riddick wasn't bad. I wasn't as impressed as I'd hoped to be with Metal Gear Solid 2 or Splinter Cell, and I'm not even including games such as Oblivion and Far Cry in the stealth category, although there are elements of stealth in both of those games. That said, the Thief series is now entering my list of all-time favorite stealth games.

My friend Rich told me about a game named Thief years ago when the first one came out. I never tried it, and I never tried Thief 2: Metal Age. I'm a bit afraid to try either now because I can only imagine that the graphics and mechanics must be a bit dated by today's standards.

The basic premise of the game is that you are Garret - a master thief. In one of the early missions, your objectives are to break into a castle, find out how to open the vault, and steal the Bloodline Opal. In addition, you'll also have to steal a certain amount, which varies depending on the difficulty level you've chosen. For example, on Hard, you have to steal 60% of the loot, plus two special loot items, such as a valuable portrait or family medallion. As the game goes on, a plot develops, and your mission objectives change to information-gathering, although the requirement to steal a certain amount of loot always remains.

Aside from the standard stealth fare, such as flattening yourself against a wall, crawling through ducts, and climbing walls, Thief has a number of other elements that make it stand out. You have two different speeds of slow movement, one which is quiet and one which is totally silent. But moving that slowly isn't always practical. For example, if you're trying to sneak up behind a guard who's walking his beat, you'll probably need to run to catch up with him. You can only hope that he's walking on dirt, and not stone or metal flooring, which are much louder. If the guard hears you behind him, he will turn and look.

But there's plenty of gear you can buy to help you. Moss arrows will make that loud metal floor as silent as beach sand, and water arrows will put out torches from a distance. Flash bombs will temporarily blind your enemy so you can make a quick escape, and gas bombs can knock out more than one enemy if they're close enough together. If you're really feeling clever, you can throw down an oil flask or explosive mine and get a foe to chase you over it. Getting a guard to slip on an oil slick and go over a cliff is a lot of fun.

But even with all this gear, the simple blackjack is what I used most to take out guards. If you backstab with your dagger or shoot with an arrow, the victim will scream and draw other guards. And even if you manage to drag the body away before anyone comes, there's still a puddle of blood left behind. And if anyone sees the blood, they'll get suspicious and start looking around. A water arrow will clean up the blood, but why go to all that effort when you can just blackjack the guard?

I really liked the way the game implemented lockpicking. I'd thought that Oblivion's lockpicking system was good, but Thief's is even better, albeit a bit easier. You rotate the pick through a half-sphere area, looking for the sweet spot. When the tumbler begins to move, you slowly move the pick around, and when Garret's hand moves into position, you click the button to lock that tumbler into place. Certain locks are harder due to more tumblers or smaller sweet spots, but none of them are as difficult as the toughest locks in Oblivion.

I have very little to complain about in this game, and I'll leave out any complaints having to do with the fact that the game is now 2 years old. (amazing that two years could make any noticable difference) First, the background noise of certain areas - a howling or humming - often got so loud that I couldn't hear anything else. Similarly, Garret often makes comments to himself for the player's benefit, and sometimes he would do so while someone else nearby was talking. When that happened, I couldn't hear what either was saying, and often, both conversations were important. I also found it very difficult at first to judge my distance from someone as I snuck up to club them in the back of the head. I would either swing and miss multiple times (which actually looked pretty funny) or else bump into them from behind before I could swing. At that point, of course, I'd have to turn and run.

But don't think that the game is too buggy or too old to play. On the contrary, I love it. I'm currently on the second-to-last mission, in a haunted old insane asylum, and I'm amazed to say that this haunted house is even better than the haunted house in Vampire: Bloodlines. I get a kind of Thirteen Ghosts vibe from it, minus the glass walls. It's one of the only times a video game has ever actually scared me, and I love it. I won't give anything away by saying more, but if you think you might like this game, pick it up on EBay like I did. You can probably get it for about $10. It's more than worth it.