Did I just finish the final Thief game?

I just beat Thief 3 (aka Deadly Shadows) and it was great. I did play it in fits and starts over the last, oh, year, but whenever I'd sit down to seriously play it I was sucked in. Just like the previous Thief games, this one oozes atmosphere in a way that other games wish they could. Not only that, it essentially ties the three games in the series to a nice conclusion and sets up a new chapter for a new thief, should they decide to make any more.

Sadly, Ion Storm is out of business, Looking Glass Studios is out of business and I highly doubt that Eidos will bother letting the remnants of either studio make another Thief game anytime soon, given that this one didn't sell that well. Sigh.

I did have some problems with the game, but they were almost all either technical issues or just annoyances with the game due to the changes from the previous two. Technically, the game looked rather mediocre until I put the miscellaneous fan-made hi-rez skins on it. Then it looked great. The other problem is that they used the Deus Ex 2 engine which has got to be the worst game engine ever designed in recent memory. When I can run Half Life 2 on my machine with nary a hiccup, yet this much darker, much less impressive (graphically) game causes my computer to chug, well, that's some sloppy coding. It's not as bad as Deus Ex 2, so the fact it ran on my machine was nice.

I also had issue with a lot of the changes they did due to the game being designed with the Xbox in mind. The load times were horrendous and that wouldn't have been a problem except that there were some instances where I was wandering from section to section in the hub level of The City and having to load each section as I went back and forth. THAT got really annoying. And when I say long load times, I mean load times of almost a minute, and that's the quick load!

That said, the quibbles I had with the game were more than handily overcome by the sheer quality of the story, the atmosphere and the fun of blackjacking many an unsuspecting guard in the back of the head while robbing places blind and triggering the end of the world in the process. That, and the game is downright creepy. Shalebridge Cradle is probably one of the scariest levels I've ever played, and that's saying something.

Anyway, I'm glad to get it out of the way and now I have 2.5 extra gigs of space on my harddrive! Woo!