I didn't expect to play Deadly Shadows, but I also didn't expect to play hours of Thief mods and fan missions, so here we are. I want to start, for clarity, by saying I really like this game. I really enjoyed playing it. I liked the tone of this game, which rests somewhere between Thief 1 and 2. I liked the ideas to mix up the formula that went into this game.

So with that all abundantly clear, let me also say that Thief: Deadly Shadows is such a piece of shit. It's a huge piece of shit...

I was ready to be done, or maybe jump to the divisive Thief 3, but the more I played, the more people tried to tempt me to try stuff in the FM or 'Fan mission' community. Thief has a series falls in the same place as Doom, with a little bit of Bethesda Game energy. These are games that are kept alive by their communities. The history of these games is inseparable from the history of the people who keep them alive, not only with new content, but even working at all. Like Doom, the Thief...

At the end of my Perfect Dark revisit, I mused about the difference between US/European and Japanese game design in regards to realism in the 80s and 90s. To summarize, the trend I noticed is that Western games often tried to simulate reality. Fall damage, ledge grabbing, a particular fondness for momentum, and the much hated limited ammo. Strategy games tend to be military tactics simulators. You see the stealth game born in the wonderfully archaic Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple II...

I love hating on Rare. I love hating on pre-2000s UK games. I love hating on basically every euro-whatever genre you can think of. Half of this is joking. It was a very different gaming culture over there, with different social pressures(Though can we trust the social pressures that makes Dizzy the Egg make sense?) due to a focus on cheap PC gaming. Half of this isn't even fair(I'll take an c64 or amiga euro-platformer over any DOS platformer, even Dizzy the Egg, don't @ me)!

... But...

I've been a pretty consistent fan of Bennett Foddy's work. I love Getting Over It to the point where I got a Gold Pot by accident, just by casually playing over and over again. I've even had the pleasure to hang out with Foddy, giving a talk with him on troll games in a time so long ago it feels like The Old Internet(It was called fucking ROFLCON). There, also I had the pleasure of also meeting and talking games with Maxi Boch, one of the other co-creators of Baby Steps. Some of the conve...