I just wanted to make this joke before anyone else did.  In other, less hilarious news, your original PS3s asplode…

Man up Matthew, don’t let the readers see you cry …

True to my word, I went out trawling today after work to find myself some Thief.  It didn’t actually prove as difficult as I perhaps thought it would have been.  The very first store I wandered into had a double-DVD pack of both Thief 2 and Deadly Shadows. And sure enough, it’s only $20AU.

“Splendid!” I think, “A pity they don’t have Thief: Gold, but this will suit me admirably” (apparently I’m more verbose in my thoughts than I am in real life)

So I get home, slide the laptop out and get to installing Thief 2 (I played Deadly Shadows a while back, so I thought I’d begin with 2).  Installation’s fine, up and running in no time.  Let’s start …

… Huh, that’s odd, where was the intro video? Strange.  Oh well, the menu is up, I’ll start the game …

… OK, now the mission brief doesn’t play and I’m skipped right to the start of the mission.  Something must be wrong with the FMV. Oh well, I’ll fix it later, for now let’s go for a …

… System freeze, eh?

And thus it goes.  Perhaps I should have done a little internet trawling before game trawling, because as I now find out, getting Thief 1 or 2 to work on a modern computer is a challenge.  A challenge requiring the patience of a stone and the luck of the devil.

After repeated re-installations, patches, 3rd party patches, driver upgrades, driver downgrades, several very nice similarly minded FAQs and a compatibility test, I’m now fairly certain that I’m doomed not to play Thief 2.  At least, not on this computer, or not without some basic HEX editing.  The best setup I could arrive at so far was a working game, no FMV, and undithered textures.  Which means that even if I run that set-up, all the textures are going to look 8-bit and gamma adjustment isn’t going to help the shadows.  The shadows being, you know, where you’re supposed to spend the whole game.

Still, it shows the dedication of the fans of these games that there is such an abundance of FAQ material out there, suggesting fixes and even making their own patches.  There was even a patch to make Thief 2 widescreen, which looked like an impressive endeavour.

Oh well, Deadly Shadows does work on a modern system, but it irks me to think that I now own one of the original games and I can’t play it because my workstation laptop is too advanced! *sigh*