I'm replaying the Thief series, and have just finished The Metal Age (Thief 2). It's been over a decade (lent out my discs and never got them back), and here's what I have to report:
Love: -I'd forgotten how absolutely enormous these levels could be. The great, sprawling expanses give numerous paths to explore and get lost in. They weren't especially impressive visually, even at the time, but they get the job done (with one exception, see below). By now I've played through Deus Ex and Half-Life and System Shock so many times I have them all but memorized; this look back at their contemporaries demonstrates that it wasn't just these games, but trends of the time, that gave rise to excellence.
-The sound. After desperately racing to pick a lock before a group of zombies caught up with me, listening to their moaning grow ever louder and feeling my heart race, I spent the entire next day whipping my head around whenever I heard something behind me, always expecting to see an angry undead monster taking a swing.
Hate: -The technical limitations. This was a product of its time, no question; we could definitely do better now. Do note that I said could, not would- looking at you here, Square- but in the few cases where graphics were a problem, they could often be a big one. It's not hard to make wood, brick, stone, and metal visually distinct, even as a floor texture, but carpeting and tile are different stories, not helped along by the fact that both can come in a wide variety of colors and patterns. Numerous times in the past several days, I'd eagerly raise my blackjack and charge forward onto a lush carpet that turned out to made of linoleum (whoops) or discover only too late I'd spent multiple moss arrows making an already-quiet carpet into a near-silent bed of moss unnecessarily. This could easily be handled by modern artists, but Square decided they'd rather just not bother ::glares at Square again::. Also, Deadly Shadows is up next, and even though I haven't even started it, I'm already dreading the concede-to-inferior-hardware mid-level loading zones that annoyed me so much on my first playthrough. I'll probably be back to report on that later, if this thread's still going.
-I don't know what happened in between the two games, but some of the voice talent they hired... Ugh. It was bad. And I don't mean Zenimax-style mediocre, I mean "grade school drama club" bad. It's only a couple of roles, but in a way that makes it worse; being alongside its well-delivered counterparts makes it all the more jarring. I could probably look up who these people were, but I suspect they probably did multiple voices, and some just turned out badly.