I never saw the fascination with Deux Ex or Half Life. On both, I got partway in and fell asleep. I must be missing a requisite gene or something. To me, a good thinking shooter is one like Unreal Tournament or Tribes where the combat is complex but the maps are simple. DE and HL reversed that, with simple combat and complex mazes full of puzzles.

Thief was awesome, while Thief 2 was merely good. Gothic and Gothic 2 were the same way. Developer seldom manage to capture the mystery in a sequel. There's no way Thief 3 can live up to our hopes, but I'll buy it anyway.

Consoles are indeed dumbing down the gaming market while holding down the hardware. My rig is getting really old (1.4ghz, GEForce 3), but the PC games aren't outstripping it like they should. I pine for the days of DOS, when you couldn't even get a game to run unless you knew the difference between extended and expanded memory. Sigh.