Nah that's part of it. If I am doing something safe and careful I save often or make sure I saved recently. If I am doing something stupid I usually say to myself I probably saved recently only to discover I haven't saved last hour of intense playing at all. :-P

Edit: I also tend not to save in First Person Games and Third Person Games and rely onto autosaves.

Get Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Of course this is coming from a gamer who more often than not gets simulator/motion sickness playing first-person perspective games and who completed the Thief: Deadly Shadows strictly in third-person perspective mode, so yeah this is a highly biased opinion :-P

EDIT: Ouch, I misunderstood you. I thought you asked to compare the games. I see that you already got both.

Thief (1 and 2) are great because it came from Looking Glass Studios. The level design encouraged exploration with many different paths to do things. The gameplay is very engaging and tense on the higher difficulties because you go down easy. The main reason I like these games is because they don't have the omnipotent AI most stealth games do and react realistically. Wrap all of that together in an amazing story + unique world and you have Thief.

3 (Deadly Shadows) is basically the same thing but leaves a lot to be desired mostly for the level design. I would play them in order if you want to really experience why most people like it. Also you owe it to yourself to get the Looking Glass Studio catalog if you like Deus Ex because a lot of those games influenced it.

They are such different games that Its not really possible to suggest what one you would like better. I prefer the Thief games myself. Like everyone says, start with the first. You'll be fine playing DS before the others, but there are things about it that are so much cooler if you have played the games in order. DS is a really good game though. Its only problem is that it used the Deus Ex 2 engine. It was a very pretty engine at the time, but it has a major limitation. It can only load really tiny levels. It wasn't that big of a deal for Invisible war, but it hurt Thief.

I enjoyed Deus Ex more simply because it is easier and more flexible. Thief games are really unforgiving and are very scary, far more than most survival horror games. I mean, being a weak thief trying to hide away from the freakish looking guards (with the bad graphics of Thief 1 at least...) is scary as hell. Also, Thief games seem to have less choice than the Deus Ex games. I'm not sure if anything but hiding is viable in most levels and I think I got to a level in thief 1 or 2 where fighting was mandatory with the undead. Just seems that Deus Ex has more choice in general in the levels while Thief is much better as a stealth game for hardcore gamers.

I think, whether one likes Thief or Deus Ex more depends on ones skill and interest. I personally never got past the first few levels in Thief 1 or 2 yet I recognize they are great games at doing what they do but they aren't my thing. Yet I beat both Deus Ex games multiple times (yes even Invisible War which I find great actually but I'm weird about that..... Universal ammo, smaller levels, and the other things change didn't bother me. I still felt Invisible War was still better than the majority of the first person games that were ever made. What is interesting is looking at professional reviews, it seems Invisible War got pretty high scores, it just wasn't what the typical Deus Ex fan was expecting I think)

Deadly Shadows is a decent game in its own right, but it has nothing on the first two Thief games. I enjoyed it a lot though. If I were to assign it a numerical score, it would be 85/100.

Anyway back to your question, it really depends on how tolerant you are towards a very outdated engine. Casting aside nostalgia, after having played The Dark Mod (the real Thief 4), certain features such as mantling and swimming really start to show signs of the engine's aging. It's still a brilliantly designed game, but if you're used to stuff like HDR, high-poly models and smooth animations, it will take some getting used to. I remember ghosting through the first few levels of Thief II, and then gave up after the part where Garrett got arrested. Or somewhere around there. Ghosting is a lot of fun, but it requires mucho momento.

Sex or chocolate ice cream?

That reminds me how people who have never heard of Deus Ex always think Im saying "Day of Sex".

Thief 1 and 2 are waaay better games than deadly shadows. But DS is still very good.

Deus ex: invisible war is crappy for me.

Invisible War is not a bad game, but "not bad" is far away from the qualities of something like Deus Ex 1.

Uhh...aren't they not mutually exclusive of each other? *wink wink*

No they are not. You can have sex with chocolate ice cream. :-P

Eww.... to each his own.

I am quite happy to keep the pleasure of food and the pleasures of a woman's body separate in my brain and frankly, the less my food touches the human body, the happier I am.

As an avid fan of Thief, I would normally have said that Thief I and II are slightly better games. However, I'm currently replaying Deus Ex and it clearly provides more scope for different play styles than pure stealth. Thief is hardcore in that regard, Dark Project and Metal Age more so than Deadly Shadows. On the highest difficulty, no killing is allowed. In Thief, you can choose multiple ways of finishing a mission, but pretty much all rely on stealth. Deus Ex lets you play it as a standard FPS walking-tank if you want to (although you miss loads if you do). Thief has an awesome story-arc though, with some fantastic level design.

Thief requires a LOT of tender love and care to get working on modern hardware though. But it's worth it. If you want help setting it up, let me know, I have experience with helping others at TTLG with installing it :)

Some fun things for you all - you can do all of Deus Ex with no killing:
http://www.youtube.com/user/shido534#p/c/8B3C5852853469DF
(although he seems happy to blow up robots). Also, here's Azal's guide to ceollecting silly things in Thief:
http://www.greywool.com/azal/
I'm not quite that patient - the average mission time is already about 1hr just to finish all the objectives.

Edit - Just to say, both Deus Ex and Thief I & II are top-100 PC games of all time, and can be obtained really cheaply - just get them :)

Conclusion: I need to get THief 1 and 2 right now! you said it was hard getting to work on a modern computer, just HOW hard is it? im not that much of a technical geek... still i managed to get the steamversion of DS working and THAT was quite tricky! DEP (Data Execution Prevention) exceptions and everything. Still, i would be glad to get some advices for how to get THief 1 and 2 working on windows 7:)