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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Blurred lines in Times' Amazon story   T A B L E__T A L K Having trouble getting the mail-in rebate for your new computer? Vent and offer suggestions in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Video killed the Microsoft star: The company's tape demonstrated its own ruthlessness (02/09/98) Lawyers, guns, money? By Janelle Brown Pundits and insiders reveal their personal preparations for the Y2K disaster (02/08/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Why is it so hard to find a valid yardstick for measuring Web traffic? (02/05/98) Night of the living day traders By Dana Blankenhorn Meet the new breed of Net-obsessed, short-term stock traders (02/04/98) Aliens blew up my garbage dump! By Andrew Leonard SimCity is back -- and managing municipal utilities has never been so much fun (02/03/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

___to catch a thief IN THIS NEW 3-D GAME, THE EMPHASIS IS ON STEALTH INSTEAD OF SHOOTING. BY WAGNER JAMES AU | I am standing in the shadows of a palace hall, one nudge away from being killed. Two sentries make their rounds in the four-cornered hallway before me. If I retreat through the door I came in, its creaky hinges will send them in my direction, swords drawn. If I back-stab a guard as he passes, the scream will likely alert his comrade, who'll shout for reinforcements before finishing me off himself. And that's assuming I can even get close enough to strike at all. But to do that, I'll have to walk on the thick rugs laid along the marble floor -- a single loud misstep onto the polished tile would be the last sound I make. So I remain still, weighing every alternative, before settling on an even more desperate option: I unsheathe my blackjack and wait for the three-second window during which the first guard is passing while the other sentry has ambled around a noise-shrouding corner. I run along the rug, right to its edge, then leap out toward the guard and, when I'm hovering just above him, lash out. The blackjack thuds the back of his head; he grunts, crumbles. Meanwhile, I'm still airborne, arcing down toward the noisy tile. But when my feet hit ground, they land on the edge of a nearby rug, muffling the impact. Behind, the guard pitches forward, unconscious -- and, miraculously, silent -- onto the carpet with me. After the flurry, I'm momentarily stunned that I've actually succeeded. But the remaining sentry is about to clomp around the corner, so I lift his brained colleague, grunt and move a few steps into adjacent shadow. A moment later, the guard passes, so close I can see his beard stubble. For a heart-throttling moment he turns, and it seems like our eyes meet. But no: He sees nothing, moves on. The suspense is exquisite, subtle and near unbearable. It's not an emotion I'm familiar with from other first-person shooters I've played -- the computer game genre to which this new game I'm playing, Thief: The Dark Project, putatively belongs. While it shares the elaborate 3-D environments of Doom and its many successors, Thief offers none of their unrelenting mayhem and firepower. (Indeed, Looking Glass Studios describes the game as a "first-person sneaker.") Since you're playing a master cat burglar pilfering the homes of corrupt overlords, the emphasis instead is on stealthy evasion. On that score, the game succeeds magnificently, creating a fantastic, medieval ur-city, looming with the vast edifices of the rich and powerful -- which your thief, Garrett, plunders with amoral ease. He's assisted by a clever assortment of rogue's tools, including a bow capable of shooting uniquely crafted arrows: water arrows, for example, to extinguish torches, and rope arrows for climbing to upper windows and balconies. The resulting experience entirely reworks your expectations for a first-person game, teaching you to prefer caution, observation and premeditated bursts of action over the usual lumbering ultraviolence. While other recent 3-D shooters have offered impressive innovations -- Unreal, say, with its visual design and animation, and Half-Life, with its artificial intelligence and narrative structure -- it's Thief that revolutionizes the form. (Which is not to say that it's consistently groundbreaking in execution: As if momentarily losing confidence in their premise, the designers include several grave-robbing excursions that veer way too close to Tomb Raider territory for my taste.) N E X T_ P A G E .|. A dark new twist on the old concept of virtual reality