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Whoa... waaaaaaay too much info for me, it just flew right over my head. But thanks dude, if I have any time, I can read thru all of that.
BJ

This game is my next purchase - hope it's on GOG.

On Steam, it suffers from a lot of serious issues. If you don't patch it with community patches, many of you won't even be able to run it on modern PCs - you'll get a black screen. And all those with more than 2GB of memory will notice the textures look terrible. That's because the game can only detect that much and will think you have a negative number of memory, lowering the texture quality to compensate. Patches solve both but I expect GOG to have this sorted out for us instead of Steam expecting us to do it by ourselves (zero support for this game) so if GOG will host the game, they may need some time to find the right patch to apply and to make sure it all works properly.

That sounds like the steam version is worse than the original retail game, I never had those memory problems on my old pc (which had 4gb). Trust me, I examined VV's textures VERY closely and would have noticed...

Are you using a community patch? Because most of these patches have the fixes embedded these days. The retail version has the same problems I believe:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1067555
This topic is one of many that talk about the issue. Thank god the community is still active to give us such patches!

I'd rebuy it in a second. My copy is a German version (In english thankfully) that says it's uncut, but knowing how the USK is, I don't believe EVERYTHING is uncut in the game as advertised.
Also, I'd rebuy it since when it first came out, I had just moved in with my wife and we were flat broke. Sadly, I pirated a copy of the game, and I've never felt so bad as when the character at the pier said "The only important thing is if you bought it", and then seeing Troika go under.
I'd pay for the game 5 times over (already done it twice, so GOG would be a third) to redeem myself for it.

No I wasn't, at least not at the start, would have been retail with the 1.2 patch

I think they would forgive you after that. :)

You troika murderer!
I'd certainly rebuy it if it came with the soundtrack

I think it's safe to say that Valve murdered Troika. Releasing the game AFTER HL2 doomed it.

It sure as hell didn't help, no

The quick answer is 'no'. However, when I played through the game with the latest community patch about 6 months ago, I didn't CTD or freeze up once. The memory leak wasn't that bad either (I have 2GB RAM on an XP box, fyi), as long as I rebooted the game every 3 to 5 hours (it actually forced me to take breaks).
I played with the 'vanilla' community patch; the one without many of the game-changing modifications. I still had the too-powerful stealth of the original game, but I didn't notice any trouble at the Temple.
Well the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80%93_Bloodlines]wiki page for VTMB[/url] has the song list of the soundtrack (I know you, and most people can find a wiki page, just linking it to make things easier). I am sure you can get most, if not all, of those tracks off iTunes for $1 per song. I know I saw "Swamped" and "Bloodlines" there while looking for other songs from Lacuna Coil and Ministry, respectively.

There's a funny story to this but, ironically, you're kinda right. One of the Troika staff members once told a little story about it. It's been 5 years but this is more or less what happened:
As you may know, Half Life 2 is built using the Source engine which, while being a new engine, is heavily influenced by the Quake engines of old. Before the engine was ready, Valve were already licensing it to other companies to help fund Half Life 2 which was still in production back then (in 2002-2003) - Valve wasn't the power house it is now - they had to develop Steam, bought the rights to Counter Strike, etc. which was all very costly. Troika was one of the (unfortunate) licensees and used it, as you know, for Vampire Bloodlines. Everything still sounds normal so far, right?
Well, things didn't quite go as planned. You see, Troika was set under contract to release their game at a certain date, however, Valve weren't so keen on meeting their own deadline and just wanted their game to be great, a luxury Troika didn't have. With the engine taking a lot longer to complete, and Valve releasing patches and updates for it sporadically, Troika were in a bind. They couldn't wait for the engine to be complete, so they had to make do with what they had, which was a beta version of the engine at best, where they constantly had to adapt their own code to fit the new updates.
Valve had all the cards in their hands, of course, and kept delaying Half Life 2. Now, from what I understood, Troika were not even allowed to release Vampire Bloodlines until Half Life 2 was completed. Not as if that would have mattered since VTMB was being pushed back due to the unfinished engine anyway. Whenever Valve would release patches, Troika had to incorporate them (without them, the engine was very unoptimised, buggy, crash-prone so they had no choice) and then test everything again to make sure nothing was broken (people who have worked with the SDK from the Source engine know how great Valve are at breaking stuff).
Long story short: Troika got screwed by Valve. They had to put too much energy into testing the engine updates and the delay of HL2 didn't help. When HL2 was finally released and the engine was done, Troika had no time left to do much testing of their own because the publisher wanted an immediate release. Their build of the engine was a lot less efficient than that of Valve because of the circumstances - some parts they had to alter to fit their game BEFORE they got the optimised code. That's why there's such great performance differences between HL2 and Bloodlines - even in small areas. If Valve had released HL2 when they said they would, Troika would have had a lot more time to add spit & polish not to mention the benefit of working with a finished engine for a lot longer instead of having to do make do with what they had.
It's a very sad story and the moral of the story is: don't license and engine if it's not done. Especially not from a company who doesn't believe in deadlines. I heard somewhere else that Troika would have sued Valve if they hadn't gone out of business as a result of this farce.

Why did they go with it in the first place? Seems like a common sense thing to not do...