Alpha Protocol

i dont give a shit if you are a 5 man team or a 100 man team.

if you are going to use real-time 1 or 2 person perspective, you make damn sure every time i walk/run i do not think the character needs to take a shit. or reminds me of a "special needs" person.

it is inexcuseable to make grand plans/ideas and then to implement them like absolute shit.
 
Just finished a mission where a hacked automated turret succeeded in constantly shooting holes in the ceiling, but utterly failing to shoot any of the triad faggots standing right in front of it.

Yeah, this game's AI rocks!



PS: One of my hard drives appears to be dying and is causing some I/O mayhem. Might explain the choppyness, but I'm not convinced yet.
 
Ok, so how did the game end for you guys? Here's how it ended for me....

[spoiler:4e31b6fcf1]My character unfortunately let Albatross die from being tortured earlier in Moscow, so G-22 wasn't available for help. My character romanced Scarlet Lake and Madison St. James. I let Madison die in Rome though.

Ok, this is what happened.



Thorton went to Scarlet's apartment to give her the evidence and then he spent the night there. Afterward, he turned himself in. Heck was chosen to be the handler. So, after being busted out,I conviced that old computer guy that Alpha Protocol was a failure and that it would cause WW3. I ran over and freed Scarlet. She confessed being the assasin.

Thorton forgave her and asked her to be the new handler. This was very handy. I forgot about Mina and she got shot by the bad guys.

Then, the old man got attacked. Scarlet helped me take on his attackers and he gave me important data.

Then, I killed Darcy. Afterward, with Scarlet's excellent sniping skills, I made my way to Leeland. I beat him, and then put a bullet in that jerk's head.

Afterward, Thorton made his way to the boat where Scarlet was waiting. The two made some suggestive remarks and then sailed out to the sunset.

Afterward, I learned that the press got all the data. Halbech was ruined. Westridge managed to escape. I don't know what happened to Heck though. Thorton still had the full resources of Alpha Protocol at his hand making him formidible..

All in all, pretty good ending :D[/spoiler:4e31b6fcf1]
 
Haven't got the time to play this until today, and just wanted to comment on Brayko fight.. I dreaded this based on comments I've read here and on Codex, but it turned to be easy to me. I had Heck deliver spiked cocaine to Brayko's mansion for abour 7k. So, the fight starts, I'm hiding behind the cover, I align the critical hit to his head with pistol never leaving the cover and take out his endurance, I do a chain shot to the head taking out about half his health, then I run around for a bit. His henchmen come, I go Shadow Operator on their asses, and after a little time and one more critical headshot Brayko just starts losing his health by himself and I win. It actually turned out to be the least annoying boss fight so far for me.
I like choices and consequences in this game.
 
So finished it. The ending is kinda meh, but the game doesn't feel too bad... Most annoying to me remains the controls (fine aiming, mini games obviously made for an xbrick controller,...) and some random bugs.

Like loading a game and half the chars just don't load. Or loading and being stuck in the ground.


A bit of a disappointment that the end fights are a string of run & gun, flanking and chain shots.

One thing I noticed was that the dialogue options became less confusing later in the game (that or I got lucky).
Verd1234 said:
Ok, so how did the game end for you guys?
Click to expand...

Massive spoilers below:
[spoiler:1aabaa9777]Killed the gun dealer, let Shaheed live (in hindsight, I should have killed the prick), saved Albatross (& Sis), killed Brayko, kept his ex-boss alive, kept Omen alive but couldn't prevent the riot, Madison died.

Also, I can't understand how anyone could possibly like Madison... I practically cheered when she got shot.

Slept with both Mina & Scarlet before the end. (what can I say? they were both worth it.)
Had the help from Shaheed, G-22, Omen, Heck,...

Got Albatross as my radio buddy, turned Parker to my side, saved Mina, did some shooting with Sis.

At the end shot Darcy because he's an annoying prick. Kept Leland alive for court.

Scarlet shot me in the fucking back (which is survived, which is funny since at the end of the Leland fight I ate a rocket and had 2hp left). What a bitch, but I still like her though.
Mina shot Scarlet in the back (poetic justice). Leland kept alive.

Off into the sunshine with a coast guard boat with Mina (though secretly I wouldn't have minded going off with Scarlet too, but she shot me in the back, so...).


Anyhow, it was obvious that Scarlet was "too nice" (if you play your cards right at least). Especially when Leland said she was in the base, yet there was no option to look for her (only Mina), it was fairly obvious she'd come back to bite me in the ass.

Ah, speaking for Scarlet... On the plane when we first met, I told her straight off I was a spy. She didn't believe it, of course, nor did I expect her to. Yet, at the end dialogue before sleeping with her, she makes a remark about me not saying that I was a spy before. Sloppy!
[/spoiler:1aabaa9777]
Could've been worse for a first playthrough. :)


Has something of a Mass Effectism going on, right? The most intriguing char is never romanced. (Sis / Tali)




Anyhow, I'll play it some more once some official patches get released. Don't know what I'll play though... Evil dude to see what SIE has to offer, or trying to do a better run being a professional good guy?


Edit: As for skills, what did you guys find useful? tbfh, I think stealth, pistol & assault rifle are probably the only top tier skills in the game, but I could be wrong...
 
Finished the game with recruit mode, trying veteran now. It was funny, what an ass you can make yourself, with the veteran dialog options in the beginning. Also I started with a shitload of skillpoints, which was a surprise for me, somehow. But it's good too, because now the game is a bit harder and you don't have to level up everything again / start as noob.

Wonder if I should finish the game a fourth time...


I'll guess AP has such a high replayability, because it's not too long and offers a lot changes here and there. I can't remember any games in the last x years, which I could replay right after the first playthrough multiple times. And if I think back at Mass Effect 1/2... there I was more happy that I am done already than anything else. Replaying the games was never ever in my mind.


@Skills: I personally highered stealth up to the maximum, if you didn't tagged the skill (that's like 3/4 of the bar or so. I didn't saw a need in fully maxing it out). Maxed out assault rifles to the end and spend like 5 or 6 points in pistols, also some points in martial arts. But not many, 3 or 4 was enough for me. Rest was spend on other stuff, what I thought is useful. But I didn't gave a single point to shotguns or SMGs, as I never used any of these weapons.

I think in the technic / sabotage (?) skill has been the "remote hack" function. First I thought this might be supercool and spend points to get it, but then... well... it came so late in the game, that I didn't really needed it anymore. So... it's not very useful at this point of the game and then more a waste of skill points. I think, this skill would be very cool in mid-game to the end... but it's not worth it in the end part.
 
I agree that the Remote Hack skill comes a bit late in the game (unless you dedicate a lot of skill points to Sabotage early on to get it), but in general I found Sabotage to be very useful. certainly not a requirement, and you might argue that the points are better spent elsewhere - but I certainly didn't mind the extra cash and speeding up the minigames as there are so many of them. and if memory serves, the skill that automatically hides you from cameras and turrets falls under Sabotage too, and I found that quite useful.

I haven't experimented that much with skills yet, but to me most skills seem pretty useful. there's nothing that screams "worthless" from what I can tell. I can imagine maxing out martial arts might be a waste though, considering most bosses use firearms and some you can't even get into melee range with.

I'm taking a break from the game now in hopes of a patch to fix the checkpoint bug. I really really want to keep playing, but that bug has made the game unbearable for me. I have to save every checkpoint manually because loading those saves is the only way to avoid it. but when I load those saves, either the game crashes or it takes forever to load. it's not that big a deal on some missions, but when I come to a point where I keep having to reload over and over it just sucks all the fun out of the game.
 
Am I the only one who couldn't quit the menu because I didn't enter it with TAB in the first place? I swear I spent like 15 minutes trying to figure out which key to press, and I forgot now they introduced the TAB key to menus lately in games. Why can't you just quit with ESC in the first place?
 
dario, that is a symptom of games made for consoles and ported to PC


it happens in a lot of those games.
 
Ausir said:
You can also exit it with a right click.
Click to expand...
Well, that seems awfully unnatural. As pointed out, console to PC ports tend to make this kind of weird things.

Well, it's been my first hours into this game so far.

The shooting is pretty meh, you can notice some graphical/camera glitches often, the animations are a bit stiff.

But the talking... I wasn't expecting to be so good! I haven't even finished my first mission, and I'm already thinking of replaying it with a different character to see the reactions! The dialog felt quite natural IMO, and I like the approach(I like to switch between suave and professional, I'll probably go for aggressive on a second play-through). It could be 1 or 2 seconds more, but it really helps to keep the flow of the conversation, instead of the traditional indefinite time answering choice.

The AI reacts a bit weird to stealth. I didn't notice anything ridiculous as being blind to you, but I don't like it when they see you with eagle-eyes. :?

Well, I had some hearty laughs with some stuff here and there. The animations might be ugly, but I like that Mike isn't fucking unmanageable a la GTA IV. The cover system acts a bit weird at times, and the crouch feels a bit high.

The subtitles work a bit weird sometimes, leaving a single word for a line, instead of adding it to the last sentence. Maybe they can fix this.

I haven't noticed any game-breaking bug so far, hope I'll be still lucky.

Anyway, past its flaws, which could've been fixed with some serious polishing, the game is really fun so far. I haven't enjoyed a game like this for a long time, I never thought something like good writing had so much influence.

As somebody said already, as long as Obsidian keeps focusing on the things they got right here for New Vegas, it'll surely be a fun game. So I'll keep playing some more, hope I don't get discouraged by the infamous coke snorting boss.
 
[spoiler:d776506929]yet there was no option to look for her (only Mina), it was fairly obvious she'd come back to bite me in the ass.[/spoiler:d776506929]
Click to expand...

[spoiler:d776506929]Actually, there is an option to go look for her in the base. That's what I did. If you find her and make her your new handler, she doesn't shoot you in the back later[/spoiler:d776506929]
 
[spoiler:9fd1a6f548]And if you don't want to make her your new handler, you can simply kill her and the problem is solved. :>[/spoiler:9fd1a6f548]
 
[spoiler:6ae8a379c0]I love how you can just go and kill off characters. There are two situations where an execute is alluded to as potentially live-saving as well, though they turn out to be false (the gelato guy encounter, and another one I don't remember...).

When I'm going to play veteran I'll just kill everyone and be an arse through the entire game. That'll probably make the game significantly harder, but that'll balance out against pissing everyone off. I'm looking forward to that really.

Also, first time through, I also didn't rescue Madison. She's just terribly unlikable. Second time through I've saved her, and guess what, her father turns out to be Alan Parker. I'm interested in seeing whether that'll have some significant pull on the bugger in the end; perhaps I should've let her die regardless of that knowledge...but my guess is that just pisses him off. It'd piss me off if someone said 'yeah well know what? your plan killed your daughter! well, I did really, I choose not to save her, but hah! your own fault. Now come and help me' , just doesn't cut it I guess.[/spoiler:6ae8a379c0]
 
Verd1234 said:
Did you guys know that Marburg is Winnie the Pooh? Seriously, they share the same voice actor.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0191906/


(Spoilers)
[spoiler:ac4118e73b]Madison's death will never be the same again.[/spoiler:ac4118e73b]
Click to expand...
It's not as awesome as learning that the guy who originally voiced Tigger made the world's first artificial heart and that Eeyore was Optimus Prime. Those Hundred Acre Woods' animals follow me everywhere in life.
 
Verd1234 said:
[spoiler:cd93469eee]Actually, there is an option to go look for her in the base. That's what I did. If you find her and make her your new handler, she doesn't shoot you in the back later[/spoiler:cd93469eee]
Click to expand...
[spoiler:cd93469eee]Even if you already rescued Mina? I'd assume they set it up to rescue one chick, but since I had a romance with both of them... Had to make a choice which they included to save from the base.[/spoiler:cd93469eee]
I could be wrong though.


@Edmond Dantès:

Didn't know that about Madison. She was an annoying piece o' shit anyway.
[spoiler:cd93469eee]Can you save her AND save the museum somehow? With the 'attack' option in the dialogue after defusing the bombs perhaps?[/spoiler:cd93469eee]
 
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