The pacing. The game is so breezy and easy to play through during a slow month, all the missions are super quick and the cutscenes don't go on longer than they need to. Verily, I've played through the game five times, more than any other RPG because it's just so...light and delightful. Yeah, the shooting is dogshit, but if you spec melee/stealth, then it becomes a kinda janky, but oh so pleasurable experience. It's the RPG equivalent of a nice MIMOSA on a hot summer morning. Super honestly, most other RPG are full of tedious, often grindy dead zones where you just fucking hate the shit of the game, but not AP. No, Alpha Protocol just pleasurably strolls on by, wearing summer colors, not taking itself too seriously, while everybody else is grunting and sweating in July heat. Japanese and Western developers alike can learn a thing or two from this sort of approach to role playing games.

I'll sign anything positive about this awesome gem. The shooting is great if you're a stealth character, otherwise it's just a matter of getting a grip of it. The main character being a huge douche or a huge dick is also absolutely hilarious.

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

it's the 1st spy game where you actual do spy stuff.

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Verily?

Yes, the game is very well paced.

@SlasherMan said:

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Well it had the laser sight...just like that critical flop Resident Evil 4.

The timed dialogue wheel was my favorite part of the game. All the choices you made were gut feelings based on urgency and your current situation. One of the few games I can play and get by with some finicky game mechanics.

@SlasherMan said:

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Well it had the laser sight...just like that critical flop Resident Evil 4.

@nintendoeats said:

@SlasherMan said:

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Well it had the laser sight...just like that critical flop Resident Evil 4.

What's your point? It's still not the best way to handle aiming regardless of how well the RE game have done (and trust me, it's not the shooting mechanics that sells those games).

Obsidian are great story tellers but unfortunately the gameplay in their games is never as polished as the story. I heard a great suggestion on last week's invisible walls podcast where one of the guys suggested that Obsidian should basically be consultants-signing out their writers and designers to other studios to help them flesh out their game stories and characters.

I hope that South Park game does well for them. The writing on the show is brilliant and Obsidian tells some of the best stories in games so I want them to have a huge hit so they can turn around and make an original IP or an Alpha Protocol 2. Their writing was the main reason I stuck with New Vegas for so long.

@SlasherMan: ResE4's action WAS one of the selling points, and part of what made it a classic. That's why ResE4 and 5 have such high replay value, and why mercenaries mode was so popular. It's extremely well designed. SotD has pretty much identical aiming, it's the weapon design that makes the shooting feel less satisfying (for some people anyway)

@Shun_Akiyama: I was being sarcastic.

Ah, for fuck's sake. Not gonna hold out for another sale. Gonna buy this now.

@nintendoeats: I'd just like to pop in and say that the shooting in Shadows of the Damned is a lot floatier than that of Resident Evil. There was a certain looseness to the way the guns handled that made my time with that game less pleasant than it otherwise would have been.

Anyways, Alpha Protocol is paced alright, I guess. I would've said that the thing it does better than any other RPG is make your choices feel like they have impact, even when they don't. Still doesn't fix the problems I have with it.

@ArbitraryWater: I'll believe that. There were years between me playing the two games, so I might have missed a detail like that. As far as the argument at hand goes though, both games used LASER BEAMS as aiming devices.

This game does so many things well. But, then there's the gameplay. And the bosses. And the motion blur. *sigh*

I really liked Alpha Protocol. The shooting was kinda meh, and once you upgraded your guy so he would be invisible, it got a little silly, but it was fun game.

In theory, it was possibly the best RPG of this gen.  In practice it didn't quite work out like that, but still a great game.
 
I wanna say that the most important thing it does that many other similar games don't do is to make the narrative and gameplay feel like they are connected and genuinely impacting on each other in meaningful ways.  Your narrative choices genuinely affect how missions play out, and how you play the missions can affect how the narrative plays out.  For example, if you kill guards during the US Embassy mission, it's taken into consideration during the narrative towards the end of the game, which is very smart game design and a solid example of how these games need to combine their two halves better so they feel like a single experience.  Here's the problem though: in theory that was what was supposed to happen, but in practice it was hit or miss whether that condition would actually function properly, which obviously undermines the whole thing.

@nintendoeats said:

@SlasherMan: ResE4's action WAS one of the selling points, and part of what made it a classic. That's why ResE4 and 5 have such high replay value, and why mercenaries mode was so popular. It's extremely well designed. SotD has pretty much identical aiming, it's the weapon design that makes the shooting feel less satisfying (for some people anyway)

I'm sorry, but the "Stop and Pop" gameplay in RE5 was simply terrible, especially in comparison to RE4. It was rage inducing more than anything. The latter could get away with it because for one thing it did not overdo it with the number of enemies at any given time (let alone the mini-boss type enemies like in RE5), and the fact that back then we didn't have a lot of the games that directed the TPS genre as we know it today.

I guess there may be people out there who like it, but that's certainly not why I play those games.

Whatever the case, that wasn't even my point here. The point was that people had gotten used to other shooters with standard aiming methods, that when something like SotD comes along it is bound to feel odd and/or off, especially for people who've been playing Gears or Uncharted or what have you for the last few years. I'll be honest, the aiming did give me some trouble at first in SotD, but for the most part it wasn't a big issue. At least I could dodge and move around while aiming, so that was a big step up from something like RE.

@nintendoeats said:

Verily?

I was gonna say that...

Anyway, I've thought about picking this up but a lot of the problems that people often admit it has are the very things that would make me not like it. Still, I'd like to try it out for myself at some point. Not now, though.

@falcos_abortive_rainbow said:

The pacing. The game is so breezy and easy to play through during a slow month, all the missions are super quick and the cutscenes don't go on longer than they need to. Verily, I've played through the game five times, more than any other RPG because it's just so...light and delightful. Yeah, the shooting is dogshit, but if you spec melee/stealth, then it becomes a kinda janky, but oh so pleasurable experience. It's the RPG equivalent of a nice MIMOSA on a hot summer morning. Super honestly, most other RPG are full of tedious, often grindy dead zones where you just fucking hate the shit of the game, but not AP. No, Alpha Protocol just pleasurably strolls on by, wearing summer colors, not taking itself too seriously, while everybody else is grunting and sweating in July heat. Japanese and Western developers alike can learn a thing or two from this sort of approach to role playing games.

I just bought it for $13, just to see how it goes. I am keen to give it a try. Oh, and verily is such a nice word, verily it is.

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

........ and I just bought that for $15, and I am keen to give it a go as well. It was some very good pedigree and I am assuming a good deal of fun, which is what I want in a game.

I thought you were going to say that awful duck-walk sneaking animation.

@believer258: Dude, it's awesome, especially if your smarting about the ME3 thing. You want a game that takes your choices into account...ALPHA PROTOCOL IS IT.

Game is like 10 bucks at eb might walk over and grab a copy. Worse case scenario is i'll feel I wasted 10 bucks which I would have wasted anyways.

I found that to be much the case in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Not a pure rpg by any means but never boring and always very slick.

It's the first RPG I've played in a long time where I wanted to restart the game immediately after I finished it, for many of the same reasons you listed. Oddly enough, I actually found the straight up shooting route quite entertaining, I maxed out Shotguns and Toughness, which basically turned me into the Grim Reaper, casually walking through hails of bullets and blowing dudes away, or setting them on fire with incendiary slugs for variety. Another thing I like about Alpha Protocol is that it's pretty much the only RPG I've played with a system that rewards getting people to hate you as much as getting them to love you. It's the one game that understands that sometimes, I don't wanna suck up to virtual people I don't like so they'll shower me with praise and loot, that's just too much like real life. Why shouldn't being a jerk be rewarding in the fantasy worlds of video games?

Agreed. The shooting was iffy but goddamn if it wasn't fun. I even went for a no-kill run, as well as a challenge by a friend where I couldn't take more than 200 damage total over the course of the game and finished it.

@nintendoeats said:

@SlasherMan said:

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Well it had the laser sight...just like that critical flop Resident Evil 4.

Wow thanks you too for backing up my point, the gaming media and indeed many gamers these days are too caught up bitching about really small details rather than just enjoying a game. I never found it difficult to use my guns as they should be used in either Shadows of the Damned or Alpha Protocol yet someone always has to bitch and practically shit on the game just because they cannot adapt to the game mechanics of the game they're playing

I really like this game despite its many shortcomings. The shooting was awful and that crouch walking animation was terrible but also amazing

When the game came out everyone was shitting on it because they felt cheated. Now that the game has been out for a while and you can get it super cheap it's everyone's favorite hidden gem. Funny, that.

I might like it if the gameplay wasn't such utter horse shit.

Gameplay is what counts, and AP had awful gameplay.

I thought it played like ass and wasn't interesting, so I didn't get very far in it at all

I honestly enjoyed playing through alpha protocol a hell of a lot more than any of the mass effect games past the first one

I thought it played just fine, except for a few of the boss battles, which were kind of annoying.

and, as has been said before, this is basically one of the only true spy games out there. Also, one of only a few true rpgs of the last generation, I would argue.

@Shun_Akiyama said:

@nintendoeats said:

@SlasherMan said:

@nail1080 said:

True and the same goes for games such as Shadows of the Damned where people in the gaming media wrongfully criticise it saying the 'shooting is bad' as if Gears of War shooting is the most exciting shit ever...yeah right....people need to stop bitching calling all gameplay bad, sit down and enjoy the fucking awesome games we're spoiled with these days!

There was nothing wrong with the shooting. It was just the aiming that needed a lot of getting used to, since there was no reticule.

Well it had the laser sight...just like that critical flop Resident Evil 4.

Are you saying RE4 was critically bad? Don't most people consider it to be one of the best games ever?

Definitely a joke.

Definitely agree. The problem with, let's say, all games is pacing. Alpha Protocol handles it well, you never get massive information dumps, and you never spend the entire game waiting for whatever justifies an entire character's presence in the story (looking at you Final Fantasy).

Bastion is not the greatest story ever told in games, but it is easily the best paced. You never go too long without acting in the story, and you never go too long without learning something new. Unlike other games that cram as much exposition as they can at you, and then send you to go perform tasks for an hour before they can force feed you more story.

@nail1080: Well, ok, Alpha Protocol had some issues. The big thing for me was that I was using a mouse, but the aiming was super chunky. I would be too aiming far to the left, mouselook to the right...nothing...mouselook to the right more and boom I'm on the other side of the thing. This happened alot, even when I was hidden and had all of the time in the world to aim.

That drove me several types of insane.

I just started a 1 month OnLive subscription to catch up on some great games that I missed when they came out for various reasons. Right now I'm working my way through Arkham Asylum and next up I plan to play through Alpha Protocol. It's threads like this that make me want to. Parts of it sound pretty bad, but the bits that people say are good are generally the things that I look for in games and that's why I want to check it out.

@Kazona said:

I might like it if the gameplay wasn't such utter horse shit.

Can you recommend me another modern day spy roleplaying game? CAN YOU? Well then there you go.

I was actually surprised that I liked that game after everything I heard. Glad I took a chance.

@Jimbo said:

In theory, it was possibly the best RPG of this gen. In practice it didn't quite work out like that, but still a great game. I wanna say that the most important thing it does that many other similar games don't do is to make the narrative and gameplay feel like they are connected and genuinely impacting on each other in meaningful ways. Your narrative choices genuinely affect how missions play out, and how you play the missions can affect how the narrative plays out. For example, if you kill guards during the US Embassy mission, it's taken into consideration during the narrative towards the end of the game, which is very smart game design and a solid example of how these games need to combine their two halves better so they feel like a single experience. Here's the problem though: in theory that was what was supposed to happen, but in practice it was hit or miss whether that condition would actually function properly, which obviously undermines the whole thing.

Ding ding ding. This is why I loved Alpha Protocol. It helped that I picked it up for fifteen bucks, and I exploited the shit out of the game, but the experience, and how the narrative played out? Brilliant. Alpha Protocol nailed the notion of choice and consequence, for me, better than any other RPG this generation. The gameplay was shit, yes, but it still had a profound impact upon the story. And your choices definitely had a profound impact upon the game. And it was damned well-written, voice-acted, and it walked a fine line of serious and tongue-in-cheek brilliantly. And Matt Rorie worked on it. Seriously, I love this game. Would I have loved it had I spent sixty bucks? Maybe not. But still, it's something I think a lot of games can learn from when it comes to marrying narrative and gameplay.

And here's a fix for horse shit gameplay: it's god-damned cheap. Exploit the stealth, or turn it down to easy. That's what I did, and I loved it. I went into the game with stilted expectations--I knew the gameplay wasn't incredibly strong. But it wasn't break-your-controller frustrating, either.

Also, I loved pretending Thorton was fucking insane. I'd run around my safehouse karate-chopping the air just for shits. And then I started to play the game like Thorton was a nut-case. Made the dialogue choices a lot more fun.

Sexual assaults from Slavic women with the approximate body shape of a minotaur?

I think were all missing the best part of Alpha Protocol... Steven Heck. He is absolutely geniously played by Nolan North.

This game was OK, but I got stuck on the boss fight with the rich Russian kid that chases you with knives so I gave up.

I loved Alpha Protocol. I think one of the things it also does extremely well is the organic interactions between the characters. Such a great game!

The shooting is fine once you dump enough skill points into whatever gun type you want to use. But it's more about stealth and using your abilities instead of point and shoot. I played through it 3+ times and 2 of them were stealth runs. I played it if you were shooting someone without using an ability or a critical shot you done fucked up. The one run I did more aggressive I dumped all the points I could into health and shotguns, that worked out alright.

It was a good rental. I liked it despite it's shooting being pretty horrible. I did like the premise, though, and the limited response time in conversations was interesting and worked well.