lobotomy42

Alpha Protocol

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I can't figure out how the hell the code-hacking minigame works. I'm playing it on PC, in case it's different. It makes no sense to me at all.

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This seems to be the most divisive game that's come out since Assasin's Creed/ Deadly Premonition. Most of the podcasts I've listened to seem to be panning the game critically, but then they get abused by the message board denizens that all seem to think the game is good.

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I can't figure out how the hell the code-hacking minigame works. I'm playing it on PC, in case it's different. It makes no sense to me at all.

Here's how it works, at least on the console.

There is a big grid of constantly changing characters. However, among this grid, there are two separate horizontal sequences of characters that are *not* changing. (These sequences are identified in the upper left and right hand corners, but not their position.) You have to identify the static characters among the changing ones and select them before time runs out. (On the console, this is done by using the left and right analog sticks to move the character sequences from the top onto their matches in the grid.) To make it more difficult, every 20 seconds or so, the static characters change position, and you have to re-start your search.

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Also, on the pc the controls for that minigame are abysmal. The keyboard side doesn't move quickly enough & the mouse side moves erratically and is extremely over-sensitive, getting it to properly line up on the matching code segment can be a nightmare. You do get used to it eventually. I started out thinking it was completely broken, but I can do it pretty quick now & haven't failed one since the start of the game.

The game is full of terrible shit like that, but I am weirdly still really enjoying it.

[edit] Chris, the left hand code segment is controlled by the keyboard WASD, with the space bar locking it in. The right hand segment is controlled with the mouse, left click to lock in. When the hack begins, start moving both segments toward the middle of the screen (so it's statistically likely to be closer to the appropriate code segment when you identify it) and unfocus your eyes to find the areas that aren't moving.

Edited by spindrift

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I'm really hoping that if I wait a year to buy this they'll be able to patch it to a playable state. I don't know if Obsidian has ever managed that for their past bungles though.

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I'm really hoping that if I wait a year to buy this they'll be able to patch it to a playable state. I don't know if Obsidian has ever managed that for their past bungles though.

I'm about 2/3 through my first play-through of the Xbox 360 version, but I haven't encountered a single bug yet, except for maybe poor AI behavior. (It's certainly nowhere near as buggy as KOTOR2 or NWN2.) There are some questionable design decisions, certainly, but I haven't found anything that "doesn't work" or seemed to be otherwise unintentional.

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Ok, skipped work to finish my first run of this game.

Unfortunately, I don't have much to change about my initial thoughts. As I said before, the big draw of the game - the dynamic conversations with major repercussions in both gameplay and storyline - are also the game's biggest weakness. On the one hand, the idea never seemed to live up to its potential. On the other, the conversations did compel me to stay up late and keep playing long after the gameplay had grown a little tiresome. I genuinely did want to see what would happen next, even though I never once had a solid grasp of what was happening or why.

The problem with the reactive system, as I see it, is two-fold. First, the gameplay changes never seem significant enough. I spared an arms dealer so, okay, I can get stuff from the store at 10% off. Uh, good? In one mission, I was promised "help" from one faction on a mission infiltrating another, which had me fairly excited. Would I be able to sneak around while the two sides were fighting? But it turned out that I just got to skip past the first three guards in that level - what a wasted opportunity. Obviously, you don't want the player to make a choice with terrible consequences that cause the player to get permanently stuck in an extremely difficult level. But the alternative chosen here is to make all choices essentially "equal" - one stat goes up a little, another goes down; or one level becomes mildly easier but another becomes mildly harder. Surely a better balance could have been chosen?

The other major issue is the plot, such as it is. I spent every spare dollar I had on gathering Intel, read and re-read every dossier and e-mail, and I still couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on, beyond the most general sense of "Oh, these are the bad guys." Every conversation feels like I'm walking in blind, watching two characters who both know more than me exchange some banter, randomly selecting options for the "me" character, and watching it unfold. It's compelling, certainly, but not at all clear, and I didn't remotely feel in control. At one point,

I walked into what I was told was an NSA Listening Post disguised as Gelateria. Except I show up, and some shady-looking character gives me the evil eye while I fumble through trying to give the pass-phrase. He doesn't recognize it, but then lets me bug the super-computer in the back anyway. Then he offers me some gelato, and I leave. WTF? I still have no clue who he was or what happened to the NSA Listening Post.

The game is full of moments like those. Various factions (there's more than 20, I think!) would just go off and do things, or join me or fight me seemingly on a whim.

So, in sum, the game is impressive, and compelling, but not at all coherent, at least for me. I get the impression that the designers had a bunch of new ideas for how RPGs could work that they wanted to cram into the game without as much thought as to how these features would ultimately come across to the player. Still, I was definitely driven to be constantly playing, which is more than I can say for a lot of games.

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So, I picked up this game in the Steam sale finally. I'd been tempted for a couple of weeks.

I liked it a lot. I really didn't mind a lot of the problems mentioned in reviews, and here.

However... yesterday I rage-uninstalled a game for the first time in a long time. Is that even a thing?

I got to Brayko, and I had levelled up hand to hand and stealth. He was so difficult with my spec that I just packed it in. A Sega guy on twitter was giving me links to tactics and I found a forum full of people explaining to people like me that we are all idiots for not being good at this game.

A game that in every single review was lambasted for gameplay issues...

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I've done that with Bad Company 2 at least three times.

Yeah, I'm not getting this. I had some misplaced hope that this would be when Obsidian finally gets their act together but it was not to be. Even for all their faults I really miss Troika.

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So, I picked up this game in the Steam sale finally. I'd been tempted for a couple of weeks.

I liked it a lot. I really didn't mind a lot of the problems mentioned in reviews, and here.

However... yesterday I rage-uninstalled a game for the first time in a long time. Is that even a thing?

I got to Brayko, and I had levelled up hand to hand and stealth. He was so difficult with my spec that I just packed it in. A Sega guy on twitter was giving me links to tactics and I found a forum full of people explaining to people like me that we are all idiots for not being good at this game.

A game that in every single review was lambasted for gameplay issues...

Yeah, Brayko really seemed like a... Mega Man-esque challenge in that you really, really had to identify patterns, scope the environment, and use it in a vary particular way to your advantage. It's kind of frustrating when the game poses conflict to you as multifaceted, then presents a boss that forces you to use one facet.

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Haha, fuckin' Brayko. Worst fight in that game. I was stealth spec & he raped me in half until I figured out how to bug out the AI.

Still an awesome game, though.

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If nothing else works, there's always the "Options->Difficulty->Easy" tactic.

For some reason, I never had as much difficulty in Alpha Protocol as I did in Dragon Age. Most of the difficulty criticisms that are held against AP seem, IMHO, to apply equally as well to DA. But I guess people's mileage varies.

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If nothing else works, there's always the "Options->Difficulty->Easy" tactic.

For some reason, I never had as much difficulty in Alpha Protocol as I did in Dragon Age. Most of the difficulty criticisms that are held against AP seem, IMHO, to apply equally as well to DA. But I guess people's mileage varies.

It's funny you mention it, I'm more than happy to play a game on easy, even if it's occasionally too easy for words, to enjoy a good story.

I play Elder Scrolls games with all the difficulty sliders at zero because I just want to click through dudes and then talk to other dudes.

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I'm having fun so far with the game!

I just beat the Russian Brayko guy.... I was a Rookie wearing no armor, I had forgotten to bring any health packs and I was a stealth specialist too, but I was on Easy... :mock:

I really love and hate the whole conversation system, you never know if what you said will prevent you from getting a mission later... ;(

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I'm having fun so far with the game!

I just beat the Russian Brayko guy.... I was a Rookie wearing no armor, I had forgotten to bring any health packs and I was a stealth specialist too, but I was on Easy... :mock:

(

No mockery from me!!! Brayko made me quit the game and uninstall it. I'm going to eventually try the whole game again on Easy, just to enjoy the conversation stuff and not worry about coming up against some dude I can't defeat.

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No mockery from me!!! Brayko made me quit the game and uninstall it. I'm going to eventually try the whole game again on Easy, just to enjoy the conversation stuff and not worry about coming up against some dude I can't defeat.

I thought I was totally boned and failed twice, but by taking cover in the place where the ammo spawn and running when he pulls out the knives and then hitting him when he stops to rest worked fine!

Also, you should really try to play as a rookie first as it unlocks the veteran which is a total badass and starts with tons of AP and money! :clap:

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I have to confess that on my first playthrough I relied on the Brayko AI - specifically, waiting until he ran into a wall and then repeatedly shooting him in the head. That was a stealth and pistol character - the second time I specialised in SMGs, and basically just sprayed him to death on his first run from the stage. Not terribly sophisticated. The boss fights in general felt like a bit of a letdown - partly because they are alive for longer than the grunts, so their AI has more time to do stupid things (I ended up playing peek-a-boo with

Marburg

, stepping out from behind a door, shooting him in the head with a pistol and then stepping back in while my chain shot recharged, as he stood politely outside the closet I was hiding in, telling me he was going to kill me). Also, they are either pretty simple or pretty much impossible, depending on your skill approach and the equipment you have with you.

I blogged a review of this, the one-liner of which was "Vampire the Masquerade: Bondlines". It's not fatally buggy so much as incomplete - sudden shifts in animation, inexplicable AI, a mix of rush and repetition, and occasional back-to-the-last-checkpoint camera bugs or cover bugs. In the end, especially once I'd broken the combat system, I played the action sections as basically a minigame full of minigames, and treated the conversations and relationship management as the actual game. You probably do need a couple of playthroughs to see the variation, but it is pretty impressive. I found that I could engineer boss battles with former allies, and that decisions like the order I took missions in had consequences. Also, at one point I think I might have buddied up with someone quite a lot like Osama bin Ladin.

At the price it's getting to be now, though, having not sold nearly as well as expected, I'm thinking it's actually worth taking a crack at if you're prepared to tolerate its quirks. Then again, I played Bloodlines straight through about twelve times, so you may not want to trust that opinion.

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I just finished this. I played a stealth/pistol specced character and I really enjoyed the game in the middle sections, after I had enough stealth to get through the levels easily enough and enough pistol skill to beat some of the bosses. In the end I thought it was kind of a strange and uneven game. There were parts of it that seemed to be trying for the super-campy 70s spy aesthetic

such as the teenage girl in the hot topic jacket leading an elite squad of mercenaries or the reveal at the end that the reporter was actually a super-assassin.

but it wasn't really funny or charming like a No One Lives Forever. I actually found almost all of the characters related to Alpha Protocol/the main plot to be grating, uninteresting douchebags, main character included. It also really annoyed me how every time a plot even was supposed to happen Thorton would jump out of stealth and walk into the room, announcing himself to all of the guards/boss.

Weird game.

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Ha ha, the game is so ridiculously fun when you get the highest rank in stealth!

You can literally become invisible for enough time to take out a whole room if you're quick enough! :clap:

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Ok, I just beat the game... it gets a bit too talky in the end, but it was still fun!

Has anybody played on hard? Since I should have unlocked Veteran, it should be easier for me anyway?:erm:

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I had this "brilliant" plan to try something for a 3rd playthrough of this game. Globetrotting.

The game doesn't actually lock you in, but once I started an area, since all those missions are connected plotwise, I would only stay in that area. I was wondering if jumping around would actually have meaningful effects on how people reacted.

I made it through the Intro mission with a submachine gun veteran, and started doing all the 'meet a dude' missions in each region. There wasn't really any change. I gave up after that though, because I forgot about the weird camera issues I was having in that game and didn't feel like pushing through that stuff. I also completely missed the respec button, so all my skills were borked and i didn't feel like reloading.

I did notice some subtle conversation changes with Mina. I deliberately failed to endear her to me, like I did in my first runs so she was at a plus 2.

I also noticed, that to piss people off, you tend to have to play poorly and miss out stuff. A big example is not doing the training to piss off Westbridge, there's no perk for skipping it, and you miss out on xp and the chance to rep up or down with your team. They usually do a good job of making each choice meaningful in some way, so it's a bummer when they don't. I didn't try deliberately failing all that stuff though, I hope you can do that without being forced to take each course again. Although I'll never find out because I'm never playing this again.

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I just beat Alpha Protocol on Hard Mode today actually...:yep:

Doing things poorly doesn't make people angry, but doing certain thing will make them angry, like killing innocents with Mina as a handler.

The order in which you do the missions can affect the other missions, if you meet a certain someone in one area, that person can be in another area to assist you in a mission.

Hard mode was kinda fun since I REALLY had to rely on stealth, enemies can take you down pretty quickly even with the best armor!

The ending can change is very subtle ways... The handler you chose, how much they like you, how much you know about them...

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This is on sale on Steam for £5, is this worth picking up?

Did they ever patch some of the worst bugs I heard this game had?

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