ATTN: EL DOUCHEBAG (Coffee) Alpha Protocol

[Havok]

I didn't know you played this.
It's one of my favorite games ever. I know Stark diggs it. What did you think of it?

[Mr. Coffee]

I loved the hell out of it. I normally dislike RPGs, but AP played like a shooter that turned out to have a decent story attached to it. Cover system was neat, but I really dug the character build stuff. Lots of choices on how to go with your dude, and for once doing a stealth-based character in a game wasn't a death sentence (in fact, being a sneaky shit was actually one of the saner builds for a "spy"). It's like Burn Notice the game, only with more ethnic stereotypes and no Bruce Campbell (not sure if that's good of bad, really).

I dunno, maybe it's because I picked up the game well after it was out and all th bugs had been more or less fixed, maybe it's because I tend to play using a 360 game pad instead of mouse and keyboard, maybe I just don't give a rats ass what some lame-ass game company shillreviewer has to say. I thought it was one of the more entertaining and original games I've played in years, and whoever at Sega decided not to greenlight the fuck out of a sequal should have their balls removed so they don't infect the human race with their fucking retardation.

[Stark]

The real question is - did you find a reason to use the SMGs?

[weemadando]

I still intend to replay as a Veteran character and use snipers/smg/shotty.

But I know I'll just end up with a pistol again.

[Havok]

Yeah, this is the first game where I am pretty upset that it is not getting a sequel, for all the reasons you gave.

I know the game wasn't as polished as it could of been, but fuck, a sequel would have fixed all the ACTUAL problems, which there aren't many of, and would give time to all the "reviewers" (OMFG I CAN'T RUN AND SHOOT ACCURATELY WITH DOUBLE PISTOLS/SMGS WITHOUT ANY OF MY SKILLS IN DOING THAT BUILT UP!!1! BROKEN GAME!!1!1) to figure out how you are supposed to actually play the game.

Newsflash fuckheads, it's not Halo.

But yeah, I was also thinking about playing through it again.

[weemadando]

Wut u mean mai choice have consequence?

Wait i no abel to replay last two minutes to see every ending?

Lady characters no like me. But i say sexy things to them.

Me no empowered.

ME HATE ALPHA PROTOCOL.

[Stark]

It's a laugh because Aaron was talking abotu Deus Ex how there's a guy saying wah wah save me etc.

And if it was Alpha Protocol there'd be longterm changes and doors opening and closing if you saved him or not... but because it isn't, he knows that the choice is really 'save him and get a reward, or don't save him and... don't get a reward'.

And if you play martial arts, try the shotgun. The knockdown is HILARIOUS, you can knockdown four guys at once!

[TC Pilot]

Did you guys play it on a console or the PC? Frankly, I thought the game (on the PC) was mediocre in basically every aspect. Certainly not worth slogging through another 10 hours of bland shooting and piss-poor controls just to get a whole new series of encounters for Michael "douchebag" Thorton to drone through.

[Stark]

protip don't press the 'is wanker' button and he's not a wanker

and man it's a lol that skyrim has guys that play animations during conversations as an amazing thing of building immersion

and in ap you can cruise your apartment and check your shit while bigscreen lady fills you in

[SilverWingedSeraph]

protip don't press the 'is wanker' button and he's not a wanker

All three (sometimes four) dialogue options are just different flavors of wanker. Thorton is a huge asshole.

I find that entertaining though.

[Stark]

are you sersiouly saying 'no paragon option = is a wanker'

because when i play thorton is a smooth motherfucker unless he's trying to piss marburg off

I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN PAKISTAN, DICKLESS

[Havok]

Did you guys play it on a console or the PC? Frankly, I thought the game (on the PC) was mediocre in basically every aspect. Certainly not worth slogging through another 10 hours of bland shooting and piss-poor controls just to get a whole new series of encounters for Michael "douchebag" Thorton to drone through.

protip don't press the 'is wanker' button and he's not a wanker

All three (sometimes four) dialogue options are just different flavors of wanker. Thorton is a huge asshole.

I find that entertaining though.

Uh... fucking what?

[Stark]

if you want 'wanker', playing the finale as a murderer is great stuff - shooting scarlet in the face and telling mina you hate her and leaving her to die is top shelf stuff

ALMOST as funny as tricking parker into trying to kill marburg and dying horribly

which is ALMSOT as funny as heck's reappearance

maybe these guys never noticed that the convo options aren't 'good' 'neutral' and 'evil', they're apporaches to take

being casual with marburg is a riot

[TC Pilot]

protip don't press the 'is wanker' button and he's not a wanker

It seems to me the only consistently not-douchebag lines are under "Professional," and even those are delivered as if the VA's half asleep.

Too bad I can't reload my quicksave to find out!

and in ap you can cruise your apartment and check your shit while bigscreen lady fills you in

Certainly better than looking at the screen, given they all seem to have the same grainy-with-black-lines-and-rainbow-outlines look to it.

[Mr. Coffee]

The real question is - did you find a reason to use the SMGs?

I actually did a play through where I forced myself to use SMGs and Shotguns. I think I rage quit that fucker live a dozen or so times before I said "fuck it, bring on the cheats" and rejiggered the config file to allow me to unlock the full skill tree across the board and give myself 250 skill points a level. Then it was somewhat playable, but the SMG was still the most useless thing ever, and thanks to not having my happy shiney supressed pistol it made stealthing through a mission damned difficult. I made more kills with stealth hand-to-hand take down moves then I did with the SMG and shotgun combined.

But yeah, fuck the SMG. Pistol, AR, and max your stealth for the holy trinity of Mike Thornton skull fucking everything he sees.

I know the game wasn't as polished as it could of been, but fuck, a sequel would have fixed all the ACTUAL problems, which there aren't many of, and would give time to all the "reviewers" (OMFG I CAN'T RUN AND SHOOT ACCURATELY WITH DOUBLE PISTOLS/SMGS WITHOUT ANY OF MY SKILLS IN DOING THAT BUILT UP!!1! BROKEN GAME!!1!1) to figure out how you are supposed to actually play the game.

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly the reason why I never listen to professional game reviewers, because if they aren't blatant industry shills writing paid adverts for game publishers then they're impatient asstards that play maybe two or three hours of a game before rendering their "opinion" (and we all know that opinions, like assholes, are usually full of shit).

Did you guys play it on a console or the PC? Frankly, I thought the game (on the PC) was mediocre in basically every aspect. Certainly not worth slogging through another 10 hours of bland shooting and piss-poor controls just to get a whole new series of encounters for Michael "douchebag" Thorton to drone through.

What the Christ are you on about? I've only played the game on PC and the controls worked fine for me. Probably due to me understanding it's a console port that's pretty much optimized for a 360 controller, but whatever.

Also, what do you mean by "bland shooting"? This isn't fucking Modern Warfare, or Halo, or Bad Company where you just run and gun. You're not going to run out and mow down hordes of mooks because the mooks in this game are fully capable of hunting your ass down and skull fucking you if you fuck up. You actually have to look at what you're up against and plan your attack, which after years of lame fucking run and gun assholery like the above mentioned game I found pretty goddamned refreshing. Then again, I love the hell out of the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises for the same reason, so your mileage my vary.

Being a dick with either the prick Jack Bauer button (Y for you Xboxsexuals) or sauve mothafucka Mike Weston response (X for you console loving reprobates), is fucking hilarious. Then again, if you go through the whole game using just one response instead of figuring out how to use the response options to mindfuck and manipulate everyone you encounter into doing what you want them to then you're a fucking spazz and shouldn't ever play a game involving any NPC interactions beyond shooting them in the face with a bazooka.

[Stark]

It's worth noting that the B response (professional, Matt Damon response) is generally 'safe' in that you won't often be penalised for using it, but it's also the most boring. B is for BORING, kids!

Mixing up the options inside conversations is really the strength of the game; you can swtich from being all business, to cracking a joke at the right moment, and then back to the mission, and actually get rewarded for it. Constantly pressing the 'joke' button and expecting people to react nicely to someone constantly busting out bad jokes isn't the game's problem.

Although the joke responses to Heck are great stuff. :V

[Scottish Ninja]

The first time I got to send an email reply to Heck was probably the greatest moment in any video game ever. I'm glad I went to Hong Kong first.

[Stark]

flirting with mina at the right time can make you a lot of money

what a wanker!

[Vympel]

You really don't need anything but the pistol - AR is a complete waste of time.

I've got a veteran game ready, but haven't begun it yet.

[TC Pilot]

What the Christ are you on about? I've only played the game on PC and the controls worked fine for me. Probably due to me understanding it's a console port that's pretty much optimized for a 360 controller, but whatever.

*shrug* I hadn't heard it was badly ported when I bought it last month. Aside from the horrible hacking minigame control, I found it takes forever to rotate the camera around with no option to up mouse sensitivity. I went back to check, and sliding the mouse completely across the mousepad rotates the camera roughly 90 degrees. By contrast, a full sweep moves the camera 270 degrees in New Vegas. Also, occasionally the camera would go beserk and end up facing the wrong direction. That usually doesn't happen during a fight, but it happens way more than it ought to.

Also, what do you mean by "bland shooting"?

For starters, I'll point out I was using the default normal difficulty setting.

I started out the game with a silenced pistol, but found I was terrible at stealth . So I just said fuck it and went straight to assault rifles. Combined with the early light stealth armor upgraded with magic rehealing armor, I essentially became unstoppable halfway through the first post-Arabia mission. In the cases where I wasn't simply wading through enemies like Rambo, I generally found that the AI was so poor that I could sit in a corner and methodically snipe enemies down one-by-one with my scoped assault rifle since they're too stupid to navigate properly and apparently incapable of following you through the levels in certain cases.

A few instances I remember: in the Taiwan level with all the red-pajama goggle guys, there's a two-story room full of computer servers. Two guys got stuck on a stairwell and proceeded to shoot the wall in front of them endlessly. Later on, in a warehouse just before the exit, some goggle guys spotted me, so I ducked back into the previous room. All they did was run around inside that room until they forgot about me. In the Moscow trainyard level, more than a few guys got stuck going up or down ladders, and in the level where you're going after the old Russia mobster (the one with the boxer bodyguard), a mobster got into an endless loop of hurling grenades at the opposite wall (granted, I was hiding behind that wall). Now that I think about it, I actually got glitched into a wall during that boss fight, which was actually kinda funny, compared to the sheer frustration of being killed by those rockets you can set off in the Arab arms dealer mission because I was standing on one of the leg braces when I activated the computer, so that Thorton did his "use computer" animation at a 45 degree angle and clipped through the launcher and got hit by the rocket as it launched

Granted, I hate gameplay like MW2 or Blops, so I liked how the camera spaz-outs weren't intentional. But I never found combat to be especially challenging (save for the epic thrill of trying to turn if a guy appears behind you). It felt more of a chore to get through in quite a few places. This is not unique to AP, of course. The last RPG I played as actually Dragon Age, and holy fuck did I get bored of practically every dungeon halfway through.

Being a dick with either the prick Jack Bauer button (Y for you Xboxsexuals) or sauve mothafucka Mike Weston response (X for you console loving reprobates), is fucking hilarious. Then again, if you go through the whole game using just one response instead of figuring out how to use the response options to mindfuck and manipulate everyone you encounter into doing what you want them to then you're a fucking spazz and shouldn't ever play a game involving any NPC interactions beyond shooting them in the face with a bazooka.

I think the dialouge, in principle, suffers the same problem as Mass Effect, the sort of "that isn't what I thought you were going to say" effect, albiet I give them credit for actually implementing the time limit that was ditched in ME. I tended to try tailoring my responses to the specific individual, which I think is why I ran into so many "douchebag" lines. Which sorta kills my own interest in interacting with other characters, since I find the protagonist annoying, both because of the voice actor and the actual lines, and I can just kill everyone without much difficulty anyway, so this "choice and consequences" falls flat.

[Mr. Coffee]

Using the suave responses with Conrad Marburg nets you a pretty sweet pistol when you troll him into fighting to the death. The Jack Bauer response is good with Sie if you plan on getting good rep with her for the shop items and/or going for Thornton Plumbing laying pipe to all the fuckables in the game (and Sie's a fucking freak...).

[Stark]

that's solid gold

'consequences don't matter cause combat is easy'

hear that game designers? moar linear plz!

[SilverWingedSeraph]

are you sersiouly saying 'no paragon option = is a wanker'

because when i play thorton is a smooth motherfucker unless he's trying to piss marburg off

I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN PAKISTAN, DICKLESS

I wasn't being entirely serious. "Professional" is usually fairly safe and non-dickish, even friendly and respectful sometimes. Suave is sometimes either total smarmy jackass, or it's flirtatious, or it's bragging about yourself. It's my favourite dialogue option because it's hilarious. Aggressive is fun sometimes too.

In all honesty the dialogue options in Alpha Protocol were my second favorite thing about it, after the whole "choices have ACTUAL FUCKING IN-GAME CONSEQUENCES HOLY SHIT" thing.

[Stark]

a lot of the conseuqnces are really minor stuff, like dialog changes

but in one conversation with marburg there's more player-action sensitive variable dialog than in a whole bioware game, and those little changes are a great way to reinforce to players that the way they approach things and act actually has meaning and value

instead of being 'shoot everyone, press the blue option = SAINT EVERYONE LOVES YOU'

my gf hated the hacking minigame, right, so she used a lot of EMP nades to bypass locks
so instead of punishing her for SKIPPIGN the SUPER IMPORTANT minigame, the game gave her a perk that doubled the number of EMP nades she could carry

supporting different styles and roleplaying and shit is the strength of the game, for all it's problems

[SilverWingedSeraph]

my gf hated the hacking minigame, right, so she used a lot of EMP nades to bypass locks
so instead of punishing her for SKIPPIGN the SUPER IMPORTANT minigame, the game gave her a perk that doubled the number of EMP nades she could carry

supporting different styles and roleplaying and shit is the strength of the game, for all it's problems

That's something else I loved that I forgot about, yeah. If you want to do things a certain way, it rewards you for it and makes your prefered playstyle easier. That was a cool thing that I enjoyed, and I was honestly surprised by how many things I got rewarded for.