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The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, Uncategorized

Alpha Protocol

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Listen to this while reading and prepare yourself for a fairly shallow bout of sheer enthusiasm about a game I like.

If you’ve heard much about Alpha Protocol, an espionage-based RPG from Obsidian, you’ve probably heard things like “It’s okay”, “Buggy”, “Mediocre”, etc. Metacritic shows that the average hovers around 65% (Slightly higher on the PC version), and it generally has failed to inspire, as well as being confirmed not to have a sequel in the works.

You know what I have to say to that?

BULLHOCKEY

Mike Thorton knows how to blend in.

Alpha Protocol is AWESOME. It’s one of the better games I’ve played in the past few years, certainly outside my preferred Strategy genres. Yes, it is a bit rough around the edges due to time and budget constraints and yes, people have reported bugs aplenty (I haven’t encountered anything worse than a graphical glitch myself, but that’s an entirely subjective experience of course). The leveling isn’t perfectly balanced, with pistols and stealth being rather overpowered and some others falling by the wayside.

But these are minor nitpicks in a glorious game. Alpha Protocol has a great cast, a ton of missions, and everything – EVERYTHING – you do has some consequence or another. It might grant you a stat boost, or it might change the entire ending, but whatever you do it’s going to change something. You can choose to kill or spare pretty much anyone in the game, you can take different attitudes towards everyone, and you fight an 80s-obsessed Russian mobster who is coked out of his skull. Unless you do things in a different order and make friends with the right character, in which case you can just poison his cocaine and the fight goes way easier.

The depth and intricacies are amazing and well worth it by themselves, but the gameplay is still perfectly solid even if not exceptional and let me tell you, pulling off a perfect stealth run makes you feel like a total badass. So if you get the chance, don’t listen to the critics, listen to me and play it!

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

Dead Island thoughts

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So as you may or may not have seen, there is a new video out regarding Dead Island, the game which caused some interest and excitement recently with their rather good announcement trailer. The new one features plenty of gameplay footage, so I thought I’d take a look at it and give my thoughts, being a lover of all things shambling and flesh-eating.

Okay. Let me start out by saying that this isn’t Dead Island, this is Left 4 Borderlands: Far Cry Edition. And that’s okay! It does look like a great game, I will almost certainly be picking it up when it hits. But I will admit to being somewhat disappointed because the vibe I got from the first trailer, and from what I had seen of developer comments so far, it was going to be a bit less action-oriented than this and a bit more concerned with survival and so forth.

The one thing that is really bothering me though, is what happens at 2:50. Yes, she blew up a propane tank by throwing a nail bat at it. This really, REALLY pushes my suspension of disbelief over the edge to a jagged cliff far below; I’m all for a game which is action-centered, and I’m all for killing zombies in ludicrous fashion (Hello Dead Rising!) but seriously, come on.

That rant aside, there’s not a huge amount I can find to complain about if the game is taken on its own merits rather than what I was hoping it would be. The animations need work for sure (That kick, oh my), and the HUD is incredibly obtrusive, but really, a game which is centered around open-world zombie slaughter using customizable weapons (“Explosive Homemade Knife of Concussion”) and locational damage? Yeah, I can get behind that. I can get behind that BIG TIME. What will be really interesting to see is how much you influence things on the island and to what extent things can happen dynamically. I cannot begin to elaborate on how much I want a zombie game where you can lose entire quest hubs to zombie onslaughts and you can’t do anything about it.

Another thing I’m deeply interested in is how good their mod support is going to be. A foundation like this means that, with powerful mod tools, even if the game proper doesn’t provide exactly what I’m looking for, it’ll still be possible to implement something like it. Like taking out the ability to detonate propane tanks with melee weapons.