Alpha Protocol iPod Contest

Hope i win

good goood goooood

Turns out i can do simple math! (second attempt)

Really liking the look of this game, hope i win! :D

I've gotten stumped at the major boss fight in Moscow so I'm taking a breather, but what I've played of the game (played three cities before it, including Saudi Arabia) I've enjoyed it. Story feels realistic yet over the top at the same time, as it uses conventions from great spy films and shows, and I almost felt like I was someone like Jack Bauer in 24, doing spy stuff, or even Jason Bourne with the awesome gunfights and martial arts.

The choices you make are time-limited meaning you have to make literally life-or-death decisions in little time, like real life! After all, it's not like you can decide what to say after thinking over the options for two minutes. And those choices come back to either benefit you or harm you, meaning you have to not just shoot like a spy, but think like one. Good replayability, I already feel like a second playthrough or even a third would be in order to really see what I could have done differently.

The problem was the cover mechanics, which didn't really work, which really annoyed me. In games like Mass Effect the cover system is fluid, but here it seems hit/miss and really broken most of the time. Not a good thing since your health matters and you can't regenerate health, which isn't a bad thing in itself.

I liked the name of the protagonist. Usually I prefer creating my own character, my own name, like in Fallout 3 but here, in a story about a spy, "pre-creating" a character and allowing the player to only be able to change cosmetic things like appearance, or being able to only upgrade skills and whatnot rather than being able to massively overhaul my character was a good idea, because it means the story is more concrete and my character matters, because he has a predetermined backstory which affects the game.

I'm playing it on the PC, after preordering it on Steam, and I had no major issues or bugs, except for this one place in Taipei, where I descended down to a sewer of some sort (or something like that) and suddenly the whole place went black, and I don't mean the sewer! I was a little scared my game was corrupted or something, and my save would be corrupted but a reload of the latest checkpoint (which was just before I went down the sewer ladder!) fixed it and I could continue enjoying the game. I've heard others are having issues, either on PC or the consoles, so I guess I'm pretty lucky!

Graphics as most people say are pretty dated, but that's what happens when you delay a game by a year. I still enjoyed it and I must say, when a game is this compelling and enjoyable, the visuals are probably the last thing to look at. Most of the game takes place in your mind, when you live out your epic espionage fantasies anyway. And to be honest, that's all I wanted. And I am impressed, it exceeded my own expectations.