Alpha Protocol - Making nerdy kids cry with no Sis romance

Been awhile since I posted something, first of all I want to start off with. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE. I finished the game and I checked around on the internet to see what would be new with a new veteran play through but all I find is people whining that they can't romance Sis. First of all, you already can romance four other people already. You have the redhead reporter, the German big breasted masochistic chick that loves it when you call her a bitch, treat her like shit and gets horny when she remembers the scars you gave her when you shot at her, some dumb blond, and a transsexual chick. Why the fuck do you wanna bang the 16 year old mute chick. Pedos, all of them.

So what is Alpha Protocol? Well if you haven't seen the millions of commercials on TV, you're a secret agent out to discover a huge global conspiracy and save the world. Whats funny is the commercials keep going "pre-order and you get more guns! You need more guns to save the world!" No you don't. You just need a pistol. I've been using the same gear at the start of the game and at the end of the game and there are no difference. You just need to learn talents and learn the overpowered abilities. You can also abuse glitches and other things.

Remember Velvet Assassin with its broken stealth system? Well, this is a billion times worse. Stealth is based on sound, and vision. With talents into stealth you learn concealment, which reduces the chance of enemies seeing you. And if you wear stealth armor you make less sound. Therefore, if you were to sneak up to someone in broad daylight stand in front of them just inches to touching them, pull out a gun point at their head and fire it off, they won't see you. And with a silencer, no one else will near you. Which is funny because enemies don't give a shit about their allies. When you see two people stand beside each other with rifles in their hand staring at you. You pull out your trusty pistol shoot one in the head, the other would stand there while his buddy drops on the ground and dies. Then you shoot him on the head and both guards are dead and you can "sneak" into the base.

However sometimes the opposite is true. You're sneaking behind an obstacle and from 50 yards away a guy sees you. What the hell did he see? Do I have a shoot me sign glowing above my head? One thing you need to watch out for is ladders. If you are near a ladder and you're running from enemy gunfire and you touch it accidentally, you'll spend 3 seconds to position yourself and start climbing. To get off and back into the gunfire it takes you 3 seconds to get off the ladder and reposition yourself to pull out a gun. During that time if you're not dead you'll probably lose all your health. And you want to know what the most stupidest glitch I've seen is? The game is a third person shooter, which means your camera is always behind your dude. So I pulled out my pistol and aimed at an enemy in the head and just when I was about to fire a guy walked behind me blocked the screen with the cross hair on his back. When I fired, the bullet magically appeared behind me and shot the guy behind me and killed my ally causing people to be pissed off. WTF happened? If you position yourself where you are behind an obstacle and your crosshair can still see and you fire it off. You can shoot through rocks, walls, crates, computers and more while all their bullets get blocked. However, if you're shooting a target behind an obstacle and his head pops up no matter how many shots you take at the head, it will always be blocked by the obstacle.

And for the worst glitch possibly made, if you were to die and you hit reload. None of the objectives will appear and you'll be stuck in limbo waiting for it to spawn. You'll have to hit load game, load last auto save and then all the objectives will load. What is the point of that? Just to piss you off more. The game is horrible with balance too. First of all why are all the enemies completely retarded? When an alarm goes off and you run over to turn off the system all the enemies immediately go "Oh alarm is off lets stop looking for him and head back to our positions and start jerking off." Yeah that's probably what they're all doing anyways. All the stationary targets do nothing but wait for you to kill them. The patrol targets aren't much smarter if you shoot one and another walks by they'll run over to the body to check if its alive and then you can shoot him in the head. Repeat that until you get a pile of bodies and all the patrol are dead then sneak in and silent kill the stationary targets. If they were the Russian mafia they MIGHT be that stupid but come on most of the enemies aren't mafias they're the CIA, KGB, Chinese Secret Police, Interpol, and Alpha Protocol secret agents. Really? Can't they find someone smarter than a 5 year old to join their team? This is an insult, a disgrace.

If you want to be an asshole, you'll be a spy type character. With high stealth levels you can learn "Shadow Operative" A talent that you can use every 2 minutes which gives you permanent invisibility for 30 seconds. When you hit that you can start running and walking over and silent killing everyone with a knife. In 30 seconds you can clear the whole room and no one would know you're there. This works for bosses as well. They can't see you but you can't silent kill. That's where you pull out your pistol and use "Chain Shot." With a pistol you can learn a talent for critical shot which gives you like 2.5x more damage. You can do a critical shot if you hold your cross hair on a enemy for a few seconds. After that the cross hair becomes red and you know that your next hit will do 2.5x damage so a critical head shot would be a silent kill with a silencer. with chain shot time stops for 30 seconds. You can queue 6 shots and then time will resume. So you can shadow operative over to the boss kill all his lackeys and then point the pistol to his head chain shot load 6 critical head shots and the boss dies instantly.

Of course they also give you retarded fights like the helicopter that fires endless missiles and you have to hit it with like 5 direct hits of the RPG and like 30 rounds of bullets from your pistol to finally get it to crash. If you were to shoot it behind an obstacle the RPG explodes for some reason and you die. Fuck that shit.

Glitches aside there's also the annoying framerate stutter and mouse issues. Which can easily be fixed by using this in APEngine.ini (Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config)

MinSmoothedFrameRate=20
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=30
OneFrameThreadLag=false
UseBackgroundLevelStreaming=false
OnlyStreamInTextures=true

That should solve a bunch of the stutter making it a bit more playable.

The story for the game itself isn't that bad. Think of it as a international super spy movie and your the main character. You can act out your character differently however you want it to. All actions carry consequences. You can be sauve, you can be professional, you can headbutt people and break wine bottles over their head, or you can just shoot everyone you see. The game changes, the ending changes, you lose out on guns/quests/stuff or enemies get stronger, new allies etc etc. If you're into that kind of stuff I would advise you to try out this game, just don't expect much out of the combat. Overall decent story, shitty game play.

Assassin's Creed 2

The best thing I can say about Assassin's Creed 2? It's longer.
The worst thing I can say about Assassin's Creed 2? It's longer.

Depending on whether or not you found Assassin's Creed 1 either enjoyable or tediously repetitive, AC2 can be either awesome and a direct improvement, or an even more arduous test of endurance.

The AC series has always been about nebulous answers to paranormal/sci-fi questions put into a backdrop of cinematic parkour through a historic urban landscape. In achieving this, AC2 does excellently, and I think it can be universally accepted that Renaissance Italy was much more appealing than the grime and dirt of feudal France presented in its predecessor. AC2 is a sight seeing adventure, but when it comes to completing missions, the same worn path from AC1 awaits you.

Again, many missions are simply run in and assassinate, either detected or undetected. I found myself planning an attack even less than before, simply using an elevated pounce or a quick dash from a concealed area to close the distance between the target and myself, ending in a quick kill before I'm noticed. Unfortunately, it still doesn't feel very 'assassin-like', as I alert every guard in the city right as soon as I murder the target.

You'd think the developers would want you to assassinate without EVER being revealed, but it's not the case in AC2, as the pounce/dash-kills are astonishingly easy to accomplish, and getting away from the guards are simply a matter of time. It's simply not worth spending time planning a perfect assassination, even if there was such a possibility. (There is no such possibility by the way, most kills will auto-trigger an alert, and it is part of the mission to escape capture after a kill. Sometimes, the kill will end the mission and warp you out, even though you see thousands of guards swarming you after your less-than-covert tactics.

There's a lot more content than before, and definitely more areas to explore than before, and sidequests and items to collect along the way. However, I feel that they took a rather bland approach at extending the replayability of the game, since the sidequests are shallow and often the same thing: beat up a philandering husband, or win a race. 20 hours of those sort of quests are rather mindnumbing... You keep hoping that the next sidequests will be more fulfilling, but they never are. Yet you can't see the next quest until the previous ones have been completed, despite them have no relation in the slightest.

This time, Ubisoft actually progresses the story in a meaningful manner. You have a rather boring and predictable vengeance story told from the perspective of Ezio Auditore, but it is overlaid over the real story: (spoilers) impending cosmic doom foretold by extinct, malicious deities. Unfortunately, the latter portion is told through riddles picked up by exploring optional areas of the game, so a casual playthrough would unveil literally nothing until the final cutscene of the game. That is the worst storytelling: not telling anything at all. I think it is nice to have extra tidbits the player can get by going the extra mile, but the ACTUAL story shouldn't be entirely concealed.

Bottom line: AC2 is okay, it is an adequate sequel, but it won't turn any heads for anyone who wasn't impressed by the first game. It quite a faithful (if not unoriginal) sequel that doesn't try to deviate much from the original formula. While that sounds like a negative connotation, it isn't. That's pretty good praise considering the franchise in question here.