Personal backlog struggle

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Just because you didn't like the gameplay, doesn't diminish it being an RPG.

If one wants a better shooter or sneaker or brawler, look elsewhere. There's lots of better action games out there.

I want a better shooter, sneaker, brawler, ANYTHING where I can save my progress when I want to and then go for a coffe, beer or something or suffer a heartattck so I can resume the game after they give me CPR.

And you're right. There are lots of games out there that are aware of terabytes of free space on my hard drive. A lot of games that don't think I'm playing them on a microwave.

I enjoyed Alpha Protocol a lot. Played it all the way through twice in a row. Terrible 3rd person shooter but great RPG.

The intro levels until you-know-what happens and the game opens up is rather weak. After that Alpha Protocol rocks.

AFAIR it took me ca. 30 hours.

AP is the only Obsidian game I have ever really enjoyed. I would not recommend playing it like a shooter though because the shooter mechanics are indeed pretty weak.
It is a really good stealth game, however. I did a stealthy and non-lethal playthrough which provided a nice challenge and tickled your creative fancy in how to avoid combat or take out enemies non-lethal and silently.
Other than that, I really liked the spy game atmosphere (straight from a Robert Ludlum novel) and the timed dialogues because they fit well into the setting.
The boss fights suck but there aren't that many luckily.
Overall a very enjoyable experience in my opinion, at least if you approach this game as a Thief-like stealth game.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I think Alpha Protocol is a full fledged RPG, with some of the most impactful roleplaying decisions I've ever seen in a cRPG. Not sure what people are missing.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Just because you didn't like the gameplay, doesn't diminish it being an RPG.

If one wants a better shooter or sneaker or brawler, look elsewhere. There's lots of better action games out there.

I didn't mean that as a slight against AP. I'm fully aware that the level of C&C it had could only be matched by a Fallout game or Age of Decadence.

I think my use of the term was highly personal. Call it a pet-peeve but I like my RPGs to have the good old wander-around-town-looking-for-quest-giving-NPCs phase which afaik Alpha Protocol does not feature due to its mission-focused structure. It's also the reason I rambled about IWD several months ago and am now a bit more picky about old(er) games.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I think Alpha Protocol is a full fledged RPG, with some of the most impactful roleplaying decisions I've ever seen in a cRPG.

I think that´s a valid point, though personally when I describe a game as a fully fledged cRPG it means that it, among other things, comes with at least partially open world design and a party of characters. It´s certainly a pretty meaningless descriptor when it comes to telling anything about a game´s actual quality.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Point is, C&C is it's strong point, but it's lacking significantly in other areas. If it wasn't then it would have been a lot more popular around here.

It likely would have, but I think it´s actually a fairly popular game around here - at least to me most of the people who played it seemed to like it. It also ended up at 29th place in RPGCodex´s top 70 list and that in my opinion happens to be a very good list.
I´d add that while its combat gameplay is somewhat lackluster (though personally I wouldn´t categorize it as bad since I actually rather enjoyed going through the game´s levels and I don´t thing its worse than in, say, Bloodlines), the game delivers a kind of experience that can´t really be found anywhere else so, at the very least, it´s not a redundant game.

Also, while it doesn´t excuse the game itself, a quite interesting point is that, according to an interview with an Obsidian dude, the way character stats affect shooting mechanics was SEGA´s mandate, not something Obsidian wanted to do.