Backlog Beatdown: Being some sort of James Bond figure in Alpha Protocol

I’d been aware of Alpha Protocol through several Youtube videos I’ve watched, but the influencer who said it was good to the point of being worth buying was Metal Jesus. I’ve been playing it over the last couple of weeks and managed to reach the end:

Alpha Protocol is an action-RPG, with a greater emphasis on the action than we might expect from an RPG. You play as Michael Thorton, an agent recruited into Alpha Protocol, a clandestine United States Agency. You are sent to a mission in Saudi Arabia to assassinate a terrorist leader; when transpires that all is not what it seems, you go on the run as a rogue agent, working your way across Asia and Central Europe to piece together the evidence you need to clear your name. Along the way, you’ll make friends, enemies, and uncover a conspiracy to cause structural and economic disaster on a huge scale…

The game has two main elements. The first is the action sequences, where you run, gun and stealth your way through a series of field missions. The second is the dialogue sequences, where you have conversations with people, developing your relationship with them depending on what approach you take. How you handle these missions is up to you but for every choice, there is a consequence…

I'm having some faff uploading pictures
so I'm recycling my old ones...

Many games boast that latter point, but in Alpha Protocol it is true. There are three main campaign areas, and countries you visit later make references to the events that happen in the previous ones. How you treat various characters makes a difference to what extent they will support you later. And some people like certain styles of attitude better than others – people rarely respond positively to aggression, but some characters like the professional dialogue, whereas others prefer the confident and suave talking.

All of this promises much, but sadly falls just short of delivering. The action sequences work, but the shooting is a little off. The viewpoint is over-the-shoulder third person shooting, which is great for short-to-mid-range combat, and not much use for anything else. You can create a build that focuses on melee combat, for example, but melee combat in Alpha Protocol is not fluid enough for this to be a consistently good option. Thankfully I’d decided from the beginning that I was going to focus on pistols and assault rifles –the two most standard weapons in the game but the ones that gave me the most flexibility and strategy. Also, the interface is very clunky; even in 7^th generation games it should never take more than one button press to access your map and switching between weapons is a lottery, gambling on which of the directional buttons brings up which menu.

The dialogue sequences work OK as well, although given the huge number of variables involved with making this, there were some slips – talking about in-game situations before I’d found out about them, repeating lines of dialogue from previous conversations, that sort of thing. I’ve managed one playthrough so far so I don’t know how much difference taking different options makes; it would be good if it was substantial, but I’m not hopeful. Nonetheless, it’s voice-acted very well, the graphics look good for their time and the sound is fine, with the Brayko boss battle being particularly memorable!

But it's well worth showing this bit again!

With all that having been said, I’ve really enjoyed Alpha Protocol. I could have used a roadmap to unlock more achievement points by aiming for certain results, but I found it oddly liberating just to play through the game, pick the dialogue options and courses of action that made the most sense at the time, and seeing what happened as a result. I was content to let my mistakes be mistakes, for example one NPC that I had a lot of investment in died near the end of the game because I went the wrong way to try to rescue her. It’s by no means a perfect game, but it’s an experience that relatively few people have had, and one I was very pleased to get to the end of. I’d recommend giving it a go if you fancy doing something a little bit different with shooting and role-playing games.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

Last Week Games: Alpha Protocol and FOMO

On Saturday night I beat Alpha Protocol, which I started to play last week. I’m going to save my remarks on the game for a review that I’m hoping to get out by Friday, but for today I wanted to talk about a concept that has been doing the rounds lately: FOMO, how it applies to Alpha Protocol and why, in some cases, FOMO is justified.

Do you fear missing out on Alpha Protocol?

FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out. This applies to many things including gaming; video games and hobby games. It represents the fear of the idea that the game will become obsolete at some point, so you must spend an ill-proportioned amount of money on it as soon as possible to avoid missing out on the experience it provides. This can lead to several consequences: massive game collections that you may or may not ever play; and rather more seriously some people could put themselves in to major financial difficulty because of their compulsive fear of missing out.

Because, and it’s the simple truth: Games aren’t good forever.

Fortnite is one of the perpetrators of
this with their "Battle Pass..."

If you look after physical games properly, they’ll work forever. But that’s only part of the story. We buy new consoles when they come out, because the consoles we currently own have a limited time before developers and publishers stop making games for them. We have yearly iterations of Call of Duty; which the fan base will buy the week it comes out because that is where the multiplayer community – the lifeblood of any game selling itself on its multiplayer – is going to be. The same is the case with FIFA; once that multiplayer community has moved on to the next game, there’s little reason to stick with the current one. Currently, a lot of the bigger games are doing online events with opportunities to win specific collectables for the game; there’s usually a cost for this but if you don’t pay it then you’ll never get the content; missing out on this is a genuine fear. Personally, I see offers appear on my Steam and GOG wish-lists, where the price of a game that interests me has been reduced – along with the other games in the same series. So, I’ll buy the whole lot knowing that there’s not much chance of buying those games again at the same price. I’ve ended up with nearly a thousand games, and while individually they rarely represent any substantial amount of money, thinking about how much I must have spent in total is something I rarely choose to do.

Lazy to re-use the photo, I know, but it
 turns out this is literally the bit I meant.

How does this apply to Alpha Protocol? While I was researching the last blog, I found that the game had been taken off Steam and other online platforms, because their music license had run out. This was confusing because most big-budget games handle their own soundtracks, so music licensing shouldn’t come into it. That very evening, I played the game again and reached the boss battle with Konstantin Brayko – a Russian gangster obsessed with 80s American Pop Culture, whose fight takes place in disco/ball room with Turn Up the Radio by Autograph blaring out over an overly-large sound system, so that solved the mystery!

I previously mentioned certain games becoming obsolete because the platform those games are played on is superseded by its next iteration. That’s less of a problem than it was in the 90s, because a great many of them are available to download onto PC or the later consoles – but problems arise when we run in to licensing issues like Alpha Protocol. This isn’t surprising; it’s a good game but nowhere near profitable enough for Sega to gain any benefit from renewing the license. But it does mean that if you want to play it now, you’ll have to look for increasingly rare physical copies.

Fear of Missing Out is in many ways an exaggerated effect; the worst it will mean for me is that I won’t get to play one specific game, and it’s not like I’m short of those. But it’s worth considering the issues it raises, how we can miss out on certain experiences if we don’t react to them straight away – and whether it represents a significant problem to those affected by it.

Last Week's Games: The Chameleon, Machi Koro, Alpha Protocol, Absolver

This week there have been a LOT of games, many of which I’ve played for the first time…

A lot of green. But who is the Chameleon?

First, the hobby games. I had The Chameleon for Christmas last year and hadn’t got around to playing it yet. With lockdown still in full swing, organising a conventional gams night is out of the question, however many people are running games online and, with a bit of fiddling around with our phones, social deduction games like this are ideal. There is a secret word randomly generated from a grid, and everybody knows what it is – except one person, the Chameleon. The players then have to say a word that relates to the secret word, including the Chameleon, who must guess what it might be. Then the other players then guess who the Chameleon might be. Five of us played it over Zoom (Kirsty and I took turns in running the game and playing it) and we played for about an hour and a half in the end! 

Nice theme and well presented.

 

Me and Kirsty also had a go at Machi Koro later in the week. I had played this city-building game before at the UK Games Expo in 2015, with one of its expansions, but I’d never played my copy. It is like Monopoly but without the board, and with a far more manageable endgame! You buy various amenities for your city, one and later two die rolled each turn activate certain cards. The aim is to be the first to build four essential buildings for the city, and the first one to do it is the winner – but as most of them are relatively expensive, you’ll need to build some infrastructure to generate money. We really enjoyed the game; not without a few knocks which I might go into detail with later, but it’s accessible, friendly and anybody should be able to have a go with this and enjoy it.

The shooting is a little off but it's
still a pretty fun game.

I’ve been playing some different video games as well. I had a go with Alpha Protocol on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to buy this by Youtube’s Metal Jesus’ hidden gems videos, and as 360 games are usually very cheap now, it was a great time to pick it up. It’s a 3^rd person shooter with some role-playing elements, where you take on the role of a secret agent in an even more secret agency trying to save the world. The strongest point for me is the plot, as it’s well written and voice-acted, and tells an interesting story that hooks you in and conveys a sense of urgency. The gameplay is a little wonky; the enemies take more hits than I would usually expect from a game like this and the interface is a faff, but I’m enjoying it so far, so I’ll keep playing and hopefully see it through to the end.

An interesting martial arts game,
but not a good experience with a poor frame rate.

One game I won’t be coming back to is Absolver. I bought this for the PC on a whim, but it was a massive let-down for me. Not because it’s a bad game – far from it. It is a martial arts adventure game with some deck-building elements, set in a strange and beautiful but curiously empty world. You play a “prospect,” a trainee, who is trying to work their way up to the skills required to become an Absolver. You fight using a combination of light attacks, heavy attacks, weapons, and stances that give you different options for each. It looked good, and I know enough about the developers, Devolver Digital, to know it’s a competently designed game. But it doesn’t run very well on my laptop at all; the framerate is horribly low, and I have no idea why. I’ve made sure my GPU is linked to the game, and my computer is well within the minimum specifications. I may allow for the fact that I’m using the weaker (but more stable!) of my two power leads, but I can’t see the other one making that much difference. Perhaps it’s the mandatory online connectivity; domestic laptops aren’t really designed for this. But a combat system that relies on timing isn’t going to work with a bad framerate, so I’ll shelve Absolver for now until I get an upgrade.