Sid Nitzerglobin

Cool, guess it's off to Taiwan for me next then.

I can only speak for the 360 version personally, but I have had very minimal technical issues so far. These amount to a couple of second long stutters in a particular mission area and texture pop-in that is pretty much equivalent to that of ME1. Many of the animations aren't of the greatest quality and the shooting mechanics aren't exactly silky smooth, but I don't believe these are technical issues so much as design/execution choices. If you're primarily an RPG fan and not expecting AP to have GoW/Borderlands/ME2/MW2/etc. style shooting mechanics or the absolute cutting edge of visual presentation, I'd say go for it. The story, characters, and gameplay seem to take a little bit of time to get moving, but I am pretty damn drawn in at this point and having a good deal of fun. Well worth the purchase, in fact I might wind up buying a copy for PC as well at some point in the future.

Nice, remember where that became available?

So far I would vote AR based on the range and armor penetration advantages, but I haven't really played with the shotgun extensively (especially not against bosses).

The armor upgrade is named Printed Circuitry. It's around $4K and available right off the bat in Saudi IIRC. Definitely worth it IMO.

Just to revisit after spending some more time w/ the game, computer hacking seems ~10 times easier after getting the second rank in Sabotage and buying the printed circuit armor mod (bypass and lockpicking as well, these two are pretty much too easy now). I wound up hacking several of the computers in the before the first timer was up.

My second mission in Saudi is where I started having fun. Can't comment too much on the technical or UI issues as I wound up getting the game for 360 and the worst I've seen so far is a couple of 1 second lags coming out of and a good deal of texture pop-in (around the same level as ME1). I would agree that computer hacking mini-game is pretty annoying (even on the console, sounds like it and the other mini-games are worse on PC due to mouse/interface issues). The others are decent, although hopping between traces on the bypass game could be a lot faster. At least EMPs and the interference skill gives a relatively easily accessible workaround. The mechanics of the game definitely don't seem to want you to play run and gun, even if you're taking the Rambo approach to Mike's build, and I would imagine it would be extremely frustrating to use this play style. Seems like the game is set up to reward preliminary threat assessment, tactical planning, and relatively careful execution of triggered skills/aimed shots from cover or stealthy CQC take downs. I'm only 4 missions in at the moment and haven't really played with a tanked-up toughness type so I could be totally off base here, however. So far I'd have to agree with the sentiment that people will have a much better time with AP if they are able to discard the idea that ranged attacks in this game play out in any way similar to a shooter and try to approach it as a more or less purely stat-based RPG that happens to have your character using firearms. I guess you need to be able to enjoy stat based RPGs in the first place for that to really help though. As it stand right now, with the 5th level of pistols, controls seem way too clunky and the statistical penalties for anything but the most maxed out aimed shots seem way too significant to do much more than waste ammo and trigger alarms. Does the ability to pull off effective snap/running shots get any better with additional skill/mods/better guns? I would imagine it should to some degree, but not sure how much exactly. CQC and grenade lobbing seem to be faring a lot better under the action RPG approach so far.

After a night with the computer hacking mini-game it's like I don't even see the code anymore. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead ... Seriously though, I don't think I would make it through this game if it weren't for EMPs/interference. Lockpicking and bypass are fine and the overall concept of hacking isn't exactly rocket surgery, just very hard on the eyes and kinda frustrating to me. Meh, at least they gave us a way around it that doesn't require too much investment of AP/cash.

Judging from those screens, AP would have to be like the most graphically awesome PS2 game ever conceived. Like SCEA engineers from the year 2050 came back in time and sprinkled powdered unicorn horn on the code to make it render magically delicious on the PS2. Definitely looks like there's a good deal of negative hyperbole re: the graphics floating around in some of the reviews to me.

So AP makes great bounds forward in jiggle physics? That alone should cement it a place in gaming history alongside VtM:BL and DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball. In all seriousness, I will be pleasantly surprised if I get the same level of enjoyment from AP as VtM:BL.

Yeah, Please elaborate a bit. I'm planning to pick up my pre-order from GameStop tonight after work. Will go riding instead if I'm not going to be able to play it until a hotfix is released.

Never read these, not heard much about them that really interested me. Does sound like a kinda weird arrangement to me. I'll root for it to work out well for Obsidian though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ioslNR0WiI Between 1:47 and 1:50. Also, like Grom I'm playing on 360 with an imported (level 60) character. By the end I had maxed out the paragon meter, only had a few renegade points and no blue options were ever greyed out for me. OK, that is freaky.

By June or it's going on the scrap heap.

Gamestop.com is now showing a street date 6/1/2010 If true, that definitely sounds like a "take off and nuke the site from orbit" kind of situation to me.

I'm in much the same boat but add in Forza 3 as well... This has pushed me over the edge to go ahead and get Arkham Asylum anyways. 4.5 months without a new game is just to too long for me apparently.

If true, the delays in the industry overall are getting kind of ridiculous, but oh well. Seems like all these games will be packed in awfully close and there are only so many games most people will buy at once. This has to make it pretty difficult for any individual game to attract an audience outside of its standard market. Hopefully this means things will be well polished and debug-ified at least.

I pretty much only buy games via pre-order (for the PC anyways) whether I get bonus items or not. I don't personally understand people having an issue with them existing in single player games but then again there's lots of other things I don't understand about people as well I suppose... PC version not getting the same stuff as console versions is a bit of a put off however.

Seems pretty even handed for a preview. As mentioned, if I was an RPG fan who hadn't heard of AP or Obsidian some how, this would certainly have me interested.

The goggles... they do nothing!!!

It does sound extremely positive. Anyone else notice the September 25th expected release date?

Yeah, I noticed that in the conversations w/ Sie, but seemed like the majority of footage used the Suave/Aggressive/Professional/Honest/Friendly/etc. stances from my recollection. It'll be interesting to see how often you get to select summaries vs. stances.

I think the dialog wheel is kind of key to the cinematic approach. It looks like its implementation in AP as stances in most situations will make the flow of conversations even tighter. Changing the options available to only stances/tones rather than short sentence summaries (even if some of them point to the same VO or are predictable as to what "alignment" they are associated w/ by their position on the wheel) would take a bit more of the control over the character out of the players hands IMO. The traditional full text selection dialog mechanic certainly allows much more control over the character (and potentially deeper role playing as a result), but also runs counter to a goal of flowing conversations (in addition to being a potential turn off to those w/ an aversion to reading a bunch of text in their games). I'm in the same boat as far as not really having an opinion over what's "better". For me it all comes down to what best serves the type of experience the game is trying to convey . I can appreciate both the cinematic and traditional approaches in RPGs personally.

Pics or it didn't happen....

Beginning of October would be perfect by me, assuming it's "finished". Would give me a few weeks to play through it before DA:O hits. I'm no MBA but I definitely wouldn't want to see it delayed to anywhere near the drop dates for ME2 or Splinter Cell. Seems like they need to get it out by mid November to me, again assuming it's done. Not having any system requirements or new footage coming up on a little over 2 months before release makes me a little wary though.