Tigranes

Heck, which country / institution is rich enough to have 130 billion dollars on hand and risk it being smuggled?

Obligatory note for all concerned: please leave your handbags at the door with our strong, stereotypical German bouncer to avoid unpleasant dinner table scenes about who sang My Heart Will Go On on stage when they were twelve and who's got a giant wart on the tip of their nose everybody knows too well to mention. *cough* Coming back to this, I think the games where the save system worked the best and where I was least conscious of / abusing / frustrated about saves were games where even failures, bad / unintended / impulsive decisions or simply surprising developments were exciting enough that I want to see where it goes. I think it comes back to the point that a game should first be made to engage the player no matter what decision he/she makes (which, conversely, makes it even more important for the developer to place sensible limits on the decisions you can make - the belief that completely open free-form play is teh awesum is silly), then the save system or such mechanisms tacked on after. I guess that sort of means that the save system shouldn't play such a big role in proceedings. Hard to think of examples, though. I think a good one is the dialogue you have with Kreia on... Nar Shaddar, I think it was? The dark planet with the railings, the one where you're attacked as soon as you land, and where you can do the races. The one where you come across some cripple or something and you make a decision on what to do, then Kreia lectures you. It was pretty hard to get what most gamers would consider an 'optimal' outcome (the one where the game (Kreia) approves of what you have done and you gain tangible rewards), but no matter what decision you made, you had the chance to justify it to a harsh but fair mistress (Kreia) and you felt like the game had treated you fairly and given you something worth your time. The E3 gameplay footage, which is the one where we can see the checkpoint save system in action the best, demonstrates that (as far as we can see) Alpha Protocol is very intent on, and does a good job of, making you proceed through the missions quickly and always on your feet, making snap decisions and running with it. When you are in a hostile zone with a sensitive mission to carry out (and handlers who are not always your friends) you don't have time to screw around - you have to pick a route and go with it, or be ready to change everything and see how that turns out. As long as AP delivers on what we've seen and provides limitations, choices and consequences that reflect that, a checkpoint system is not so different from a save-anywhere... and perhaps slightly better for discouraging metagaming tendencies. I don't see a need to bring overbearing rhetoric about "defining RPGs", "defining player rights/freedom" or "literally open-ended gameplay" into it. It's just a very realistic question to do with the type of experience AP players will have.

I'd rather they forced the endgame events in order to deliver the story in the sequel actually. Sometimes things happen outside your control. Sometimes you can't just save Khalid. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just when they go too far (e.g. if the ending decisions were as momentous as in MOTB, a 'sequel' doing this wouldn't work) or make decisions that are unnecessary. Personally I'd be much happier if they took Shepard Dies as a canon ending. Do intersting things with that!

I generally go for Samsung, because on price, sound quality and functionality they're basically ipods... but don't look as butt-ugly and don't need you to put up with the idiocy that is iTunes. But then, I have some Korean music as well, so that was another factor. As with anything music, I say you need to have a listen before you buy.

Actually, I wouldn't mind any of that if the actual romance scenes (dialogue, music, sequencing, camerawork) were up to snuff, or at least something you don't need to be embarrassed and disgusted over. The hasty lead-up or the book catalyst only look stupid because the main dish they accompany has this strange putrid smell about it.

Platform / Adventure games are pretty bad with this IMO. The former because there would usually be a series of jumps or timed actions (e.g. from one hanging rope to another), and if you fail the last one you're back from the start - hell, even without checkpoint saves, you usually fall to the bottom or something. The latter, similarly, tends to give you challenges (esp. boss enemies) that need to be tackled in one particular way and order (e.g. hit the back of their googlie mooglie, jump to avoid their boo boo gun, throw the magic rose at their head then do Chopin's rondo with your ocarina).... and hell, sometimes you need to do it 20 times until they die. As you can see, though, most problems with checkpoint saves, for me, are pure design problems on their own exacerbated by badly placed checkpoints. I don't really see a lot of this kind of stuff happening in Alpha Protocol, and that's exactly why I don't have a problem. The only thing I can think of is lengthy dialogue + fight combination (but checkpoints are apparently after dialogue, so fine) and stealth missions (ah, but stealth loses half its suspense if you can creep-save).

If Fable had the best save system in the world it would still be crap, because it's rubbish the first time you play it. Not sure what to add to Enoch's points, because you're now simply repeating mantras like "save anywhere is just AWESOME everything needs to have it or SUCK". I would be interested in reading you addressing some points I made (and others made) when you first fired off those proclamations.

Yet it is taken as an effect in itself in many fields. That's my point about one of the relics of colonialism.

Very much so. Democracy and freedom still occupy very specific and powerful places in our discursive formations. Zakariah (sp?)'s seminal work on illiberal democracies acutely demonstrates how we still have a tendency to pursue democracy as a goal in and of itself. Britain is (or was, till the 80s at least) very 'caste', but God knows where that came from.

I think devs need to watermark screenies with dates. It's a low budget indie game. The threshold should be "does the game hurt my eyes" for technical quality. And AOD no longer does. If you want more... well, it doesn't make any sense.

Awesome alanschu - tell us what kind of work, if not the job description. Second hand Okami has been found and acquired - no Ico anywhere in the country though. I'm really excited. In the last few years I've dug up and played most games I meant to play, and this only leaves Psychonauts (which is still selling at nearly full price ).

Bhabha for hybridity, lest someone fail their googlin'. Shame be on Wals. Big fan of postcolonialism, but are you wanting to discuss anything about it? The issue of indigenous or colonised(hybrid) cultures seeping back into the imperial one is further complicated by the maturity of diasporas throughout the world, now. You can mention popular examples such as the Turkish barbeques in German parks, Indian curry in Britain and the phantasmagoric cultural plane created through Bollywood (which, of course, has sustained an entire cabal of Indian scholars by itself)... but I'm a lot more interested in what will happen when these immigrant societies start to really break bread with their host cultures. Currently you have interaction and some mechanical integration (i.e. at an institutional / economic level), but I'm talking about multiple, organic points of communication opening up between, say, Japanese immigrants and the host citizens of, uh, Canada. i.e. High school / university Koreans sharing their (largely pirated) banks of Korean music, movies and funny videos with Americans; the continuing mainstream-isation of international cinema and literature; more multi-lingual and/or multi-ethnic individuals that can freely participate in various cultures' activities, and so forth. That kind of stuff might very well take shape in the next few decades (barring a true theory-come-to-life destruction of national integrity), and then we will truly begin to see 'post-colonial' hybridities... or, at least, interesting mixes in the 'North' while the 'South' languishes. edit: That, most likely, made no sense unless you've (a) read up on post-colonialism and (b) possess an uncanny ability to decipher poorly written intarweb rants, but dear god I am dying of fatigue.

Well, Ico is practically a lost artifact in New Zealand now, but secured myself a second hand copy of Okami, which is almost as rare. That alone makes my PS2 worth it.

I thought it'd be similar to FO3, where you can make the decision to right at the end. There's no problem if (a) the situation makes sense and there are enough reasons for you to commit to such an act, and (b) if the direct consequences of that action on the world, or the gameplay alternatives offered to you afterwards (i.e. in ME3) were rewarding enough that you feel like you've been on a rollercoaster rather than you've been robbed of something. Of course, FO3 failed at both of these in this particular case, which is why you ended up feeling exactly that, robbed for no reason. It would be interesting if the manner in which it was done here was a bit different, i.e. a galactic trial or falling away into nothingness (a la Eureka Seven).

Yep, rolling checkpoint autosaves of three should be the standard, surely. Or at least IWD2-style saves where autosaves at key spots are made into unique slots.

Ironically, your example doesn't invalidate the immersion argument.

Fallout takes a while to get into, I only played them like, 7-8 years after release (in fact, just before BIS closed). It sort of helped that I started with FO2, because that game has more immediate lulzness. It still took me a weekend when I had absolutely nothing else to do to stick with the game, but once you get into it it is amazing.

I was just going to compare it to Team Ico's work, but apparently that's who it is by. Ghibli-style cuteness + fun platforming = win.

I suppose they're aiming for a later date to start hyping it up, since FO3 is still pumping out DLCs and Alpha Protocol is getting a lot of hype. Maybe NV will start get going near the end of the year.

Tranquiliser dart?

....See the last few posts for the answer? It's not really a question of personal annoyance. Things make a lot more sense when you consider them from the perspective of making a good game, rather than this invective on personal rights and freedom.

The proletariat demands oopdat!

To clarify: the saving during combat was an extreme example. There are many people and many instances where you save before key conversations and play them differently to 'see' all the options, or save before each battle, or save before the completion of each quest, or, in fact, save before any decision you have to make. Why? So that if you aren't satisfied with the consequences of your choice you only need to go back 1-2 minutes at the most. In other words, there is a scale of cost-effectivity when it comes to indulgent metagaming: when the game has given you an economy where the cost of reloading is clearly very low (thus my extreme example of saving during combat), then you are implicitly encouraged to consider chronic reloading as a playing style. Which, of course, cheapens C&C, and in fact is even more disruptive to immersion and game flow than replaying from a checkpoint would be. If you are someone that is never tempted by this anyway then, yes, the checkpoint system would feel like an unnecessary inconvenience. I fully agree with that. I just think that, balancing it all out across all players, for Alpha Protocol, sensible checkpoints won't be that different or better/worse than typical RPG save-anywhere.

Wouldn't really change my opinion about those games, actually. Fallout and the NWN series actually suffered from allowing you to save during combat because this exacerbated the metagaming to the point where you could save after a good critical hit or successful maneuvre, or screw up your quicksave because you hit it immediately before dying. The key thing, though? All those issues are really quite minor. I know the frustration of checkpoint saves because some JRPGs really punish you with them (i.e. some sections in the older Final Fantasies, god bless emulators' save states), but I think they have their place. Realistically/frankly speaking, save systems do implicitly nudge you towards playing in a certain way, there's no ifs about it... edit: I forgot to read Dagon's post above, but his sentiment is exactly what I was addressing here. A game experience is built out of a combination of things. Your desire and what you want to do in a game, and how that game is built and presented to you, aren't often separate things that can be cleaved like that. They work in tandem and influence each other. If we really committed ourselves to a blind 'freeeeeedom for the player' style of game design we'd end up ruining the experience for ourselves because of the sheer level of indulgence. To a degree, playing a game, like watching a film, is about understanding and submitting yourself to how the general architecture the creator has designed. ...If Alpha Protocol's focus is on a dialogue system where you have to make decisions quickly, situations can spiral out of control and there are lots of multiple paths to be taken, I really have no issue with a checkpoint system - I envisage that I would very rarely reload this kind of game, anyway, because the game is built towards, and rewards you, for playing in that way. The combat is probably not the kind that kills you with a single bad move or has extremely long, gruelling sequences, either (I mean, what if you had to fight Kangaxx with a checkpoint system?). There's still merit for arguing save-anywhere in any game, yes, but to call it a deal-breaker for any game or a 'defining feature of RPGS' is a major exaggeration IMHO. Unless the checkpoints were absolutely draconian.

Makes sense Sawyer. Are you able to tell us whereabouts in that context the CQC we saw in the E3 stealth playthrough is, though? i.e. Was Thorton, and his CQC skill, about where you would expect most players to be at for that area in the game, or underdeveloped, or buffed up for the demo? Were we seeing The Best of Mike Thorton CQC there, or a 'level 1' performance, or somewhere in the middle? I thought the CQC looked fine, especially liked how the other guy was trying to shoot you anyway but kept being disrupted and misfiring. I think the most important thing for me in terms of how it looks/feels is how the guy being beat up on reacts to it.