Pop

Send me your email addy.

Because I got in touch with the guy and he's said he'll stick to his word. Lemme know, I'll pass it along.

Steam is a platform that runs under games. You sign in to play whatever you've got installed through it.

The AV Club gives it a C, applauding ambition but knocking it based on bugs. Surprise cameo appearance by an ex-Obsidz dev in the comments!

Everyone in a position to have actually seen the game, genius.

Everyone's saying that it's awesome... I don't know, I played all of the first 10 minutes of Dungeon Siege 2 before permanently shelving it (which was memorable as that was the first time anything like that had happened to me with a game). Could this really be that "game that AP should have been", per that Joystiq commenter? It does have Zeits and Chapman at the helm, so.

That's not the point though, the point is that if a player is given something more powerful than a constantly jamming .38 snubnose or a dull butter knife, he is being sucked up to, by the developers.

The pretty excellent media review site Popmatters gives it an 8/10.

They were up awhile back. There was also some rudimentary animation. It was basically the dwarves from Snow White in 3D.

I certainly won't.

I'm being told there's a Tim Rogers review of AP out somewhere, and I want to read it because I feel like it's probably going to be a trainwreck with some surprisingly cogent design criticisms nestled amongst all the loquaciousness. His site was the only pro review site to take Mass Effect 2 to task for Bioware's design philosophy and *gasp* review it on second playthrough. Tim Rogers is sort of like Roshambo from NMA, with a stoned spaciness in place of Rosh's bottomless, curdled spite.

Given all the legal tussling that D&D is going through with Wizards of the Coast and Atari, I don't think we'll see another D&D game anytime soon. Signing on to make one would certainly be an unwise business decision for Obsidz.

I had SMGs as my secondary weapon skill (behind martial arts) on my first run and they seemed fairly useless.

Someone (either Rorie or Josh) said that any potential AP sequels will utilize UE3.

See, I haven't run into any major bugs at all in my first playthrough in the game, at least on PC. I think the whole "Obsidz = good writing in a bad game" is a media narrative more than anything else. I don't feel like AP is particularly buggy. I don't feel like the AI is particularly bad relative to any of the other games I've played (nobody bitches about, say, Red Dead Redemption AI).

Because he reads it? It's a comment on a blog post, not a press release. Ironically enough (perhaps bad for him) the comment's got press release legs - I've gotten a number of email flags of it being written up on news sites as what amounts to an official denial of the game's quality by Obsidian (it's basically "Ferg **** talks Sega over canceled Aliens game" redux). For all we know, this thread might have more to do with that glut of blog posts than the original comment. If he is real and being honest, and he probably is because there's no one who would have real reason to lie about something like this, I don't really have a problem with the comments. The game is officially out now, and people are entitled to opinions about it, even if they worked on it. You can whip up all sorts of amusing, ripe talk of his integrity as a person with an alias, but all things considered I would rather there be honesty out there than not. If being truthful about development trouble and the like required an open "official" admission, we would view game development as a universally awesome experience only occasionally hampered by unforeseeable, unpreventable issues. There's too much at stake to openly suggest otherwise. I mean, for example, has Obsidian ever come out publicly regarding KOTORII development and said "we got screwed for time", even though by all accounts that's exactly what happened? I would reckon that it was private or anonymous discussion of the development that led to the common knowledge of how messed that was. One of the reasons I like Josh as much as I do is because he's been pretty up-front about how wacky NWN2 development was. You can't be a good manager (or a good artist) if you're not critical of your own work. Go back and read into the development history of a lot of the Black Isle games. Game development is tumultuous. We know from MCA that there were two different versions of AP made prior to this one. The comment's account is definitely plausible, even if the view of Parker is definitely sour (which in itself does not mean that Parker wouldn't be responsible for systems turning out the way they did).

Awareness is an activated ability until the 5th increment of the stealth skill is purchased. It starts off as something that all agents get regardless of stealth ability, lasting 20 seconds. 2nd increment stealth knocks up the duration to 60 seconds or so, and 5th increment make it a universal, passive ability.

I'm pretty certain I know who the guy is. He seems like a solid guy, but he definitely wasn't afraid to speak his mind when it was perhaps prudent not to. I ran into him in the comments to an article in the AV Club, where AP came up somehow. He didn't identify himself, but the profile avatar is the same as the guy's old account here. He indicated that his split with Obsidz was acrimonious, but in those comments he seemed pretty supportive of AP, at least to a point. The Joystiq comment seems consistent, really.

Yeah, so far the Brayko fight is the hardest in the game. He basically gains Vampire Celerity at one point and charges you. You can indeed get Heck to ship in spiked cocaine (if you did Taipei prior to Moscow) and it hurts him when he snorts, but I'm not sure how much difference it makes, this being my first playthrough and all. He killed me 3 or 4 times, I got a little better each time, but then he hit a snag (the only bug I've seen in this game not having to do with the occasional omniscient guard) and just stood in front of the stage facing away from me. When he got top about 1/3 of his health my CQC stopped doing any damage at all to him (he may have been stuck on permanent block or something), so I just unloaded 3 full SMG clips into his back and beat him. Don't know how I would've done it had the bug not shown itself.

Most of the way through the game now. The encounters and scenes shown to me by Obsidz two months ago didn't show up in my playthrough. There is a fair bit of branching in the middle of the game, and most of it has to do with the context of your missions - I went Taipei - > Rome - > Moscow, and as a result I've had a relationship with the G22 through most of the game, but only the last few missions with the VCI. Had I switched up the order of things, that would be different, and the things I'm doing and the way I'm doing them would be different. There have been a few interesting twists, and a few tour de force conversation pieces (with one character in particular), and for a first-time action RPG Obsidz have really outdone themselves - Stealth is pretty good especially at higher levels, which is hard to pull off, and weapon combat is, as I said, better than ME1's but not quite as polished as ME2's. I haven't run into any bugs at all besides the obligatory UE3 issues (some momentary texture pop-in, etc.) The reviews are trickling out even though there's an embargo till the 1st. Most seem to be around the 80's as expected, though some have gone lower. Gamespot gave it a 6/10 and G4TV gave it a 2/5. 1Up gave it a B+ and it's a surprisingly good review. Anyway, more thoughts upon completion.

Big boss kills are done in cutscenes, so it doesn't really matter how you whittle their health down. "Mini-bosses" (ex. Triad Bosses in Taipei) can be stealth-incapacitated or martial art'd just like normal enemies.

Yeah good luck with that.

The game is set in 2009. I noticed the '77 thing as well, I think it's supposed to be '97. I blame Matt MacLean.

Don't worry about it, the Gamersgate one was actually the 4th copy of the game I'd purchased.

I was gonna go with a "no comment" but you just had to let the cat out of the bag, eh? Yeah, it's out. And I'm loving it thus far.