Cycloneman

Well, there is the possibility that PCZUK was incorrect in naming "hacking" and "electronics" as two different skills, but it has never been explicitly stated that there was a stealth skill. I had also assumed that it was a skill until I got a list of eleven skills including it. The number of skills was established as an even ten in the GI article, with a direct quote from Chris Parker.

It wasn't disclosed all at once; that list is a compilation of information from multiple sources. There is a tiny (but extant) possibility that "Hacking" and "Electronics" are the same; however, they appeared simultaneously in one article, so... Also, Toughness may simply be a subskill of a larger set, like athletics. Just "flirt" and the stance.

You are correct.

So, I was kind of annoyed at the very lackluster amount of data at the new website, so I put this together. It's a collection of data from a wide number of sources, but I didn't go to the effort of sourcing them all. If you want the source for a particular statement, I can find it. Alpha Protocol is a third person spy RPG with a lot of choices being presented to the player. In it, you play Michael Thorton, a superspy who is sent on a mission which goes horribly wrong; in the aftermath of it, you must escape to someone else's network of safehouses and try to find the people who burned you. Your character has the following skills: 1. Shotgun 2. Assault Rifle 3. Pistol 4. Unknown Firearm 5. Hand-to-Hand 6. Gadgets 7. Hacking 8. Lockpicking 9. Electronics 10. Toughness They can be leveled up ten times, and their effects are not wholly incremental; leveling up allows access to unique abilities. For example, Chain Shot is a special ability that is accessed by leveling up pistols. Good news! No diplomacy skill! Your experience in the social arena is also different from other games. Rather than providing an options menu that you can wait at for a year, the game forces you to choose between three choices rapidly. These three choices are linked to three buttons on the gamepad, and you can switch between them as the other character talks. Each choice corresponds to a general "stance;" a calm, professional stance, a impatient and angry stance, and a cool, suave stance. You can choose to adopt one stance for the entire conversation, leaving you to wait it out. In addition to the stance you choose having an identifiable pattern, there will also be a word or short phrase describing its effect onscreen, such as "flirt" or "bribe." Another key difference in Alpha Protocol's interaction system is that you won't be confused about the results of a choice and be forced to reload. Instead, you will be given dossiers on the characters you encounter before interacting with them. Many choices in the interaction system will have long-term effects. For example, if you choose to kill a Marine in one early sequence, you may later be attacked by his buddies in a later one. There will be a large number of romance options which are not mutually exclusive. All, or almost all, of the women in game will be romanceable. Known Mission Information: • There will be a mission that takes place in Saudi Arabia where Michael is supposed to capture an arms dealer. • There will be a mission that takes place in a US Embassy and involves marines and an old buddy of Michael Thorton. • There will be a section of the game involving neo-conservatism and an out-of-control military-industrial complex. Woo! • There will be a stealth mission taking place in a corporate office.

It certainly looks like there will be reloading, given this post from the Consolidated Infinite Ammo thread a while back.

A vote for the Democrats is a vote for responsible spending. Take a look at this graph. Who's the responsible spenders here?

Why don't you show me these studies? You're the ones making a claim. I'm not doing your research for you.

Evidence?

What's wrong with polygamy, huh? It's even in the Bible. Jacob (AKA Israel) had multiple wives, and he had a whole nation (God's Chosen) named after him!

I've always prefered third person, since it prevents me from walking backwards into walls and getting killed while I try to back away further. It's far to difficult to tell when you've hit a wall on your backside in a FPS, especially with the way that backing into a wall often causes your character to move (albeit much more slowly) to one side.

The thing is that evolutionary theory, just like any other theory, will not be killed by a single outlier. It would require a systematic observation of improperly located animals; rabbits in the pre-cambrian, trilobites in the modern era, velociraptors coexisting with woolly mammoths, on a consistent scale. If we found one human in the pre-cambrian, we would just call it an outlier. Perhaps it was somehow deposited far deeper than it belonged. Perhaps it was a time traveller. We would no more abandon evolutionary theory due to that than we would abandon the theory of gravity because one object temporarily defied it. If a ball fell up, we wouldn't just throw out gravity; we have huge masses of evidence. We would call that ball an outlier, since the purpose of science is to describe, and gravity describes the universe pretty well..

I really hated the whole system for romance. I guess I found it too easy, all in all, but maybe that was the point. Oh wait, I forgot, I haven't gotten the chance to play Alpha Protocol.

I will answer this question with a brief explanation of probability, since it is a beautiful thing. Let's say you're playing poker, and you draw a hand. What are the odds of you getting that *particular* hand? Well, I'll tell you: one in two million five hundred ninety eight thousand nine hundred sixty. That's a 1/2598960 chance! Do that a few more times, and all of the sudden your outcome is less likely than those primitive nucleotides arranging in order! And you expect me to believe your theory of random drawing? Preposterous! I hope you learned something: anybody can make a particular event seem completely improbable by phrasing their words correctly. The arrangement of organic chemicals are not completely random. There were, most likely, a massive number of "attempts" made at creating the original cell before it succeeded. Add that to the fact that we don't even know how many "right answers" there are, and your statistic is just nonsense.

Evolutionary theory is about the speciation process and the elements behind it (natural selection, mutation). The abiogenesis process is completely different. Spontaneous generation is a historical, now discredited, scientific theory about the creation of large-scale life like flies and aphids. Abiogenesis in modern theory is the creation of autocatalyzing primitive RNA molecules from surrounding chemicals.

Golden mean fallacy. Show me a society which adopted an extreme form, that demonstrated enduring stability Show me a society which demonstrated enduring stability.

Funcroc, how the hell do you find all this stuff so fast?

Golden mean fallacy.

I can't believe they're turning CoD back into a WW2 shooter. CoD4 was ORGASMIC.

There's nothing wrong with irradiated food, especially not that of a mutated animal like the Brahmin. "Ooh, two hundred years ago this animal's ancestors were irradiated, leading to genetic mutation? I guess I'll get a disease if I eat it." BZZT. Actually, Brahmin meat would probably be safer than normal meat, since the biological processes of Brahmin have obviously changed, thus causing bacteria or viruses that might be capable of human-cattle transmission but not human-cattle-brahmin transmission to be unable to be gotten from the meat. Further, even if Brahmin meat was to be irradiated, that would mean there was significant background radiation, and you would be in greater danger just walking around. Further, even if the Brahmin was to have walked into a damaged microwave factory and been irradiated just an hour before you ate it, that would actually be beneficial since it would've killed off most of the bacteria that might have been living inside the Brahmin.

I don't believe you. Prove it.

That's simply untrue. If it were, why are so many "Intimidate" options simply "Act Like A Colossal Wanker"? How does it get your job done any better if you sow dissent in your crew with racist statements? How does it get your job better if you insult your crewmembers or the people you're trying to help?

Remember playing scavenger hunt for every single item of food in the entirety of Deus Ex? I do.

"Innocent" - How I hate that word. Nobody is truly innocent, dammit. Nobody! That's just something people say to justify mass-murder, torture, or any number of other things. "Well, nobody's perfect, ergo nobody's innocent." Innocence does not require perfection; merely the lack of responsibility. These people were "innocent bystanders;" they had done nothing to earn what happened.

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You do realize that terrorism does exist, and the United States does, in fact, kill terrorists in other countries? Heck, it might not even be foreign terrorists that committed the act; after all, Thorton gets falsely thrown out really early on, and the missile is a US one. Anyway, this really isn't "good information," Mr. Rorie. Almost everything that's on that website has been seen before.