Oblarg

Nvidia driver support? Ha...hahahaha...ha...ha.......ha... The thought that ATI could be worse is pretty scary, actually.

Actually, it appears I have fixed the problem. I had recently installed a rather sketchy CD drive which made unsettling noises when attempting to read disks. Unplugging it fixed the crashes. I have absolutely no ****ing clue how the CD drive was crashing the system, but there you have it.

Damn, I can't access Newegg(speaking of which, are there any other sites like these?) Budget would be 600-1200(peripherals not included) as in, why are the components in the $1200 computer better than the components in the $600 computer? I don't care about HD when it comes to the monitor thing, as long as I can hook up the composite cables plus the audio+ a headphone jack its good.(if its too much trouble then I'll live with just my tv.) I'm interested in learning both performance plus how it works(I want to be self-sufficient when it comes to this) The components in the $1200 computer are better because you had more money to spend on good components. Better parts are, for the most part, more expensive. That's not to say you should judge quality of hardware completely on price, as there are always good deals and bad deals. Anyway, building a computer is very easy. If you can use a screwdriver and have some common sense, it's pretty much nothing more than choosing the correct parts and putting them in the proper place. The "hard" (and I use the term hard very loosely) part is choosing parts that are compatible and then configuring the BIOS to get all your hardware performing optimally (usually all you have to do for that is set the RAM timing). The computer I'm using now is homebuilt, it was the first one I ever made and it has held up for two and a half years with not much more than minor problems. Here are the components of your basic computer: Case Power Supply Motherboard Processor Video Card (possibly integrated on the motherboard, if you aren't going to be doing anything video-intensive like gaming) Sound Card (possibly integrated on the motherboard) Hard Drive RAM

Yes, it is. Especially in real time first person CRPGs. As a old skool player, I can accpet the fact that I have to use 200 bullets to kill corporate drone, but players in general nowadays find it totally retarded. To apply dragon, supermutant or ultimate-robo-o-doom boss fight mechanics to characters like in Alpha Protocol, is a grade A design fumble. What do I care right? I can complite this game without item upgrades, with any spec or difficulty. It's not about us hardcore gamers anymore, it's all about those who play Halo, Gears of War or Modern Warfare. This means Obsidian, just like every other AAA level (or AA) developer, have to do certain things as good as in previous games or even better. We shouldn't compare Alpha Protocol to 2002 version of the Spinter Cell, 1998 version of the Half-Life, nor 1994 version of System Shock. Yet, Alpha Protocol still does things worse then those games in certain areas of the game. Design choice? Sure, but a bad one. Obsidian has alot to offer in chocies, characters and storylines. But those don't mean anything if base game and combat mechanics are up to date. Comparing AP to ME1, it's an improvement in pretty much every field. Comparing it to ME2, the combat isn't quite as good but the narrative blows it completely out of the water. Or did you suddenly forget that the final boss of both Mass Effect games were bullet sponges, as well? You don't need to compare AP to old games to see improvement. On top of that, this is an RPG. The title is Alpha Protocol: The Espionage RPG. It may be wearing shooter clothing, but that's a fad nowadays - it's not supposed to be gears of war, and if it played like gears of war I'd be pretty ****ing disappointed.

I just finished my third playthrough. This is the only recent RPG I can remember playing through three times consecutively without losing interest. So, in short, this game is great, and the reviewers can go **** themselves.

Killing all the predators is never a good thing. We have no wolves left over here in America, and deer are certainly more of a pest now than the wolves were.

It's not panic mongering if it's true. A large solar flare would be...pretty destructive to our society.

I, too, found that much of the criticism is unwarranted. Yes, there are some minor bugs. No, none of them are gamebreaking and most of them are simply graphical. I've run into one or two that involve reactivity, but even with those the game's reactivity is far beyond that of any other RPG I've played recently. The shooting is better than ME1, and the graphics are better than DA:O - oddly, neither of those games were trashed for having the same issues AP does. I think the review that is most consistent with my experience of the game is the 1up review (which gives it a B+).

"He brought his fists to a gunfight." Lol, Championchik.

As much as everyone here has been denying it, there is legitimacy to the complaint about the duality of player skill and character skill. However, it is not at all specific to AP (in fact, it has plagued most action RPGs to date). Requiring both aiming (player skill) and RNG (character skill) is a tough balance to get right - you risk either losing the feel of the game being an RPG (too much player skill, too little character skill), having the shooting being clunky (too much character skill, too little player skill), or having the shooting being frustratingly hard (too much of both). I think AP (once you get your weapon skills up) came closer to balancing it correctly than most other action RPGs have, but the system still needs a few tweaks.

Here's the thing : me too, but others encountered a lot more bugs. Trust me, it isn't that simple and linear when it comes to bugs. I realize this, but I can't make my game more buggy to rate it based on how it would be if it were crippled by bugs. The game I played was easily worth a score in the high 80s.

Dragon Age : Origins has been criticized a lot when it comes to gfx though. Really, trust me, I've heard/read people going all 'the visuals are ****ty', so it's not like this treatment for Alpha Protocol was unexpected. The scores weren't dragged down for it, however. And most of the major game reviews didn't mention it. I doubt that it was the visual presentation that dragged down AP. Not only that, at least, but a whole lot of other flaws (little and big) here and there, like bugginess, wonky camera, clunky controls, unsatisfying shooting (debatable, but that's what a lot of reviewers felt) and an unoriginal story (granted, Obsidian choose to do an unoriginal story, and the narrative is at times incredible for the reactivity but.... some reviewers really didn't care about it.. now that you make me think about it, that's a good point in criticizing certain reviews.. you can't praise Dragon Age's story and then criticize Alpha Protocol's). I'm enjoying the game a lot, but it's not like the reviewers invented the flaws, they're in the game. Here's the thing, though: I've seen maybe five bugs, total. Most of them are minor graphical bugs.

Dragon Age : Origins has been criticized a lot when it comes to gfx though. Really, trust me, I've heard/read people going all 'the visuals are ****ty', so it's not like this treatment for Alpha Protocol was unexpected. The scores weren't dragged down for it, however. And most of the major game reviews didn't mention it.

The real irony is that we're able to set up deep water oil rigs while offshore wind farms (which pose almost no environmental threat at all) meet an absurd amount of resistance.

It's not even subpar compared to recent RPGs - it looks noticeably better than DA:O, for example.

Once again, where are all the bugs these people are complaining about? I'm not seeing them.

Ah, I long for the good old days (and I am young myself, oh my) when not everyone was a graphics whore and games didn't need to sell a million copies to make even for their insane graphical costs... I don't buy that bull****, anyway. AP looks better than DA:O did, and DA:O wasn't labeled as "unattractive."

I disagree. You see, we're also fans of games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Vampire: Bloodlines. Which are games that Alpha Protocol mimic'd in terms of gameplay style. While I think some of the reviews may be harsh, and I have had some people even around work say that they feel the game is "abysmal," I don't deny that the game has faults. The biggest bone of contention with reviewers looking at faults is that they seem to focus and concentrate on the faults so much, while not doing so with other games like Mass Effect (which I feel plays very similar to AP). Maybe there's some bias because ME came first. But I am skeptical. I think if this game had BioWare on the box and not Obsidian Entertainment, I think the review scores will be higher. ANd this is WITHOUT any implied "buying" of higher review scores. The reviews are as they are because the game is very flawed, it has nothing to do with who the developer is. AP has very serious issues with the gameplay and presentation. Mass Effect was flawed, and almost all reviews mentioned those flaws, but that was 3 years ago, standards were different and there was nothing like ME. AP has a good story and good C&C, but that means **** all in today's market if the game is janky, unattractive, etc. The fact that some people are actually blaming BioWare and Mass Effect on AP's low metacritic score is just sad. There's a lot of bitterness on these forums, I've noticed. SEGA marketed the game as Mass Effect with Spies, and that's what the people and reviewers expected, that level of polish. They told the press to call this game Mass Effect + Splinter Cell, literally. They tried to compete and came up way short... Name one aspect of the game that falls behind ME1, please.

I followed this game for ~1.5 years before release, so I was going to buy it regardless. I must say, the initial negative reviews had me worried, but I found them to be mostly unfounded when I actually played the game.

So you just accept best guesses and estimates and made up figures. okay. Whatever you choose for your career, don't be a statistician. You'd hate it. Statistics should be very clear in methodology in gathering data and in the margin of error created from extrapolating the data into the broader population. There are very clear guidelines as to how to do this and generally speaking the mathematics is sound (the typical problem with "lies, damn lies and statistics" lies in the methodology (non random samples is a big problem), trying to obfuscate margin of errors or poor application of the data to non-supportable results). Anyhow, good statistics are fairly different from best guesses and will have some logic behind their provided information. Statistics has more fudging numbers and making questionable assumptions than pretty much any other branch of mathematics. The problems with statistics is typically more a problem of application and data gathering than in the mathematics part of it. That's why people can distort what statistics mean for what they want them to mean and why you should take them with a grain of salt if not presented with methodology and margin of error (and once you read the methodology you may still want to take them with a grain of salt). This is important to this discussion, in my mind, because the debate over global warming isn't really the numbers per se, but how the numbers are gathered, whether the numbers are relevant, and whether they mean what we think they mean. Which is the same problem with statistical data. It's more accurate to say that the mathematics part of it only works if your application and data gathering are sound. The mathematics assumes that you are sampling correctly, and that the samples you get are at least somewhat representative of the population, etc.

Two factors: you have great HD and access times are better than majority of complaining people, or it might be something with game better performing on dual core processors than on quads? We might post a poll in Tech forum and see if people who are having spikes have also something in common hardware-wise. Do you have your game installation on same HD as your system (I mean like default installation path in Program Files)? As I have quite similar configuration, except my processor is quad-core and with lower clock. I might overclock my system and reinstall the game to see if that helps. I'm not having some enormous lag spikes in Clearinghouse, but sometimes (like about every third time or something) it gives me huge lag when buying stuff with crazy HD activity (hence my idea that it has something to do with resources management). HD is just a cheap 320gb seagate drive, nothing special. Installation is on the same HD as system, there's only one drive in the machine. I haven't even defragged the disk in about 6 months. The install was a digital download, if that changes anything. I've experienced no slowdown at all using the clearinghouse.

Pretty much how I see it, as well. The real place where Obsidian pulls ahead is dialogue - BioWare can make a good plot, but they can't back it up with equally strong dialogue, which often detracts from the intensity of the plot. Virmire in ME1, for example, had a great moment in the plot where you had to choose between Ashley or Kaiden, but the godawful dialogue robbed it of any emotional power it would have ("I'M SORRY ASH. I HAD TO MAKE A CHOICE."). Obsidian, on the other hand, has always written absolutely great dialogue to support their games. Kreia in KotOR2 has some of the best lines I have ever heard in a video game - never has any BioWare character even come close. Edit: And if Kreia isn't good enough for you, try Heck. I was falling out of my chair laughing at his emails. This is part of the problem i guess with what im seeing of fans the game who dislike the low reviews. You play and are willing to see past this cracks to the beyond awesome dialog. You have to understand though that it doesn't make a game!. It isn't 50% of the game, it has to be a shooter really. While Obsidian do great with the idea of the RP apart of it, the G part fails a bit. They have had issues with gameplay in general in a lot of the game and need a lot of time to bugfix which they evidently didn't put in. Because of that and how much potential this game had, it is being given hard marks. Not because its being compared, but because i should of stood up and been awesome but Obsidian evidently didn't use the extra time to bug-fix now did they. So the scores are fair, if a little hard based on the feelings of what people think should of happened. If your saying its unfair for the reviewers to of given these hard marks, its more because they thought higher of obsidian with this. There own IP that had its chance to step out and be counted as being BETTER then Mass Effect. So there is your answer really. If its different, id be surprised considering who i work for and how the general view around my office has been with this game. Gunna have to disagree with you there - I found AP to have better gameplay than ME1, by far. Combat with the pistol becomes *very* satisfying once your skill gets above 10 or so. I also encountered very few bugs, all of which were pretty minor, during my playthroughs.

80s German speed metal is great. Gotta love Scanner.

KotOR2 HK-47 is great. HK 47: In a startling turn of events, the sith declared war on the republic. The republic wouldn't stand for it, so they went to war right back Exile: Why did the sith declare war on the republic? HK 47: Answer: Oh who knows, master. It is evident that the sith would like very much to assassinate all the jedi. Which is somewhat equivalent to cultural suicide, since some sith are jedi or were jedi. HK 47: It is much like the circumstance I find myself in now: How do you kill such an integral part of yourself over such ethical differences? HK 47: The answer, of course, is to keep firing until all dissension has been eradicated. ****ing hilarious.

Pretty much how I see it, as well. The real place where Obsidian pulls ahead is dialogue - BioWare can make a good plot, but they can't back it up with equally strong dialogue, which often detracts from the intensity of the plot. Virmire in ME1, for example, had a great moment in the plot where you had to choose between Ashley or Kaiden, but the godawful dialogue robbed it of any emotional power it would have ("I'M SORRY ASH. I HAD TO MAKE A CHOICE."). Obsidian, on the other hand, has always written absolutely great dialogue to support their games. Kreia in KotOR2 has some of the best lines I have ever heard in a video game - never has any BioWare character even come close. Edit: And if Kreia isn't good enough for you, try Heck. I was falling out of my chair laughing at his emails.