Fallen Ghost

This game has the worst AI I've seen in an RPG......in some areas the enemies are literally surrounding the room facing the walls and I can sit in the center of the room all day....they'd never know. Then in Surkov's case....he just likes to stay out in the open and absorb as many bullets as he can as enemies spawn all around him. Then the plot holes and the bugs and all the rest....yeah it's pretty bad until you get used to the work-arounds which may not be worth your time.

I wasn't talking about difficulties....I was talking about game stopping and game ruining experiences. I've played RPGs for years and have played nearly every major RPG released since KotOR in 2003.....no RPG ever had a broken tutorial an no RPG drastically increased the difficulty of a critical to mission advancement minigame, all of a sudden and for absolutely no apparent reason 80% through the game....doing 12 nodes in 20 seconds cannot be done with a controller because you need to cycle through all the nodes between the one elected and the one you need to cut.....shifting from the left/right to the center takes well over a second and spotting the next number also takes a bit as they are all badly scrambled. Not to mention the plot holes, misleading achievement descriptions where doing what the a achievement says is literally going to guarantee you won't get it(Judge Jury and Executioner just to name one). This game deserves and owns its lowers scores.....no RPG I ever played had quite as many broken parts.

At first glance AP looks like it doesn't deserve all the low ratings but the more you play and the more you experiment around with the different skills and mechanics the more you see what a broken game it is once you start making bad skill development decisions....an experienced RPG player will test around a bit at the beginning and use prior knowledge from other RPGs to get through the game without noticing the broken parts....I almost completed a whole playthrough when the game decided it was a good idea to make me absolutely 100% need a skill I never needed before in order to advance the game 2 missions before the endgame. After that experimentation and testing with the less than optimal skill development choices combined with the poor bordering on broken way they behaved led me to fully understand and simpathize with some of the harsher reviews of the game. The problems can be avoided for the most part by sticking one of a very few working combos and the really branching story is really enjoyable....this is about the only saving feature of the game. Then there are a few plot holes and balance issues that don't deal with skill development such as the ponce repellent wallpaper known only to mr. thorton. Ultimately most bad decisions can be painfully manage with though it makes the game literally become very unenjoyable while some extremely few bugs can literally leave you in impossible spots such as all of a sudden 80% through the game having to do a 12 node bypass in 20 seconds with a console controller(360 or PS3)....you can't click around at will and the only way to switch selected circuits is by cycling through each and every one manually which really eats up a lot of seconds when you are trying to navigate 12 heavily scrambled nodes in under 20 seconds. This wouldn't be nearly as bad if the game was clear about the skill requirement for EMPs after the tutorial and if they actually were common rather than only seeing them on a few irrelevant doors you have alternate routes to work around before all of a sudden having one block your ability to continue the game right near the very end. In the end there are some horribly bad game design decisions and some painfully broken features and plot holes.....great story overall and playable mostly without issues if you know what you're doing right off the bat but can still run into game breaking shortfalls though far fewer than someone unused to RPGs. Once you get to really learn the game inside out the game can be played without issues or problems if you know where all the bad parts are and take appropriate preemptive action but you can be left with a sore resent if your play style isn't properly functional or just too much of a pain to bother with. So yeah this game deserves its 65, 66 and 73 metacritic scores just like it deserves its lowest individual reviewer scores.

Yes the weapon files for the preorder bonuses are on the game disc....they are not true DLC...the items you can use and access are part of your inventory however....which is all referenced in the save files and I don't imagine this is different on the PC. Now the save files do reference the 2 preorder packs so what I think would be interesting to test is if modding their values in the save file would enable the content in the game. I am curious however if PC saves can be opened right in a hex editor first and edited immediately because every single 360 save behaves as an individual container for an inner file that is called file(0) and only this inner file can be properly hex edited to get the desired effect in the game....attempting to hex edit the .sav 360 save in a hex editor would be useless.

I use a program called Modio to open the save and then in it there is an inside file called file(0) and then I open this in a hex editor from where most hex values are pretty straight forward once you know how to translate them to decimals and the other way around. The only thing is Modio specializes on 360 saves and hacks and such so I'm not sure if it wold be able to open your PC save but it doesn't hurt to try.

I always pay attention to the story and ALWAYS try to go for the desired result in terms of molding the outcomes how I want....it's called ROLE PLAYING and the game does very well in this area...I now know how to work around the flaws but trying to deny they exist is quite another story.....which is exactly what you are doing here.

the 5 letter hacks are the only doable minigame on its hardest setting because you can always quit and 2 sets in 20 seconds depends on how fast you see them mostly but on the 360 and PS3 doing the bypass 12 nodes in 20 seconds can't be done because in order to shift the targetted circuit from left/right to the center takes well over a second, they are all scrambled up and noticing them takes time.....on consoles Hard bypassing IS broken.....regardless of what Tigress and you try to pretend. That is a FACT.

I have played through the game 10 times and I have tried using nearly every skill available and seen most of the endings and variations in the story and gameplay....the stuck without being able to use EMPs happened on my first playthrough and was extremely lucky to have exactly 3 unspent AP points to be able to advance the game. The money are way too much of a shortage where Intel and gadgets add up to the point that decent weapons and armor are unaffordable and special ammo is insanely expensive. You may try to argue past the game's flaws but generally speaking nearly every professional review out there reflects them so denial and trying to shift the fault for the game's many shortcomings will only get you so far.....why should I have to go looking through all the game's written details when the tutorial clearly taught me something....EMPs open locks without any further skill being necessary....are you saying that I should right off the bat assume the tutorial is broken? I never found a need to even think about EMPs until near the game's end and then the only rational thing to do was what the tutorial taught me.....only then did I find out the tutorial was broken.....when I was stuck. I take absolutely no blame for failing to immediately assume the tutorial was broken and go looking into things I didn't need for 99.99% of the game. The flaws go a lot further than that if you actually try to role-play the game and spend your money on intel and such to find out all you can about the game's story and characters because you will most likelybe left with no decent weapon/armor since they all half decent equipment costs over 100k....more around the 150k range and the really good equipment can run at 250k+. If you're serious about engineer then going on gadgets will cost you quite a bit and if you're on stealth the better silent armor and subsonic rounds will eat up large amounts of money too.

I think the weapons are on the game disc since the download is way too tiny(108 kb) to be any more than a trigger so they are not true DLC and our gamesaves list triggers for both GameStop and "GameCrazy" preorder bonuses....the stealth pack was originally going to be exclusive bonus for preordering from GameCrazy.....I haven't truly tested this but I think that simply finding how to tweak those values inside our gamesaves should be enough to gain access to the content. I'll have to try and start messing with those values but it may take me days before I get to it. I am talking about 360 game saves.....not sure about PC and PS3 gamesaves though I suspect they aren't too different.

I think I can discard this.....I gave my characters after the 4th playthrough 999 AP(spent all I could too) and my minigames didn't get harder....though on the Hard difficulty most of all minigames are VERY difficult but the tutorial ones were still easy though as far as I remember. He's at the start of the game so starting a new playthrough wouldn't cause any great loss...that should fix it.

I find it very amusing that the program has nearly infinite funds literally thrown away on unnecessary amounts of TVs and computers in safehouses that just about nobody knows about....that means there is no money trail leading to them either so the program MUST have enormous amounts of funds they aren't held accountable for yet Mike can't buy a half decent pistol if he wants intel? And must lower himself to pickpocketing dead bodies? Seriously? On top of that he's a superspy that either knows a little bit of everything or really good at 2 or 3 skills and utterly incompetent at everything else. Generally speaking most people will focus on 2 or 3 skills and ignore everything else then the game for all its insane focus on stealth....since even engineers MUST remain undetected long enough to for a plan or lay traps or what not....makes damn sure to force you into big fights nearly every single mission....there are what....4 missions in the game that you can complete undetected alltogether where the game doesn't force you into some trouble or another and then in the mission where you have to stop Surkov from escaping you literally don't want to avoid the final fight with Championchick and the guards because if you do you miss out on a few pieces of intel. Not to mention that Stealth has a lot more perks that are far more useful....and a lot cheaper since they don't require money you don't have.....as an engineer 75% of available perks involve carry 1 more of x gadget for using x gadget x amount of times.....just to carry one more EMP you need to successfully use 25 of them.....that costs nearly 25k....for ONE perk. Now is it impossible to play another way? NO but it IS way beyond reasonable where you have to deal with all the poor and unbalanced parts of the game where you might as well be better off chewing on razor blades. The same thing I pointed out before....you can go 80+% of the game not needing a certain skill and then you are stuck in an area because you can't advance the game without that skill.....all of a sudden having to hack 12 nodes in 20 seconds.....less than 2 seconds per node and they are all far more tangled than the 4 to 6 nodes and your EMPs are useless because you have no points in Sabotage and the tutorial allowed you to use an EMP without EVER telling you that you need sabotage in order to ever use them again. I will HAVE to see a youtube video of YOU bypassing a 12 node circuit in UNDER 20 seconds with 0 points in sabotage before I will believe you. Looking for unfamiliar patterns takes time and mistakes cost more time.....less than 2 seconds per node where no other bypass critical to mission advancement ever had more than 6. THAT is a rather big flaw that can leave you completely stuck more than half way through the game unless you happen to have unused advancement points laying around which doesn't happen very often. That is just ONE example....there are plenty others. All on top of the things that plainly do not make sense.

Generally speaking trying to specialize in anything that eats money is bad because the game gives you so little of it you barely have enough to buy intel and may buy some toilet paper for the bathroom if you're lucky. On top of that the game likes to punish anyone not stealth oriented as you'll miss on a vast collection of stealth perks that give good benefits therefore you cripple yourself. The way I see it is I don't like being some kind of super spy in the leagues of Bond and Bourne but have to pickpocket corpses so that I don't run out of ammo or something so I go ahead and give Mike access to the secret funds of Alpha Protocol nobody knows about.....you know...the money they buy all the TVs and computers with so that each safehouse has about a billion of them....just in case a few million computers or TVs happen to break on the same day or something. Then I also get Mike some special training sessions so that he can actually behave like a half competent spy instead of getting pawned every time he's dragged kicking and screaming out of the shadows and actually has to fight instead of say....stab someone in the neck from behind. Like yahtzee said the game is all too happy to let you put all your points in learning to waltz only to leave you stuck in a unavoidable free dancing competition. Besides Alpha Protocol's secret funds aren't used by anyone since nobody knows about them so I say go ahead and use them to empty out the black market stores and outfit Mike like the super spy he's supposed to be as well as giving him some lessons in not being pitiful in all but 2 skills.

Don't get me wrong I absolutely love AP and consider it better than any and all RPGs released since KotOR but I have to agree with pretty much everything that Yahtzee said....took me about 3 playthroughs to really get a grasp of the finer details of the game and another 5+ playthroughs to earn all 50 achievements as well as see another billion variations of the ending lol. But yeah all his criticism is spot on.....plus like the others said Yahtzee wasn't nearly close to as harsh on this game as he was on 99.9% of the other games he reviewed....for him that's high praise.

Never had that issue on the 360....every time I got killed by the chopper and reloaded the last checkpoint the chopper respawned just fine. Not sure what to tell you.....what platform are you playing on?

Ehm, if you shoot immediately after pressing the right mouse button, sure. Then it's somewhere in the reticle (notice how large it is?). Give it time and it will be 100% guaranteed hit where you aim, with a critical hit. Headshot usually means dead. Except for the really tough guys (Deus Vult usually took 2 headshots). It never depended on "luck" for me. Hitting wasn't the hard part at all, not getting hit is the challenge... Nah I noticed this with perfectly aimed pistol critical hits.....about 1 in 10 times it hits the unaware enemy dead in the back of the head and does little to no damage for no reason whatsoever....and I'm talking completely unaware enemies not yeallow alerted or red aware with perfectly line up criticals.

I certainly do not.....I play on the 360 too....all I mentioned in my post is strictly as it applies to the 360 version of AP and the 360 save files of AP.

If you beat the game with the recruit background you get access to the Veteran background which starts the game with a lot of points.....three levels in each skill. If you remove the points from weapons you don't use and assign them to things you do use you'll be able to max a lot more than in a normal playthrough. Additionally the save files do not have a checksum so they can very easily be modded for money, special ammo, 999 Ability Points, experience and more. If you go to Moscow first all the best gear will immediately be up for sale so buy it all. So Alpha Protocol's NG+ is awesome yes?

I absolutely love it....I can't stop using it....I kill just about everything with it. And the fact that it's so limited sucks a lot.....but at least the saves are extremely easy to mod so it's allright I suppose. Still I think Obsidian should just put a patch for the game where subsonic ammo is made cheap like the regular ammo and we can buy infinite amounts of it like the regular ammo so that everyone can really get to have fun with it.

I finished all the hub places except Tampei and I am almost done with Tampei too....about to reach the end-game....I always explored every area to death, opened just about everything I could. Never needed an EMP charge before...the hardest bypass I did before was 6 nodes...NEVER 10 nodes. I never needed to read the description of Sabotage and the fact remains that the tutorial has EMP chages work just fine in opening a door with 0 sabotage points so why would I think I'd all of a sudden need a skill for the charge to work when the tutorial said nothing of it?

Because most of all the bypass minigames were relatively easy with 3 or 4 nodes to cut in 10 to 15 secs....this door all of a sudden had 10 nodes to cut in the same ammount of time.....the only other doors I saw have that difficulty were irrelevant...like shortcuts to places you'd reach anyway....NOT to a critical mission objective. I NEVER once needed an EMP charge before to open something since the tutorial...and it the tutorial the charge worked with exactly 0 points in sabotage....shouldn't the tutorial say something about that? Like I said....retarded game design choices.

It worked....I was fortunate....extremely fortunate that I had exactly 3 unspent AP points laying around to put in a sabotage point....if sabotage is critical to advancing the game why not give one point in it to start with for every single class? Retarded game design choices....I played 80% of the game without ever needing sabotage.

So I am in Tampei and the only way to advance the story is by hacking a bypassing a door lock....it has ten nodes and 15 secs to do it and they are all mixed up so looking for each number and then following the thread takes time....there's no way to do it, I can't break the door and EMP charges thrown at the base of the door do absolutely nothing when they detonate....wtf? How in hell am I supposed to continue if I can't get to a critical objective?

Possible, yet the gamestop employee said the console versions they received didn't work, how do you explain that? I'm starting the think some of you are skeptical, that's what I get for living in a hick town, I guess. GameStop is a huge corportation with stores all over north america....why are you the only one with this complaint? All stores get their supplies from a handful of suppliers at most so if EVERY PS3 and 360 copy of the game in that store doesn't work then it must be a suplier error and plenty of other people from plenty of other states would be affected.....where is everyone? Why are you the only one mentioning this issue if it is a real issue?

what do you mean PAL versions? PAL is the european standard for TV, it uses different specifications than NTSC. NTSC is the Americas standard for TV. The Xbox in North America uses NTSC and the Xbox in Europe uses PAL, if you try to play an European Xbox (PAL) game in an American Xbox (NTSC) it will not play and vice versa. I think the notion that every gamestop in NA got the PAL version is laughable.....a disaster of that proportion would have blown up all over the news hours ago.....we can safely dismiss that.

You'd think that with Gamestop being only THE single largest game retailer in north america there would be more threads complaining about this IF it was a real issue....yet the OP is the only one.....I think this is just a gamestop hater with a bogus story to scare people away.