2041

I went with the backwards baseball cap, aviators and gigantic beard. I wish there had been more options to make him look truly cracked.

2042

The gigantic beard was too much. I wanted more of a frat boy rather than a psychopath. But I gave him a regular beard because I didn’t want a total douchebag either.

I think this is the most I’ve ever been invested in the look of an RPG character.

2043

Odd, considering he looks pretty much the same no matter what you do, unless of course you give him a Silly Beard.

2044

I picked this up during the steam sales, and help! I am a moron and can’t pass the computer hacking tutorial. I must be missing something super obvious, but I can’t see what. You have to match patterns, but I only saw the pattern once out of ten attempts.

Would someone give me an explanation of this minigame that’s suitable for my granny?

2045

I look for the block of characters that are not moving. I have to look at it so that they pop out at me, like one of those pictures* with the hidden image in it.

*I saw the sailboat.

2046

You have to look for the characters that aren’t moving. Relax and they will eventually pop out. It helps to break the screen into halves or quadrants and scan those.

2047

I couldn’t see those things for the life of me in the tutorial. But eventually it clicked.

To be crystal clear about the instructions – every space has constantly changing letters except for the two words you need to match, which are somewhere in that soup. Once you find solid text, you can check which word it matches and move the word in the top left or right on top of it. If you wait too long, the words will move to another location.

You move the left word with the keyboard, right word with the mouse, and they use separate keys to lock the word to it’s location. Movement of the mouse is very weird, it treats the mouse like an analog stick. So while the mouse is moving down, it’s as if you were holding down the stick. After awhile I found myself moving both words towards the center of the screen while looking for the words, to save time later, but you won’t need to do that. I also started to memorize the first two letters of each word so I knew right away which one it matched.

And put two points in sabotage skills, it gives you a lot more time.

2048

I will add to the advice here that I would quickly note the first two characters of each string so that when I found one among the changing characters, I could more quickly tell which I had found.

2049

Just finished and I (generally) really enjoyed it. The only reason I’m not immediately replaying it is the absurd amount of lag the game has. i suspect this is due to it not playing well with my video card - anyone else have this problem?

2050

If you are going to blame it on your video card, it might be helpful to state what card you were using and what approximate settings.

Load times were onerous for me, but not any more than ME2, but I cannot recall any significant lag with my 8800GT at roughly high settings.

2051

The only issues I had with lag was after a loading screen the camera would frequently spin wildly around for a second - imagine a quick blindfolded game of pin the tail on the donkey. This made for all kinds of fun with the ubiquitous checkpoints that would drop you right in the middle of a firefight.

Man I could go on for hours bitching about shit like that with this game but in the end I adored it. Reading through the spoilers thread elicited a long stream of utterances along the lines of ‘wtf game is everybody playing’ and ‘am I even in the right thread?’ I had no idea going through it just how much of a difference I was actually making, I imagine a second playthrough would be an eyeopener indeed.

2052

There were some .ini file tweaks posted in this thread that fixed some mouse issues I had.

2053

I think this is that the game will seemingly load a save before finishing caching stuff. I had the same issue on a high-end machine, load a save and experience lag for a couple of minutes and then it returned to being silky smooth.

2054

I love how cut-throat a lot of the dialouge is.
but yeah, I thought it was one of the better titles this year. People seemed dismissive of it because didn’t play like the shooter they expected it to be (or mass effect 2) Which was a real shame, because a lot of the level design worked much better.
The convoluted espionage plot served only as something to bring you closer to the well-written characters, giving you moments of conflict and resolution. Plus, the character interactions were intergrated quite well into the gameplay, meaning you never really felt like you were playing an interactive novel or a dating sim. Unfortunately, it is a bit unbalanced, and is quite frustrating on consoles.

2055

Killing Brayko - I have done it! And going to Taipei does help a lot. I did it in one try - just headshot him with 5 steel core and when he start pumping himself with drugs, whomever I befriended in Taipei caused Brayko to lose even more health - that means he didn’t even have a chance to stab me with his dagger. He just lie defeated. Pretty easy for a boss that took me 10 tries earlier. Thanks for the tip.

In the end, I executed him immediately … I wonder what happens if I didn’t. I will now go to the AP Spoiler thread to read them! :)

Now I am off to do my FINAL mission! Can’t wait to finish this.

Edit: not a good idea… the reading the Spoiler thread part. First page is full of end game spoilers AND worst, Tom Chick spoiled Mass Effect 2 ending in Alpha Protocol Spoiler thread. BE WARNED!

2056

ATI 5770. Turning down the settings didnt help appreciably, even turning down the rez didn’t impact it.

What Gendal experienced it is closer to the description of it - it would stop to do somthing (often it was to access the disk, but sometimes it didnt seem like it was) and the screen would pause for 1 or 2 s, then it would unpause and receive every input in the space of a quarter second. In real terms, i would be walking down a corridor, experience the pause, and then find myself spun and walking back the way i came, often with wild cameria gyration(and sometimes, even more confusingly with none).

That this often happened at critical points(rounding a blind corner) led to a lot of blown stealth

2057

Picked this up during the Steam sale and I really want to like this game, but the controls are giving me a hard time. Movement and controlling the camera just feel janky and its always a battle to try and take a look around.

I can’t hit the broad side of a barn with the weapons, does it depend more on your skill level than your ability to aim?

Also I hate the hacking minigame and even more the timed conversations.

Is the story really going to be worth putting up with all this?

2058

I’m having the same issues with the controls, and the lack of a save system that doesn’t induce insanity doesn’t help either. Also; why can I jump several meters from one ledge to another, but jumping over a 50cm concrete block in order to avoid a camera is impossible!?!?

I tried some of the stuff linked here, and it seemed to help a bit.

2059

Thanks, I’ll take a look and see if it helps.

2060

Well, it gets better, and I’m not just talking about the story.

First, regarding the aiming: here, the reticule denotes the hit area. Better weapons (and improving their weapon skills) help here.

As for the minigames, they get easier when you add a couple of skill points to sabotage, as well as getting the “hacking” gloves.

And, yeah, the story will improve from its crappy hunt-the-terrorist beginnings, although to be fair it’s not great by any means.