Roxas may not be all alone in his, uh, mystery quest? but Goofy and (especially) Donald are sorely missed. At least so far, Roxas only brings one Organization XIII member with him on his missions, and they absolutely refuse to heal Roxas, with magic or otherwise. Add to that a relatively small max HP, and a bizarre equipment/ability/level/item system that severely restricts the sum of Roxas's powers (as an addendum to this explanation, "level-up" takes up a grid space, just as "one potion" does), and the game seems a little more punishing than it has to be.

There's time for it to improve, of course, but after my experience with Kingdom Hearts II my confidence is a bit lacking. Unfortunately the combat mechanics aren't the only things I'm worried about -- almost everything about the game's pacing has me concerned. It took me a dozen missions or so until I could buy or synthesize items, given I'd already accumulated nearly 10,000 munny and had nothing to do with it. And although the premise of a deeper look inside Organization XIII sounds interesting, thus far the game has made them out to be the most boring secret society ever conceived. Everyone just sits on a couch and complains all day.

My optimism hasn't completely run out yet, but it's certainly being wavered.

Progress: Day 26

Despite its flaws, Alpha Protocol left me with a generally good feeling. Well, maybe I should say, neglecting its flaws. As I'll go on to describe, some of the game's issues border on criminal. But it's a broad and ambitious production, and a good deal of that ambition manages to shine through its many imperfections.

What should a sequel address, if such a thing were possible? Well:

• Bugs. Yeah. One of the early Moscow missions, I repeated twice, because it looked like the mission had forced me to pass an objective. It turned out that the objective's placement on the map was just wrong. Still, not a great bug.
• More freedom! If not a full-blown GTA-style sandbox, then at least allow me to fully explore a mission - checkpoints invariably block off the previous part of the level - and give me more opportunities to approach and converse with NPCs inbetween missions.
• Shooting. Who thought it was okay to make all your shots miss without some skill points invested? Gauging attack power, recoil, ammo capacity, and so on based on EXP level is fine -- but making my initial accuracy shitty, and keeping it shitty unless I invest in it, isn't okay.
• Melee. Basically, the controls don't work well, and even when they do, it's just mashing the 'E' key. The melee system is begging for some added depth.
• Stealth. There are a bunch of cool abilities for sneaking around, but the game is curiously missing many mechanics that are core to stealth games, like vision cones, and more varied distraction items.
• Dialog -- attention to detail. There's a lot of detail to cover in Alpha Protocol, which is why I can't help but respect the amount of attention it got. But it deserves more. It deserves Blizzard-level attention.
• Boss fights that aren't retarded. Encounters that use and test the same mechanics that the rest of the game does. Not some mile-long health bar bullshit, or chain guns that can shoot through my cover.
• Diverse AI. Dossier information that you obtain throughout the game describes each enemy force - Russian mob, CIA, mercenaries, et al - in different ways, in terms of their tactics and weaknesses. But I never noticed any of these differences in the game.
• A menu interface that isn't completely fucking broken. Every time I double-clicked on a menu item, I felt like I was taking my life into my own hands.

Alpha Protocol's most significant shortcomings aren't related to traditional bugs, so much as they are to the unfulfilled potential of its dynamic story and choice mechanics. And it isn't that these ideals are completely unrealized. But there's room for improvement, and glimpses of something that could really blow BioWare away.

What really sets Alpha Protocol's choice system apart from others is that it doesn't follow the stereotype of good-and-bad: being friendly doesn't put a halo over your head, and being an asshole doesn't disfigure your face. The various options available - professionalism, prying, bluffing, goading, douchebaggery - can lead to different results, but they're just that: different. The game never tries to make you believe that there's a "wrong" way to handle a conversation, nor a "right" way.

It helps that part of Thorton's modus operandi is supposed to be manipulation; but by preventing dialog choices from being a liability in your game's progress (and by making the results of your dialog wheel choices mostly intuitive), the choices become a real game mechanic, rather than a silly minigame or a frivolous scoring method.

It's impossible to deny that the game could have used some additional work. If you (for whatever reason) have high expectations going into Alpha Protocol, you're going to be disappointed. But once you get past that - as with any other overhyped new IP - you just might find that it's actually fun to play -- potentially, depending on your play style.

As I've mentioned, my gameplay experience relied on a stealth and pistol-sniping approach; basically, Splinter Cell, plus terminal hacking and lock-picking. (The hacking minigames in Alpha Protocol are pretty neat.) Due to the aforementioned shortfalls in gun accuracy and melee, I'm not so confident that other strategies would be as effective. But I couldn't say for sure. Who knows? Maybe I'll pick a new character sheet, and try it again sometime.

Better than: I'd expected
Not as good as: Mass Effect 2
Basically as good as: Mass Effect

Progress: Complete

I'll be formulating a much more detailed critique later. One thing I want to be sure to emphasize is that, occasional dialog anachronisms aside, the story's reactions to choices I made in the campaign really made me question whether it was equipped to handle such significantly different paths -- or whether it was simply an elaborate ruse to let me believe that my choices had any consequence. (Further investigation suggests the former.) In either event - again, discounting some writing wrinkles - I would consider Alpha Protocol to be the first game that made me think my choices re: character relationships were meaningful, e.g. meaning something other than a different dialog response.

Progress: Complete

Things were going pretty well for Michael Thorton in Taipei - making dangerous friends, infiltrating the Triads, uncovering conspiracies, shooting and stabbing dudes - until the boss encounter. His stealth training and silent equipment were little help against a bullet-soaking ninja with a laser-sighted shotgun.

I was willing to chalk up the "boss" of the Saudi mission set (a slightly retarded rocket-launcher affair) as a fluke, but the Taipei boss has me a little nervous about the rest of the game. I really hope this isn't a case where I have trouble finishing the story because the final boss doesn't make any goddamn sense.

As for the story, well... from a high concept standpoint, it's actually pretty good, and the writing in general isn't half-bad either. But Alpha Protocol's general lack of polish reflects poorly on the storytelling, as pieces of dialog segue poorly, or worse, are delivered out of order -- as the game reacts unexpectedly to its countless personality, relationship, and non-linear mission variables. (By including a boisterous Nolan North in its voice cast, the occasionally-stuttering dialog also suffers from an unkind comparison to Uncharted.)

Hopefully, my stealth approach will continue to work well as the game goes on, because (other than the aforementioned bullshit boss fight) it works really well. I guess I might consider keeping a shotgun on me, just in case.

Progress: Finished Saudi and Taipei

My opinions so far of Alpha Protocol are: 1) it's a lot like Mass Effect - almost like it was intentional - and 2) somewhat to my surprise, it's not terrible.

First off, let me throw in my two cents about the game's alleged bugginess -- yeah. It is buggy. The enemy AI is a little baffling, the mouse is beyond the comprehension of most of the game's menus, and I've already had to reload a save file because I got stuck in a wall. But you know? I can't really say that it's worse than any Bethesda or BioWare game. It's not an excuse for Obsidian, but I hate that the internet gives some developers a pass for these same technical shortcomings.

ANYWAY! Clearly, Alpha Protocol isn't a great game. Its brazen imitation of many Mass Effect elements - the hacking minigames, the dialog wheel, the character progression system, even the level design - is a bit disappointing, and the narrative, with all its player-choice twists and foibles, is interesting but comes across as incomplete. Nevertheless, it is pretty cool how open-ended the mission structure is -- how each part of a level is open to gung-ho gunmanship, or stealth, or sabotage, or any combination thereof.

At its best, it has a cool, James Bond feel to it, although some spotty cover and a general vagueness about enemy line-of-sight can occasionally turn a stealth run into an unexpected shootout.

Progress: Just left Saudi Arabia

It's been almost four years since I played Sora's last adventure, not to mention five years since the sequel was actually released -- so my retro goggles have blurred somewhat, and it might be unfair to expect a PS2 game to compare favorably with more modern productions. All that said, after having put more than ten hours into Kingdom Hearts II, I'm fairly confident in my "meh" impression.

Of those ten hours, I'd put money on better than half of them having been spent staring blankly at the screen. Even neglecting the plodding introductory sequence, KH2 is lousy with cutscenes, such that it's rare to proceed through more than a single room without being interrupted by one. Which would be alright, if the narrative in them was interesting -- but whereas the first game's story set up a clear goal of finding Riku and Kairi, and the quest through each world was direct in its pursuit of this goal, in KH2 the narrative feels more disconnected: the beginning establishes some vague threats in the lingering Heartless and in Organization XIII, and mentions the continuing search for Riku, but every time Sora and co. show up on a new world, they pretty much just seem to be tooling around and having fun. I'm sure this plot will pick up later in the game, but after ten hours I still have no further insight into any of the game's big picture plot threads.

These hours of tedious cutscenes can all be skipped, but even without them, interactivity still eludes me. When Brad said that KH2's mechanics had been streamlined from the first game, he wasn't kidding around: in on-foot segments, the vast majority of environments are corridors, funnelling Sora from room to room. Most of the rooms aren't even aesthetically interesting. And the rest of the time - that is, during combat - in spite of a number of new mechanical features and wrinkles, the controls have basically been simplified to "Press X, unless you're asked to press Triangle."

The other buttons have some uses too, and there is still a menu for combat options like items and magic, but there is so much X and Triangle mashing by comparison that everything else seems trivial. While the transformation system is an interesting new addition, everything else about combat has been mindlessly simplified -- I didn't even have to heal myself until after the ten-hour mark, when I was fighting partially-invincible pirates. With guns.

Rather than get into an extended discussion on whether KH2's lack of progress from the first game is a bad thing, it's easier to compare my experience so far to Final Fantasy XIII, or at least to what the interweb has told me about it: even if I assume that the later game is more interesting, more engaging, and more fun, getting there has so far been boring and dull. I feel like I'm just going through the motions, and not getting any joy out of it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Level 22, passed through Port Royal

In its second iteration, the Penny Arcade Adventures formula still feels fresh and inviting. The writing and pacing seem more polished, as does the technological package in general, although there are still some mechanical eccentricities -- like the insufficient item system, and some enemy attacks, especially bosses, which inadequately telegraph their block timing. At its core though, the game hasn't changed much, and its amusing world is still a delight.

That's why I'll continue to hold out hope for Episode 3, though it may be utterly futile.

Better than: Episode One
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright
Now I guess: I'll have to do some reading. Great.

Progress: 78% Completion

Monkey Island 2 SE looks and sounds great, and fixes almost all of the mechanical problems I took issue with from the first Monkey Island SE. But I couldn't help but come away from it unsatisfied -- not just because of the weird, nonsensical ending, but because of its overabundance of Adventure Game Annoyances. There are way too many inventory items; too many environmental objects with completely unintuitive uses; too many puzzles that use cartoon logic (a monkey wrench? really?); and in general, too much of the game seems to assume that you'll keep clicking on things until it works. Even with the item-highlight feature and the in-game hints, I still had to consult the interweb quite a few times.

So just as with the more modern examples of Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, I can't help but feel that the simple joys of the initial game have been diluted by arbitrary and tiresome overcomplication. If this is "one of the greatest" classic adventure games, then I think I can consider myself done with the genre.

Better than: technologically, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
Not as good as: fun-ologically, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
I think point-and-click adventures were more tolerable: when there weren't so many other, more exciting games to play instead

Progress: Complete

Magicka has brilliant game mechanics - with one player, or with more - and a fantastic sense of humor. Basically, it's an amazing game. But it's held back by some unfair balancing (fast attacks that keep you stunned, one-hit kill moves from stupid yetis) and some remaining bugginess. I tried the Challenge mode with a buddy, and it was extremely fun, up until we kept falling through the ground.

It's a shame that Magicka isn't all that it could be, but it's still an incredible game that you really have to try.

Better than: Trine, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
Not as good as: it could be, unfortunately
Also a better fantasy/sci-fi parody than Overlord: and a better video game canon parody than Eat Lead

Progress: Finished Adventure with 2 players, found all the secrets

Based on the demo, I described Bulletstorm to a co-worker as "MadWorld with guns." (It doesn't hurt that their protagonists have the same voice.) At any rate, it's hard to describe the feeling you get when you kick an enemy into the air, then shoot him in the junk, with a trajectory that finally lands him on a bed of spikes.

If there's a substantial campaign to go along with the kill-scoring system, this could be a real winner.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played the demo