{"id":8367,"date":"2010-06-18T08:39:03","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T13:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8367"},"modified":"2010-06-18T08:40:27","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T13:40:27","slug":"stolen-pixels-204-alpha-etiquette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8367","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #204: Alpha Etiquette"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a bit about the Alpha Protocol dialog system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I need to keep playing this game before I can review it. One minute I’ll be thinking, “This game is okay. I don’t know what people are complaining about.” Ten minutes later, “This game sucks. I don’t know what people see in it.” <\/p>\n

The most distressing problem is the save system. It’s checkpoint based, even when you’re at your hideout. I get back to the safe house and it checkpoint saves. Then I do some leveling up, buy some equipment, and arrange my gear. Then I want to quit. The only save option is “save last checkpoint”, which – if I’m understanding it – means I’d be saving the game state of when I arrived at my base. If I want to save all that fussing about, I have to start a new mission<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The other problem is that I can’t make any sense of how the save slots work. I finished the first act of the game, and then I needed to start a new game to make the previous comic. Just to make sure, I saved my game in two different slots. Later I wanted to return to that save, but both<\/em> slots were overwritten with autosaves or something. They were gone, and I ended up losing about an hour and a half of progress. You don’t name your character or anything, so if you’ve got two different play-throughs going you can’t tell their saves apart, even if you can keep them from somehow overwriting each other. This is a significant flaw in a game designed around the idea of multiple replays<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Pretty classic Obsidian craftsmanship so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is a bit about the Alpha Protocol dialog system. I need to keep playing this game before I can review it. One minute I’ll be thinking, “This game is okay. I don’t know what people are complaining about.” Ten minutes later, “This game sucks. I don’t know what people see in it.” The most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}