Some good news: Alpha Protocol is back, after a few years in digital purgatory, thanks to GOG.

While I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few years catching up with Bioware RPGs of a certain vintage, Alpha Protocol was probably the game that kicked that whole process off. (It’s somehow very on-brand for me to be inspired to play 00s Bioware games by something that was neither developed by them or even released in the 00s).

Although in some ways, the parameters of your quest are quite narrow by RPG standards – you act alone, and have to be a male spy called Mike who behaves like a knob regardless of your choices – it otherwise packs a surprising number of alternative story permutations into its fairly compact running time.

The dialogue system, which requires each decision to be made quite quickly, and the relative lack of heavy-handed signposting about the right or wrong thing to do in each case, both contribute to a more thrilling ride than your typical ‘choices matter’ type tale.

There are, of course, plenty of bugs and glitches and signs of general clumsiness, too, but it’s an interesting game and one well worth checking out now it’s available again. (My own last playthrough was the beginning of the pandemic, at which point I wrote a less than coherent review. The two facts are possibly linked).

Having seen AP retail for a couple of quid for many years, as part of the general and possibly unrealistic expectation that the price of older games should start to plummet after a while and then remain at rock bottom for an indefinite period, it is a bit of an adjustment to see it come back at 16 quid, although this no doubt reflects the effort involved in exhuming the proper rights and clearances, all of which is part of the generally nightmarish scenario that dictates that digital games of a particular period are suddenly made unavailable in the first place.

(I should also say that, despite having no such problems myself, some have reported issues in getting the game working on modern PCs, which this new version claims to resolve).

And, while Mike Thorton might be back in action, there’s still no sign of a return for Solid Snake (and Raiden) as Metal Gear Solid 2 remains unavailable on GOG, despite vague promises that its withdrawal was only temporary.

Perhaps Konami considers these promises now fulfilled via the remastered MGS collection on Steam, although if they were really committing to that being the ‘definitive’ version of the games, the fact that you can still buy the first game on GOG with no issues seems a bit odd.

Anyway, enough grumbling: let us relish in the mildly positive news that a whole new generation of gamers can enjoy the charmless ramblings of Agent Mike!

Hi there.

If reviews have been in short supply recently, even by our standards, then underestimating the size of the task before me when I took on today’s game is probably one of the reasons why.

Still, we got there in the end, and a pretty good time was had along the way. Here’s our review of Dragon Age: Origins.

Hi there.

It’s been a little while since we brought you a review of an old game, so here’s an EGA football title from the late 1980s: Microprose Soccer.

I’m duty-bound to also remind you that like all old footy titles we discuss here, this one goes into the FFG Football League, which now has a full 40 teams/games!

(Almost two full divisions, although if we’re following the English league structure, there’s still room at the bottom of the FFG Championship for a handful of other titles. But to go beyond that and have three divisions would be complete madness, wouldn’t it? Or would it? [Yes – Ed.])

Hello and welcome again to Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a semi-regular series with a title so ingenious it needs absolutely no further explanation.

Today’s game is Afterparty, an adventure game developed by Night School Studio and released in 2019. Our protagonists are Milo and Lola, two recent college graduates who unexpectedly find themselves detained in Hell, and set about trying to return to the land of the living by challenging Satan to a drinking contest.

Here’s a trailer:

Normally at this point we like to make broadly positive but non-committal noises about the game in question and encourage you to play before reading on. However, as you’ll soon see, we were more than a little disappointed by this one, having already played and enjoyed Night School’s previous effort, Oxenfree.

Afterparty has had some good reviews, however, and the forthcoming discussion will spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t played it, so the usual caveats apply – if you plan on picking it up in the future, you should probably avoid reading further.

Ok? Here’s our ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for this discussion!
 
Discussion: Afterparty (spoilers!) continued »

Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

Our ancient review of Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels probably belongs in a different series: the Vault of Regret, our chamber of assorted gaming shame.

Written on the basis of not much effort and an – incorrect – assumption that everyone, and not just the reviewer, found the game impossibly hard, its continued preservation (with caveats) on the site is occasionally discussed under ‘AOB’ at FFG Executive Board meetings, the minutes of which show no evidence of a genuinely held belief that these ancient scrawlings hold up as any kind of useful and insightful critique.

[Oh, hey, do you remember that film, Aliens? It’s kind of like that!]

However, while I wouldn’t now claim to know Vengeance of the Blood Angels very well, I do retain strong memories of it. Inevitably, they’re from the very beginning of the game, the only section that I really remember playing or am able to recall with any confidence.

After a recent spot of site tinkering saw me firing up the game again to get a few screenshots, I experienced them all over again. (I also wondered if I could give it another go and make much more significant progress – answer: no).

Whatever its flaws and merits, and however they may have sharpened or faded with time, the unsettling atmosphere VOTBA managed to create back then is still present and correct. Even the very first training mission, Purge and Retrieve, which essentially involves a couple of guys flaming some rooms, then picking up an object and taking it to the exit, can still cause the heart to skip a beat, if you’re of a nervous disposition.

I’ve played the game before: I’m sure there are no enemies on this level. Well, pretty sure, anyway. However, spooky noises persist, along with cries of “What was that?” from your supposedly battle-hardened squad mate. Let’s just get the hell out of here.

(Your correspondent remembers bodging about for ages with this level, and deriving some childish amusement from the soldier whose delivery of his own name (BETHOR!) made it sound less like that of an Olympian spirit and more like the surname of a teenage schoolmate of ours who, despite being 17 at the time, looked, sounded and acted like a middle-aged partner at a large firm of solicitors. Which he probably is by now.)

Once you jump into the first mission proper, Incision, everything ramps up. Even though you’re only in charge of a single marine and at this point spared the intricacies of tactical planning and squad control, it’s still a rude awakening.

You’re presented with as simple a task as in the training mission, except this time the dreaded Genestealer, which the game has spent the majority of its introduction hyping up, does make an appearance, and in significant numbers, which means you have to add ‘not dying’ to your list of objectives.

As your ears fill with panicked shouts from your squad, you proceed through bloody carnage to the mission at hand. Don’t let them get close, warned the introduction: it’s easier said than done. With the less than nimble character movement and corridor based levels, you’d have to be pretty nifty to avoid those iconic up-close encounters with these snarling purple enemies and hammering the fire button to get rid of them. Doing the same, from further away, whenever you see another, is more likely to bring positive results.

And, to return to one of the few relevant points we made all those years ago, for those of us raised on the likes of Aliens and the genuine fear conjured by having to keep waves of terrifying enemies at bay, this was – the spooky appeal of Electric Dreams’ CPC effort aside – the first time a game seemed to have brought it to life. Indeed, screaming out loud, Hudson style (our unhelpful walkthrough was appropriately named), while blasting away furiously was the only way I ever got through it (unlike in Aliens vs. Predator, you don’t, fortunately, have to keep your cool on the trigger and master controlled bursts of fire).

As the game opens up, and the Genestealers become ubiquitous (as well as more frequently viewed from afar while mincing about in the middle distance, rather than just in mildly terrifying face-offs) their impact diminishes somewhat. Unfortunately, you also then get into the territory of having to lead a squad through each level, requiring you to plan and think, as well as shoot and be scared, which brings any progress, for me at least, to a swift halt.

Still, to the extent that I feel qualified to talk about Vengeance of the Blood Angels, the fact that these opening moments have lingered long in the memory is sufficient to earn them a brief supplementary note on our humble website, if not quite the full re-evaluation of the game that it perhaps deserves.

Hello there and welcome along to our semi-regular look back at the year just gone, wherein we discuss how committed we are to this feature (traditionally not very, but now approaching it with renewed vigour), apologise for how late it may or may not be (quite late this time, sorry), consider whether we met our rather modest targets for updates (of the three possible outcomes stated last time – “maintain, improve, or very slightly fall away from” our usual level – eh, it’s probably the third one) and then get on with summarising what we actually wrote about in 2023.
 

Action

Plenty of, er, action here: I got stuck into a Wild West adventure in the form of Neversoft’s Gun (should I do the Grand Theft Horse-o joke again? [No – Ed.]), which was a solid enough effort, and another one ticked off the list marked ‘mid-late 00s open-world action games’ – a possible area of future investigation, although now I’ve said that, we’ll probably never speak of it again.

Also falling into this category would be the original Assassin’s Creed, which we discussed in May, although we appeared to be labouring under the misapprehension that demonstrating at least some knowledge about this series made us hip modern gamers (I guess it does, if your definition of modern is, er, 2008). Visually swish, occasionally bland, but broadly enjoyable, was the verdict.

To bolster our retro credentials somewhat, we also covered some 90s stuff: Stoo wrote about the Apogee platformer Hocus Pocus, and got stuck into a reimagined console version of a PC classic, via a modern port back to PC, in Doom 64.

And finally, we somehow managed to make our 400th review something vaguely deserving of the honour, rather than just whatever rubbish I happened to be playing at the time, to bring you some thoughts on the PC version of Metal Gear Solid.
 

Adventure

Apparently, we didn’t play any adventure games in 2023. Well, not any old-school ones anyway. However, our discussion of modern indie adventures (or adventure-adjacent titles) continued: Jo and I got dumped by Emily for a third time in Emily is Away <3, spied for a corrupt government in Orwell, and then enjoyed a gentle island adventure in A Short Hike.

A good time was had with all three, although the wisdom of spending quite so much time being told to listen to Snow Patrol on fake social media by a computer girlfriend who may or may not dump you later is certainly open to question.
 

Racing

Racing games from about 10-15 years ago were on the menu, specifically the Vin Diesel-based caper Wheelman (cheerfully terrible in places, but actually a good laugh); Bizarre Creations’ swansong, Blur (criminally underrated); and the track-exploding fun of Split/Second: Velocity (good-ish, but a bit shallow).

(Year end and new year type gaming pieces typically involves some level of self admonishment about not doing enough of X and trying to play more of Y, the practical use of which is arguably limited. However, these (now fairly old) racers have been on my list to ‘get around to one day’ for a stupidly long time. If I had any resolutions for myself last year, it was to finally fire up these games and enjoy them).

Oh, and Remedy’s top-down racer from the mid-90s, Death Rally, also received a firm thumbs up.
 

RPG

Apparently, we both now play RPGs, although Stoo is still the party member best equipped to make use of the FFG jerkin of moderate competence.

He wrote favourably about the action-RPG Torchlight, while I continued to explore Bioware’s 00s oeuvre with a look at Jade Empire: Special Edition. Which, in typical fashion, I found fairly confusing for the first 8 hours or so, then sort of got into the swing of it. There may well be more in 2024, although the usual caveats apply.
 

Sport

The sport section is probably the major reason I haven’t played all of those aforementioned ‘games I always wanted to play’. But someone must document all of those rightly-forgotten EA Sports games, dammit!

We found the Tiger Woods series in unexpectedly playful form, as our middle-aged golfer Rik was invited to hang out at the club with some American douchebags, before playing around the world against a variety of comedy stereotypes of varying degrees of propriety.

And after years of occasional and unsuccessful attempts to get it working, the buggy and unfinished (but curious in terms of its unfulfilled potential) ICC Cricket World Cup England 1999 finally kicked into life, and stayed conscious for just about long enough for an exploration of its flaws and merits. (I originally bought it on the same day I bought Half-Life, which might be why it’s retained a curious pull ever since, although I don’t necessarily ever need a reason to unearth a long-forgotten cricket title).
 

Strategy

I watched Dune on a plane, and then felt an unexpected urge to play Cryo’s adventure/strategy hybrid. (Also, to listen to the music of Sting, even though that wasn’t the version of the film I watched, and I’ve never seen the one he was in. It wasn’t even The Police, either, but his solo stuff, lute and all.)

Anyway, I understand why lots of people are fond of the game. I’ll never play Dune II, so it was nice to be able to revisit the universe in game form without getting stressed out about being rubbish at real-time strategy games.
 

Other Stuff

No big new series in 2023: not even a second instalment of The Unreviewed, which in this instance would have consisted of a brief dismissal of the Lego games as possible future review fodder (I’m probably being thick, and they are designed for kids, but I’m very bad at them, and they just don’t seem like the fun and lightweight jaunt through beloved franchise stories that I expect them to be).

Having seemingly exhausted the topic of boxed games in 2022, we did dabble briefly with it again, and there were a couple of memorable Moments in Gaming to add to the collection, but that was about it.

I guess the biggest news of the year was our renovation of the standard review pages, for which I can take absolutely no credit whatsoever. Aside from the technical tinkering conducted by my colleague, we also had to go back and fiddle with the formatting of all our old reviews and extras, a process that caused me to wonder how nice the house would look if I spent as much time doing actual DIY as I did on site DIY. There are still a few lingering issues at my end that need sorting out, but overall it’s all looking a lot neater and nicer. (The site, that is: the house really is getting neglected).

Jo and I also met (and nearly met) some of our PC Zone heroes, while I managed to achieve a lifelong dream of being vaguely associated with the magazine by writing a piece about Daikatana for PC Zone Lives. It was all so exciting, I might even try and play the game again.

And that was just about it. What can you expect in the year to come, as loyal fans and readers? Well, just consult the FFG Guarantee: our service level agreement with all our devoted followers, in which we commit to between 10-15 new reviews of games released between 1990-ish and 2013-ish, a handful of discussion pieces, and intermittent contributions to ongoing article series. It’s all there in black and white.

On a slightly more serious note, you may have noticed that Twitter (or X, formerly Twitter, as apparently it has to be called) has largely stopped working, and our minimal contributions to the de facto town square (again, not my words) have been reduced to almost nothing. For the time being, site updates will still be posted there, and we haven’t quite jumped ship altogether, but consider us otherwise in the same boat as lots of other people/sites/companies who aren’t quite sure what to do until another platform establishes itself (if one ever does).

On an even more serious note: hey, thanks for taking the time to read this site. We do appreciate it, and rest assured that we never take it for granted.

On behalf of FFG, let me wish you, and those around you, all the best for 2024.

Bloody Hell! It’s 2024!

(Apologies for not wishing you all a good Christmas, as promised – the site went down for a little bit, then we obviously got distracted by the festive preparations.)

Anyway, we’re back with what might be considered the third part of a trilogy entitled ‘racing games released about 12 years ago that I always meant to get around to, but didn’t’.

After Blur, and Split/Second, here comes Ridge Racer: Unbounded.

We’ll be back again soon with the traditional round-up of last year on FFG, despite no-one ever asking for it. [No-one asks for any of this other stuff, either – a reader]

Hi there.

Today’s review is of the action-packed racer Split/Second: Velocity.

Will there be anything more before Christmas? Oh-ho, will there? Will there now?! WILL THERE EVER! [But will there actually be any more reviews or blog posts, though? – a reader]

Er, not sure. If not, we’ll be sure to pop back anyway, and pass on a seasonal message of goodwill. But it’s a bit early for that. Like everything else at blummin’ Christmas, all starting too early these days… [cut! – Ed]

Good morning.

It’s the Cricket World Cup at the moment, a tournament which began with England attempting to retain the trophy as holders.

In preparing this review, I was planning to write something about how they’re actually quite good these days, and contrast that with the embarrassments of the past.

But, no, they’re out already.

All rather reminiscent of 1999, then, a year in which England were the hosts, and EA brought us a severely undercooked tie-in game: ICC Cricket World Cup England 99.

Hello and welcome to Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series that I could describe further, but probably needs very little effort to work out. [It’s not our fault you’ve boxed yourself in with these introductions – FFG reader].

Today’s game is A Short Hike, released by Adam Robinson-Yu in 2019, which is a narrative/open-world exploration game that takes place on an island of anthropomorphic animals. The player character is a bird called Claire, who has travelled to the national park located on this island for the summer, and you guide her in her attempts to complete its most challenging walk, the Hawk Peak Trail.

Before we get into the spoiler-tastic discussion, here’s a short trailer:

I’d say that possibly doesn’t give a full taste of what to expect, so feel free to do some non-spoilery research elsewhere if you’re interested in the game.

Otherwise, apart from to add that we both really enjoyed it, that’s all we want to say for now – proceed only if you’ve played it, or aren’t bothered about spoilers.

Here’s your ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for the discussion below!
 
Discussion: A Short Hike (spoilers!) continued »