It’s a crucial question for an RPG: what type of character are you going to be? Although the choice in Alpha Protocol may be a little narrower than in your more traditional beardy-type affair – you have to be a spy of some sort – there’s still the usual dilemma about where to spend your hard earned action points.

Essentially it all boils down to deciding whether you’re going to be a sneaky, stealthy, softly-does-it-minimise-casualties kind of guy, or a one-man killing machine who thinks nothing of leaving a pile of bodies in his wake. After being afflicted by my usual lack of decisiveness in this regard (can’t we be good at everything, like Jason Bourne? I’d happily have undergone some traumatic psychological-realignment mini-game to earn sufficient points) I eventually decided to go for being good with guns, owing to my past record of hopelessness when it comes to sneaking around in games rather than any ideological bias towards shooting first and asking questions later.

In the end, it was a choice that served me well, because for the most part, it seems, you need to be quite good with guns in Alpha Protocol, particularly towards the end where…well, I won’t spoil it for you, but needless to say, you don’t tippy-toe into your enemy’s backyard and resolve your differences with a full and frank discussion. Still, there were obviously times throughout where being good at other stuff would have come in handy. During missions where casualties were particularly frowned upon (ie they were civilians or – gasp – fellow Americans) my lack of stealth points and noisy armour created unwanted attention, for example, or when the situation called for some hand-to-hand combat, I was hopeless in a fistfight, flailing away aimlessly with powder-puff punches that rarely connected.

Without having a great knowledge of the genre, it seems that a combat specialism is usually a fairly safe choice – by which I mean that you’re not likely to get halfway through the game and then find you’re in a really difficult position because of it. I don’t know if Alpha Protocol would be significantly harder if I’d taken a more stealthy approach, but it seems to me that some of the boss fights, in particular, would be pretty tricky without some decent firepower. Perhaps that suits a player looking for more of a challenge (or indeed one of a different type) but there’s a part of me that thinks a game shouldn’t let you spend a lot of time just digging a hole for yourself to fall into and never get out.

Anyway, having successfully played the game to completion, it has to be said that I didn’t have half as much trouble with the general RPG-ness of Alpha Protocol as I thought I would. I think I was most grateful for the fact that, although there are choices galore throughout, extending even to the order in which you do the missions, at no stage do you find yourself in the middle of a vast open world wondering what to do next. And there’s no grinding through battles with random enemies just so you’re in a position to actually complete the next bit of the story, either.

Still, without being under any illusions about going back to Fallout or getting stuck into Baldur’s Gate or Oblivion, I reckon I’m ready for another action RPG. Knights of the Old Republic, perhaps? Or Mass Effect? Next time, though, I don’t think I’ll write about it. Because this whole feature hasn’t really worked, has it? [No – a reader]

The game, by the way, is flawed but worth a play. Yes, it’s buggy and there are bits that don’t work quite as well as they should and it’s all rather rough around the edges, but you do seem to have some genuine control over how the story progresses, and not just in an obvious ‘be good/be bad’ kind of way. As the end credits rolled, playing a news report summarising how the game world, and the various characters and factions within it had ended up as a result of my actions during the game, I started to contemplate what I might do differently were I to play it again.

I’d say more but the internet’s full of reviews written by professionals who are paid to tell you about modern games like this, so you can go and look at those if you want. Although I’d point you in the direction of Zero Punctuation for the most pithy and entertaining summary.

Next on FFG: a genuine review of an old-(ish) game, perhaps?

Hello there.

Finally, we have our first content of 2011. I’ll bet you were on the edge of your seat.

Well, fret no more, we have a new review! And, in honour of the England cricket team finally managing to win in Australia and bring home the Ashes, we have another cricket game for you. No, stop…where are you going?

Look, I promise this’ll be the last one in a while, okay? More non-cricket stuff coming soon. But for now, here’s a review of Brian Lara International Cricket 2005.

Well, that’s another year (almost) done and dusted. For once I’m not frantically trying to get one last review in before we get into January, so the very least I could do is staple together some half-hearted reminiscences from the previous twelve months, for anyone that might be interested. Don’t worry – they’re FFG-specific, rather than just general thoughts – I won’t be telling you what I think of Glee or anything like that.

Rewind 12 months and though my attempts to finish a review of Mystery of the Druids before the end of 2009 were in vain, it did mean we had a review ready to kick off the new year. The game wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, but I did enjoy the unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Other adventures we covered this year included a couple of more modern efforts – the clunky and dated CSI game, and the more glossy and impressive third instalment of the Broken Sword series.

The Sports and Racing sections received a boost, even if it was largely a case of wading through ageing dross (Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge and FIFA Soccer Manager, for example). On a more positive note, I rediscovered the considerable charms of Formula 1 ’97 and got the chance to include one of my all-time favourite games – Pro Evolution Soccer 4. A nice treat for my 100th review – let’s just not talk about number 99.

Meanwhile, my esteemed colleague was busying himself with a mixture of genuine oldies (such as console favourite Golden Axe and Apogee platformer Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure) and more modern fare like Far Cry. Shooters were most definitely on the menu in 2010, and positive reviews of Blood, Deus Ex: Invisible War and Doom 3, among others, appeared this year.

Finally, with esteemed colleagues at Just Games Retro calling it a day and moving on to other projects, the JMan very kindly donated a review of Star Trek: Captain’s Chair to us. A brief moment of respectful silence for JGR – you will be missed.

So, what will 2011 bring? I imagine it will be a mix of the usual stuff, although there are some reviews I’ve had in mind for a while which I’ve been putting off for too long, so it might be best if I commit to at least one of them in writing. So: Gabriel Knight – this is the year.

Aside from that, well, unless the pace of our content slows dramatically, I imagine we’ll get our 200th review up at some stage in 2011, perhaps around the same time as our 10-year anniversary. We’ve got a few special things in mind to mark these events, but any ideas, suggestions and offers to write glowing tributes would of course be most welcome (I won’t hold my breath though).

Even if you’re attempting to explain your shortcomings as a gamer in a (ha-ha) humorous, self-deprecating manner, it pays not to over-do it, lest someone mistake you for a genuine idiot. So let me make the following point: I do understand what ‘RPG’ stands for, and that role-playing, by its very nature, involves making detailed choices about everything, in order to define your character. It’s not like I’m saying, ”Why are there so many choices in RPGs?” – because that would be stupid, obviously.

Anyway, to Alpha Protocol, and its many conversation trees. Throughout the game, you’re going to have to make a number of choices which genuinely affect your relationships with other characters and what happens during the rest of the game. In other words, they matter.

What is it about RPGs and important choices? It’s something that I’ve never been able to deal with [Jeez, we all saw that coming a mile off – a reader]. But deal with it I must, for in Alpha Protocol, the talkie bits come thick and fast, every so often pausing for, oh, roughly three seconds or so to prompt you to select one of a handful of potentially very significant dialogue options.

Although I don’t particularly like it at the time, the extremely short amount of time you’re given is actually a blessing in disguise, otherwise I’d probably still be there in the middle of the first conversation, umming and ahhing about what to say. Not that you actually get to decide what you say, mind you – instead, you select from a variety of loosely-defined stances, which your character, Michael ‘Mike’ Thorton, then translates into cheesy dialogue on your behalf.

Whatever option you choose, Thorton will make you sound like a dick. Because, frankly, the character is a bit of a dick, his script consisting entirely of the kind of macho bullshit that middle-aged developers think their core audience of 14-year old boys want to hear. All that aside, though, I really have a hard time committing to something so vague. Why can’t you just see what your character is going to say before you allow him to say it? Even if none of the options appeal, at least you can try and pick the least cringe-inducing one. But no, it’s all ‘Aggressive’, ‘Suave’, or ‘Professional’. What the hell does any of that mean?

Admittedly, sometimes you are given options that are pretty straightforward. Defeat a boss character, for example, and you can choose to talk some more or select the ‘Execute’ option to shoot him/her in the face. Or if, in the middle of a bullshit-laden conversation with a slimy NPC, you suspect he or she be stringing you along, there is occasionally an option marked ‘Fuck Off’, which must surely do what it says on the tin.

If it sounds like I’m guessing there, it’s because I am. I’d never choose the ‘fuck off’ option, even if my character had been stripped naked, tied to a bed and the preceding question had been accompanied by the sound of the game’s antagonist unzipping his flies.

You see, when it comes to being rude in games, I just can’t do it. During the video cut-scenes in Wing Commander 3, for example, you were occasionally presented with a choice to make Marky-Mark Hamill either say something nice or something horrible. First up, you step into a lift with the crazy comms guy who rants and raves about something or other for a while until you think ‘This guy’s a loon…’

And, sure enough, when you’re given the option to respond, that’s exactly what one of the choices is. But could I bring myself to be rude to this man, even though neither he nor I, nor the situation itself, was real? No – I smiled politely and humoured him instead.

As the game develops, Hamill starts to attract the attentions of a couple of female crew members. Naturally enough, every time either one of them talked to me, I was nice to them – it seemed only polite, after all. Then, suddenly, you’re in the bar with them both, forced to lay your romantic cards on the table. I had no idea I was leading anyone on! Obviously, then, you have to be a massive bastard in giving one of them the brush-off, a situation which could have been avoided if you’d given clearer signals earlier on. But I couldn’t be anything but super-nice to another character until the game forced me to do otherwise.

This is even more ridiculous in Alpha Protocol, a game in which I found myself face to face with someone I’d been shooting at for the best part of 15 minutes, only to be nothing but polite to him once he was writhing on the ground begging for mercy. There must be a word for someone who has no problem with shooting hundreds of people dead only to be stopped in his tracks once one of them attempts to engage him in conversation – I’m not sure what it is though.

At this stage in the game, I’m worried that my ‘be nice to everyone’ schtick is eventually going to have unfortunate consequences. So far, I’ve tried to be reasonable and broker a deal with every shady character I’ve come across – but pretty soon, there’s bound to be a conflict of interest.

Frankly, I can’t stand a repeat of the turmoil caused by telling Ginger Lynn-Allen I wasn’t interested (yes, I chose the other one), so rather than cosying up to the next gangland kingpin I come across, I’m telling him to fuck off. Yeah!

Hello everyone. We have a review! Here’s Doom 3. Yes 3. Not 1 or 2.

We’re hoping to have a few more items before Christmas. So as to help me spend time with the oldies, I’ve made an act of supreme sacrifice and dedication, and held off from buying the new warcraft expansion.

So, when I first decided to do this Alpha Protocol thing, I guess my initial idea was to play for a bit, find something vaguely RPG-like that would normally scare me off, and then write about it. There’d be all kinds of different things, I thought…it could be a kind of weekly ‘feature’ until the game got too hard, or I got bored, or I decided to do an actual proper review of an old game [Now there’s an idea – FFG reader].

Since the genesis of this idea, though, the thought struck me that most of my RPG fears boil down to essentially one thing – the freedom to make choices. Frankly, not knowing what I’m supposed to do next scares the hell out of me in the gaming world as much as it does in real life. Which is kind of sad really, seeing as games are supposed to liberate you from the crushing weight of your everyday responsibilities rather than add to them.

But we’ll get onto that some other time. I’m going to be talking about my inability to make decisions, especially in RPGs, in subsequent posts, so in the interests of adding some small level of variety to this whole enterprise, we’ll start with something else.

In fact, let’s start with a decision-making process that’s really not that taxing at all. Now, in Alpha Protocol, you play Michael ‘Mike’ Thorton, a super-spy who can do loads of spy stuff (but not that well at the start, until you level-up and buy gadgets and do all the other RPG stuff that’s necessary). With the role of hero already cast, you don’t have to spend (waste) time customising your character to make him/her look exactly/nothing like you.

Well, you can alter your appearance by changing a handful of settings, but the number of options is so limited that you’re basically left with two choices – either keep Thorton looking as the developers intended:

Or you can make him look like a total prick, instead:

(Incidentally, Thorton does seem to act like a bit of a knob most of the time, but, again, we’ll get onto that later).

Some might say this is disappointing, but frankly, anything that saves dicking around with sliders for half-an-hour or so, altering the bushiness and height of a fake computer game character’s eyebrows, is fine by me. So, er, hoorah for Obsidian!

Back to moaning now. One of the things about being in Alpha Protocol (the government agency, that is, not the game – that’s Alpha Protocol) is that it’s so secretive they can’t risk giving you any money. Fortunately, though, there’s plenty of it just lying around. Seriously, there are piles of cash everywhere. Yoink!

And so we come to the first thing about RPGs I can’t get to grips with: there’s stuff, everywhere, inexplicably just sitting there waiting for you to take it (in some cases it does seem to involve breaking and entering, although often non-player characters don’t seem to notice, or mind, anyway).

Some of this stuff could be important, some of it could be totally useless. But what to take and what to leave behind? I’m the kind of person who wants to pick everything up, just in case. You soon run out of room, no matter how big your pockets are.

Admittedly, this hasn’t been a problem so far in Alpha Protocol – cash is nice and light, and it’s definitely important, so I’ve been taking it, and I’ve usually shot whoever it belonged to anyway, because they were shooting at me, so I don’t feel too bad. But then of course, you get around to wondering how to spend all that money. That sounds like a tricky decision to me.

Recently I purchased the game Alpha Protocol. Despite mixed reviews, it’s one I fancied getting ever since the first set of previews started doing the rounds. As I’ve mentioned before, genuine ‘spy’ games in the Bourne Identity mould are few and far between, and I reckon there’s definitely a gap in the market for a decent one. Or even a half-decent one.

So, when the nefarious/brilliant Steam sale dropped its price to a fiver, it was too much to resist. And unlike many of my impulse purchases, I actually started playing it rather than hoarding it away in my metaphorical digital cupboard for an unspecified time in the near future when I would be ‘less busy’.

So far, I like it. But there’s a problem: it’s an RPG. It even says it on the box, in capital letters: THE ESPIONAGE RPG. Now, my experience with RPGs is a brief and largely unhappy one, limited to the following:

1) Dungeon Master – I played this a bit when I was a wee lad. But I don’t remember getting very far, or an awful lot about it. Here’s what I can recall: some monsters looked like vegetables and when you killed them you could safely eat their remains; also, when you accidentally walked into a wall there was an amusing ‘whooyah’ noise which became so ingrained in my consciousness that to this day I involuntarily echo it whenever I sustain minor injury in real life.

2) Deus Ex – I don’t reckon this really counts, because it hides all of its RPG-ness to the extent that you don’t really realise that it is one. When I played it, I thought of it more as a shooter with a few interesting choices to make along the way. But, on the other hand, if it doesn’t count, that’s the only RPG I’ve ever finished out of the window. So we’ll call it an RPG.

3) Fallout – I bought this with the intention of playing and reviewing it for the site. But it disappointed and overwhelmed me in equal measure. I got about halfway through but the whole thing seemed like a bewildering slog and, knowing that the game was massively popular, I abandoned my plans for a review in case it attracted negative attention and revealed me as the dunce I most certainly am. [Except you’ve ruined it now, you pillock – FFG reader]

I can’t really tell if my time with Alpha Protocol is going to be any more successful, but from initial impressions, I reckon I might make more progress with this one. Even so, some of the RPG hallmarks that baffle me have already made an appearance, and I figured it might be an idea to write about them a little as they crop up.

So, all being well, that’s what I’m going to do. Once upon I time I did think it would be a jolly good laugh for me to review a game that I wouldn’t normally play, and would find really, frustratingly, hard, and then write about it. That might still be worth a go, but I seriously doubt I’ll ever persist with an ageing role-playing-game for long enough to produce a decent review, so I may as well get all of my gripes and anxieties out some other way. That okay with you?

Disclaimer: Now we’re on Facebook and Twitter we’ll use those for dispensable twaddle while aiming to produce something more substantial and entertaining for the journal. However, this could all fall apart, very, very quickly. No refunds of time will be given.

So you might have seen the TV ads for the upcoming warcraft expansion.

Yep a huge angry dragon bursts out of the ground, rants a lot about his ENDLESS AGONY, and breaks the world. Apart from new content for current max-level players, a major theme of this expansion is re-working much of the existing content. And thus improving the levelling experience, which is now 5+ years old and frankly tedious sometimes (endless “collect 10 kobold tail” quests). So now we have new stories, new quests and a changed land for them to take place in.

So apart from attracting more newbies, it’s incentive for us existing players to go back and start again. I might even be tempted to roll a paladin, which I used to find the dullest of classes, now that Tauren have the option. And then fall into the same old routines of running dungeons for badges till 1am, and obsessively chasing achievements.

Or I could just take a break and, I dunno, play some old games and write about them. We’ll see! I promise this won’t turn into a warcraft blog though, unless one day I snap and write a lengthy rant about why rogues should all be shot into the sun.

Hi there.

So, England are in Australia and both sides are gearing up for the Ashes. Excited yet? [sigh] You know, the Ashes…cricket? No?

That doesn’t bode so well for our latest update then. We’ve got a review of Graham Gooch World Class Cricket for you.

And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also put together a Brief History of cricket games down the years, too.

Hope you like it.

A great way to not get anything posted, spread myself across several games at once. Hey at least i’ve mostly given up on bastard warcraft.

Planescape Torment: thought provoking, sometimes genuinely moving story-driven RPG. Great, as long as you like reading lots of text. Well-developed characters, fascinating setting. As far as D&D goes I’m far more absorbed than I ever was in Baldur’s Gate. Expect a glowing review.

Dungeon Siege: The other kind of RPG – a bunch of heroes progress through forests, deserts and dungeons battering 39480 goblins to death. Token story, utterly linear, not a lot of variety. One of those RPGS where one runthrough is enough (compare and contrast with my past Morrowind obsession) – I’m pushing myself for this 2nd attempt just for review purposes. Still it is fun and has some modicum of tactical thinking.

Duke Nukem 3D: was an attempt to be “topical” what with the news that Duke Nukem Forever is actually going to happen. I failed. Will play and review anyway because I’m feeling nostalgic for the mid-90s and hard rock rendered in midi form.

Doom 3: For the sake of playing all shooters ever that aren’t the original Doom. For no reason, I mean I liked Doom. it’s just our thing.

On another note, we’re trying to integrate stuff like facebook and twitter into all this. Not got it all worked out yet; I’ve never really gotten “into” all this modern web 2.0 social mybook stuff because I am old and useless. But we’ll work something out, bolting modern technology onto this creaky old site!