Like I said earlier, I think much of it has to do with it being Obsidian. People see what they want/expect to see, and I think many reviewers (and players) expected to see a buggy game from Obsidian. So that's what they saw.

I guess if you look hard enough you can always find a reason to hate a game (or anything for that matter).

Ah well at least we know it rocks.

As much as I liked the game, and certainly theres some great ideas in Alpha Protocol, I still feel its pretty deserving of a 70-80 score out of 100. A lot of it is very generic and dull, I struggled to stay interested in it the whole time and met a few frustrations rather than show stopper bugs.

At the end of my first time through it I was glad it was over, but satisfied to have played it. In contrast, and i'm more a spy fan than a comic book lover, I nearly played arkham asylum three times in a row back-to-back.

For all its buggy mess, i still feel koto2 is one of obsidian's best games because of where they tried to take the star wars universe. Somewhere a little beyond the "young adult" generic wasteland star wars is firmly mired. Alpha protocol by comparison didn't really tread much new ground. Like kotor 2 it has some "everyone will be doing this in their next game" ideas, but the story was far too tame. This and dungeon siege 3 have me worried on obsidian's future and its got nothing to do with bugs.

I think the main problem with AP's charm is you can only real understand how deep the game is when you have multiple playthroughs or talk to people about there playthroughs, because this was the thing that realy shocked me. Doing thing defferently be it playing a mission or skipping a mission killing or sparing someone the info you can dig up on someone before talking to them changes the game drasticly.

I was shocked after my second playthrough that because of when I met someone they reacted completely different to me or what I was doing, this is not the same way that poeple have an extra line of dialogue in mass effect if you do a mission first. If your first interaction with Albatross is in Russia after your fight with Sis regardless of if you kill her or not he will act different i.e. give you info on his units activities in Tiawan (obviously not if you kill her, he'll just be angry) but if you meet him in Tiwan first you will have to kill the G22 members (as you have no idea who they are) that come for you and then you choose to give him the data you swiped or not.

Personaly though my fav Obsidian game has to be NWN2, they showed what a boss fight should be i.e. we'll all go down there and beat the crap out of the guy because it's end of world time otherwise, as opposed to most game that think up some excuse why only 3-4 people should have to fight an unstopable evil and the rest make up the cheering squad.

Did some fiddling with the INI files following some tips here and also on the AP forums (thread here: http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=55422&st=15 ) - much of the problems with Mouse Acceleration have been relieved by some of the tweaks, though the mini games are still a PITA [lock picking is irritating with the mouse sensitivity as low as I need to have it to be playable, the mouse cursor doesn't "stick" to the tumblers and it can be quite annoying moving them precisely to position :/]. Pretty bad side effect though is that my load times have almost quadrupled [turning off streaming textures had a good improvement on general camera/mouse wonkiness... but increased my load times exponentially]

The story so far is pretty good, I am not in love with the Stealth mechanics [or lack thereof - it is me I know, I suck at stealth... how else could you explain having to go through 3 radio mimics within the first half of a mission? *sigh*]

Enemy seems to have some sort of sixth sense when I come bumbling into their bases, heck - they even destroyed an alarm panel once [at least that is how it seemed, the alarm went off and I managed to find an alarm radio to try and hack or EMP.. but it was blown up - 5 times out of 10 I just can't seem to find a nearby alarm panel/radio [it might have to do with the color scheme of the game in Saudi Arabia - the washed out greens/tans are not easy on my eyes]]

Shooting isn't too bad and I think that, if I overlook the annoyances, I will enjoy the rest of the game pretty well. I like how the handlers have personalities, and how the enemy guards sometimes make small talk that adds to the overall plot. All in all a decent game so far [a few hours in] - it won't make it into my top 10 games list [or even my personal GotY list] but it isn't a horrible train wreck like some others I have played :)

It gets much better when you get out of Saudi-Arabia. Especially when you meet the "supporting characters" :)

Any suggestions on where to go after Saudi Arabia? Or is there a certain path that is "best" [or needed to avoid game breaking bugs/issues] to take?

Here are some tips on stealth:

Like you, early on I felt very annoyed by it. No matter what I did, enemies would easily discover me. Or so I thought.

The first trick to stealth is to make sure that your armour doesn't lower sound dampening. If I'm not wrong there's only one armour that increases sound dampening (Tactical Stealth Armour or something); everything else lowers it or doesn't touch it. It's still fine if you lower sound dampening by -2, since that barely exceeds the threshold of the takedown range of the enemy. In other words, you still can use a takedown on the enemy if you're fast enough. Anything lower than that and the enemy will notice you before you close in on that threshold, even if you're crouching. Also, always, always crouch when you want to sneak. Running will usually alert people unless you have Shadow Running or Evasion.

Second trick to stealth is to invest in Stealth sufficiently until you get Awareness as a passive skill. Initially Awareness will need to be activated every 60 seconds (or was it 30?), so it's very annoying to manage. Once you get it as a passive skill, you can detect enemies anytime (which also leads me to my point that it makes it easier for you to notice the silly design decision of enemies spawning 2m behind you out of the blue). When you acquire that, it becomes significantly easier to sneak through a bunch of enemies.

Also, do note that crouching has a 60% chance of getting you noticed even if you think you're hiding behind cover. To ensure you have a 95% chance of not getting noticed, you'll need to hide behind cover. The problem with this is that you'll find yourself in the same predicament that I had i.e. difficult to make a run for safer grounds due to 'sticky' controls.

You can do the three hubs in any order you want, for the most part.

I would reccomend doing a bit of Taipei before being halfway through Moscow, and there is a mission that you MUST take immediately in MOscow when it appears, but if you miss it, it's no big deal.

There is no "best" route, the game rewards you for any given path or style you may have.
And when you finish it, stay for the credits and listen to the repercusions of every single one of your actions. Missed it on my first two playthroughs, did not for the subsequent 3.

I installed the game and there were no shortcuts. Is that normal for this game? If not, how do I install the game so I get shortcuts?

Can you not make one yourself? Go to the game's install directory, right click the .exe and choose the shortcut option?

Which .exe do I use to make my own shortcut? And I also wanted to know if it is normal for games to not install shortcuts...

On Windows Vista & 7 it is common for newer games not to add shortcuts, this is because of Microsoft's [failed] policy of putting all game shortcuts in the special Games folder.

I am pretty sure that my installer added a shortcut to the desktop though - then I dragged it to my custom pin stack menu on my task bar.

You can choose 2 ways to create a shortcut, either the launcher or direct game.

Launcher location is: [Game Install Path]\APLauncher.exe
Direct game executable is: [Game Install Path]\Binaries\APGame.exe

[examples:

C:\Program Files (x86)\SEGA\Alpha Protocol\APLauncher.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\SEGA\Alpha Protocol\Binaries\APGame.exe
]

Everyone who is interested about choices in games, especially in AP, must see this:

http://blip.tv/panels-from-pax/pax-east-2010-obsidian-entertainment-but-thou-must-choice-in-games-3510743