Disclosure Alert: Alpha Protocol: Episode 29: The Spy-Themed Beard Simulator

At long last, Disclosure Alert has FINALLY returned. For those of you who haven’t been following the saga on Twitter, Aldowyn meant to have this out to you guys months ago, but forgot to bring his desktop computer to college with him. This was a problem because that was the only computer capable of editing everything.

So, we no longer have to keep you from that week’s special guest. Shamus Young, contributor to The Escapist and owner of Twenty Sided is here this week. As memory serves, this was a very fun recording session.

Wow. It’s been so long ago that Tom Braider jokes were still relevant. (For those who don’t get the joke, watch the Tomb Raider season of Spoiler Warning.) I wish I could say that I felt bad for making Shamus feel old, but I honestly don’t.

That glitch where Al-Samad gets a reputation ding is an interesting insight into how the game originally was supposed to work. I wish I could peer into the original designs of this game. It’s fairly common knowledge that this game was a victim of publishing meddling on Sega’s part, which explains so many of its problems.

Shamus is right, this game is heavily designed around Pistols, to the point where it’s actively worse if you specialize in any other weapon. Chain Shot is just such a strong skill that it makes every other skill look worse. Plus, you can shoot behind cover.

When we made jokes about how long it would take for these episodes to come out, we did not intend for those to be literal. I imagine Aldowyn felt really bad editing these.

I really dislike “ambush” style missions in general, but this one is particularly bad. This whole “protect the trace” thing is clearly an excuse to force you to mow down tons of mooks. Especially since in other missions, Mina seems perfectly capable of bugging and tracing things discretely, like when bugging the G22 base in Taipei.