4. Alpha Protocol ; What a trainwreck! This is very obviously a game that was made by a number of very intelligent very bold core designers sitting down, pitching some great ideas, and then pretty much utterly failing to make that game. Whole chunks of the game were clearly unfinished or rewritten at the last minute, the development process was obviously a disaster, and it got delayed over and over again. Many things remain unrealized; character development is interesting but it's super easy to back yourself into a relative corner, and this stinks from untested or unfixed design issues. Some mechanics are poorly explained, the game doesn't perform particularly well, and it's clearly very rough around the edges. But boy golly is this game more brimming with potential than pretty much any I've ever played. Absolutely killer writing, awesome characterization, and a far gutsier main character than Badass/Saint Shepard, it is possible to make Thornton a genuinely insane schizophrenic or a nerd trying to act suave. Secondary characters are rich and allude to a world that could have been even better with more time, more money, and more people working on it. Some of the best political themes in gaming ever--there are some really rich allusions about media control, terror-through-fear, mass panic, the psychology of crowds, to say nothing of the central premise of a government agent operating as a sort of rogue spy. Mission design is great, with the tense ice cream scene in Rome or the ambiguous sniper mission in Rome where you can choose to take a confirmed shot at an unconfirmed baddie or let him live until further proof is found play with the player's mind, the embassy infiltration mission... just three of the many missions I really adored on a design level. I'd rather more companies go big and release this kind of title than retreat to safe press-A-to-win pap.