10 Hidden Gaming Gems That You Totally Missed Out On

8. Alpha Protocol

We're all waiting with baited breath to see what the (very) long-awaited South Park: The Stick of Truth is going to turn out like, as aside from a Fallout sequel and the lukewarm Dungeon Siege III, developer Obsidian are also known for their James Bond 'em up Alpha Protocol. In a supremely enticing Mass Effect-meets-The Bourne Identity mashup, they created the first ever spy RPG, letting you put different points into sleuthing your way around enemy bases, gathering intel, hacking computers, or just going in guns blazing like our favourite Martini-fanatic. You're probably thinking this sounds like an amazing game, stuffed to the brim with conversation-options and DIY-facial customisation, truly putting YOU into the game world and asking the sorts of 'the world, or the girl'-style questions that we associate with such fare. The crippling problem, and we do mean crippling on the level of that limb-severing scene from the original Kill Bill, was the incredible amount of bugs and genuinely shoddy programming the game had in spades. Guards will see you from incredibly random distances, and for the most part especially in the earlier levels your proficiency with a weapon hinges more on dice rolls than pixel-perfect head shots, leading to many abandoning the game in favour of something more instantly-rewarding like Gears of War. However if you played in a much more straight-up stealth-like manner it was far more joyous, pioneering many stat-boosts such as the 'mark and execute' mechanic later coined by Splinter Cell, and a great performance from Nathan Drake himself Nolan North, voicing unhinged rogue Steven Heck.