Jagged alliance gold end a day8/15/2023 ![]() ![]() He does not treat Jagged Alliance 2 as a singular moment of creative j ag g ed alliance 2 While Kazemi is a connoisseur of the game, he’s not filtering its story through rose-tinted lenses. This is not a book your typical game critic could have written, and few practicing developers would have the time, inclination, or ability to tell Jagged Alliance 2’s story so clearly or comprehensively. This book reflects not just his comprehensive knowledge of the game itself, but also his understanding of the developers’ craft. Fortunately, Jagged Alliance 2 has the perfect guide in Darius Kazemi. Game development is a messy, compromised process. But understanding a game’s origins requires understanding a whole host of factors that are only tangentially related to what the creative team did, including the technical limitations they labored under, the business model that funded their work, the sales environment the game would be entering, and the personalities of the team’s individual members. ![]() It was a game of enormous possibilities, a mid-90s RPG, a wargame, an adventure, and it remains one of the best treatments of insurgency warfare in gaming. Luckily, Jagged Alliance 2 was far more than a variation on a genre’s themes. The turn-based tactical genre almost vanished within a few years of Jagged Alliance 2, and the few games that attempted to carry the torch came dismally close to extinguishing it altogether. But why was it so different from its peers, at once behind the times and yet years ahead of them? Why was it such a strange blend of influences, like Frederick Forsyth by way of Borat? And why hasn’t there been anything like it since? v ii So yes, Jagged Alliance 2 felt like an anachronism seconds after the shrink-wrap came off the box. Many of its contemporaries marked the industry’s transition into 3D gaming: Thief, Half-Life, and Grim Fandango seemed to signal a new era, and Jagged Alliance 2 was all-too-plainly a product of the past. Only a year or so after its release, Jagged Alliance 2 felt like a quintessential “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” fetish object. ![]() It’s an “I’m not even angry-I’m just surprised” kind of game. In another, it’s a dark comedy, with the squad’s resident klutz dropping a grenade at his own feet, somehow surviving, then accidentally headshotting the medic who is running to help him. In another, it’s a nighttime commando mission in which enemy soldiers are quietly dispatched with throwing knives and machetes. In one game, the battle for a mining town is a bitter, World War II style streetfight. Each encounter with Jagged Alliance 2 is like a snowflake. Remember I told you about the Russian sniper rifle I got…?” And then I’d get a blow-by-blow reenactment of a desperate, heroic battle at a dictator’s SAM site. I’d get phone calls: “Rob Rob Rob! You would not believe what just happened Fans like me loaned copies to their friends and watched as they fell down the same rabbit hole. But like a lot of great works, Jagged Alliance 2 hangs in there while so many other games fade away. Jagged Alliance 2 blotted out everything else for the next few months, and I became like a crazy man, telling my friends at school about this amazing game that nobody had ever heard of. It remains perhaps the best bargain bin purchase of my life. I grabbed Jagged Alliance 2 for $10, based on a half-remembered review in Computer Gaming World and a gripping description of room-toroom fighting in a third-world hospital. I was there to buy something else, something I can’t even remember today. It was a checkout line impulse purchase at Electronics Boutique, found in a battered, unloved box lying with the rest of the commercial refuse of the bargain bin. To my parents, who encouraged my love of writing and technology.ĬONTENTS vi Foreword 1 Introduction 6 The History of Sir-Tech 14 The Genesis of Jagged Alliance 31 Making Jagged Alliance 2 42 Character and Story 51 Mercenaries, Gun Culture, and “Realism” 62 The Unseen 75 The Code 100 JA2: Release and Beyond 114 Notes 117 AcknowledgementsįOREWORD I discovered Jagged Alliance 2 a year late. ISBN 13: 978-1-94 First Printing: 2014 Second Printing: 2017 Series Editor: Gabe Durham Book Design by Ken Baumann Page Design by Adam Robinson Boss Fight Books Los Angeles, CA Copyright © 2014 Darius Kazemi All rights reserved. ![]()
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