Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi, Boss Fight Books, August 25th, 2014
This is a book I had long been interested in but held off buying despite it being dedicated to one of my favourite games of all time. It was not so much the book itself but what I considered the pretentious aesthetic chosen by the publisher: Boss Fight Books. Certainly a petty reason but contrary to the popular aphorism — you often can judge a book by its cover. And the cover suggested it would be a meandering personal narrative of the author’s experiences with the game and so a waste of time, money, ink and paper. While this certainly seems to be the case for at least a few of the books published under this label, it is not the case here. Darius Kazemi knows his subject well, interviewed a number of the key development staff and often includes extended quotes from them within the text. He also gives a concise history of both the publisher Sir-tech and the Jagged Alliance series before delving into Jagged Alliance 2‘s development, design, story, features and legacy. It is short but little space is wasted. His experiences of the game also mirror many that I have detailed in other posts about the series on this blog.
I am labelling this as a review but what follows isn’t going to follow the typical format I usually adopt for these. It isn’t really necessary as I absolutely recommend the book to anyone familiar with the game and encourage the curious to read an exert published here.
The first thing to get out the way is some mistakes I made in my post about Jagged Alliance 2 to mark its twentieth anniversary in 2019. One of the more interesting discoveries I learned on reading this was that not only Jagged Alliance 2 but the entire series did have professional voice work through ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian, Television and Radio Artists). I will make allowances for audio compression but I still think I can be forgiven for assuming the voice work was not done by professionals. Myself and others were making fun of the voice work in every game in the series beginning with the original which I still consider amateurish even for the time.
Another minor error was that the company is properly stylised as “Sir-tech” and not “Sir-Tech” as I wrote it in previous posts. I am far from the only one to make this mistake and people still do but Kazemi got the correction directly from Robert Sirotek himself. I also suggested towards the end in the same linked post that new players use the fan made 1.13 mod to play the game today. This is actually not ideal as it makes an already complicated game even more so for new players. At the time I wrote that, I had not played the game with the installed mod and assumed it just updated the game to work on modern systems.
Now onto the book itself.
The author tends to stick to his subject but he does occasionally take detours into his socio-political preoccupations including of course: diversity and identity politics. Some way into the book he mentions how Canada (where the series was developed), officially adopted a policy of “Multiculturalism” in 1971 and implausibly links this to the cultural diversity found in the Jagged Alliance series. The first observation to make is that Canada became a nation in 1867 and didn’t have such a policy until over a century into her existence as an independent nation. Longer still if you begin with European settlement. As with my own nation, this is something that was imposed from above and never a genuine part of Great Britain or any of her daughter nations including her wayward United States of America. I am guessing Darius is a Persian who lived/has lived in Canada and is so rather sensitive about his identity.
That a game where you hire mercenaries from an organisation called the “Association of International Mercenaries” has people from all over the world is hardly surprising. And to meander myself into personal experience with the original game when I was still a boy and living with very little multiculturalism around me, I found this diversity totally uncontroversial. I can’t remember thinking anything of it at all. Even the inclusion of women didn’t bother me. From the first title, there was a tongue-in-cheek tone to the series that never had me or anyone I knew that played it, take things too seriously. The reason this is a problem today is because the decision to include “diversity” doesn’t stem naturally from design choices of developers but because it is imposed from powers above. Actually, very similar to policies of “multiculturalism” and immigration in countries like Canada and Australia.
Thankfully, outside of a few mentions of the game’s inclusion of racism and sexism, Kazemi doesn’t dwell too much on these topics. Refreshingly, he seems to support the pluralism adopted by the developers where the player is presented with these issues in specific contexts and can decide how to respond to them. As much as I’ve replayed the game, I had no idea of the dislike the Jamaican mercenary Vicki had for Gasket because of his “racism” until reading the book. This is yet another testament to how deep the game is as Kazemi mentions within the pages of the book.
Something else I didn’t realise until I started following the development of Jagged Alliance 3 was how influential cheesy action flicks were to the series. It was something I understood on the surface as a character like “Steroid” is obviously a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger but I didn’t realise how conscious this was in the design. The film McBain is specifically mentioned which I thought was just another parody of Schwarzenegger from The Simpsons. This is a real film starring Christopher Walken that I sought out and viewed before writing this post. It is not a good film but it is watchable and I can certainly see the influence it had on the series.
In one of the few sections where Kazemi brings his personal experience into the text, he mentions how he bought discount copies of the game to give them to friends. I believe it was relatively more popular in Australia than North America and don’t remember ever seeing it heavily discounted. Though I wasn’t so committed as to give away free copies, I was something of an advocate for the game through High School into University. I did know a small group at High School who did play it but it was never as big as other PC games of the time. I also remember selling the strategy guide for the game after committing basically everything within to memory. This was the days before the Internet was as full of easily accessible information as it now is so the strategy guide was really helpful. The game interestingly gives a good simulation of what the Internet was actually like within the interface for those who had no experience of it.
Towards the end, Kazemi covers how the game was received noting that it did much better in Europe. One thing that jumped out was a critical review he mentions but doesn’t quote from in PC Gamer. I went looking for this and found an archived version online as well as the page from a magazine scan which I have included at the bottom of the post so it may be preserved in infamy. That the reviewer didn’t play far into the game is especially obvious from the concluding paragraph:
JA2’s disappointments spring from the lapses of its design ambitions. The campaign is totally linear, and, as a result, replay value is not very high. Worse, the lack of a multiplayer element (in a game that positively screams for such a feature) means you’ll never be able to match your wits against other human merc bosses. Fans of squad-based tactical combat games will find this one a bit simplistic and uninvigorating, but the engaging managerial elements will satisfy anybody who liked the original JA or New World Computing’s underrated merc sim Wages of War. After all, there’s nothing like watching a good plan come together
This paragraph is impressive for how many objectively incorrect statements it contains. Very few games in history have been as successful in achieving the ambitions of the developers as Jagged Alliance 2. The campaign isn’t linear at all and as already mentioned above, the variety of experiences that different players can have with the same game is quite extraordinary even to this day. The complaint about the lack of multiplayer stems from the reviewer believing that Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games (which first introduced multiplayer into the series), was the first game in series though it is more a standalone expansion to the original though it is much more robust than typical expansion packs for the time. The idea that the combat is simplistic is just absurd and needs no further comment. The two screenshots included in the review are also from the very first map in the game which supports the idea the reviewer played very little of what remains a truly enormous game to this day. One can rightfully complain about the descent of gaming journalism in recent years but this review shows they could be very sloppy even during the golden age of PC gaming. This is far from the only fondly remembered game with at least one poor contemporary reviews though. Jagged Alliance 2 is a good example of a title that fits into the GREAT heuristic I came up with a few years ago. I can well understand why this is no longer archived on the PC Gamer website.
What has changed since the book’s publication in 2014, was not only the arrival of a worthy though inferior sequel but also the increased availability of interviews and information about the series than there was when the book was originally published. Just below is a video interview with Robert Sirotek which is part of a series of interviews on Sir-tech and the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series. There is also an interview with Brenda Romero who also worked on the series and there may be more since I last checked.
I still recommend it to anyone interested in Jagged Alliance 2 and the series as it is a short but fascinating read.
The September, 1999 PC Gamer Review:
