Shaewaroz
Arcane
Shaewaroz, everybody can have an opinion, but your claims about JA1 seem totally exagerated to me. I have played JA1 a lot, but when Ja2 came out, I never looked back. Ja2 fixes many flaws of the original.
- First of all, JA 1 is not a tiny, quick game. It has a scary LOT of sectors, and you have to take them all, one by one. And it becomes dull and repetitive (unless you are hardcore boyhood fan of the particular game).
- Second, the game has terrible pacing. I could not believe what you wrote. In about second sector, you get a paper about Day 9 and receiving material in a sector. In fact, on day 9, you are either much further ahead in sectors (and you don't need the material) or you have already lost the game because you won too few sectors.
- Third, you are simply exaggerating strategic events in JA1. Most of the times, there is aboslutely nothing to do, bar winning sectors. Native dislike has never happened to me, and in JA 2 you have far more impact on popularity with key events (like Chalice).
- Last but not least, there inexplicable situations in JA1 with huge impact on the game. It can be really frustrating. The damned power plant - nobody on earth knows why the things gets blasted. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. You may try to steal through, but at the end, you just pray. Terrible design. And it can lose you the campaign.
The game has good and strong points, the jungles sectors, the river ones. The interaction between characters is funny, the first time you encounter it. The game is pretty hard, harder than Ja2, which I enjoyed. But at the end, it is really slow and too long for the few feature it offers. A hardcore fan will play it till the last day of his life. Others probably will always turn to the sequel.
Well, let me address your points.
- Yes, JA1 has flaws. It's a flawed jem like XCOM. The pros vastly outweigh the cons.
- I never said JA1 was a quick game. Also, you don't have to capture even nearly all of the sectors, you can go straight for Santino's HQ. That way you capture maybe one fifth of the sectors in the game.
- The fact that you receive clues of weapon supply drops happening days later has absolutely nothing to do with the game's pacing. Pacing means that events follow each other in a logical, consistent stream and player never feels like there's nothing happening. The fact that you get a clue of a supply drop that is going to happen days later requires you to think ahead, it doesn't require you to wait doing nothing.
- There's around ten major story events in JA1. Each of them usually require multiple days to complete. I don't understand how you can suggest that there's nothing to do. You have probably never experienced native dislike because you don't understand that native worker availability is tied to how much natives like you and if you play the game on baby difficulty and reload every time a merc dies or your sector is captured by enemy troops, you will obviously never experience hardship, which is the true beauty of Jagged Alliance.
- You complain about choices/player input having consequences? You wouldn't want events to have impact to the game? Yes, the events can completely screw you over, but you have to adapt - you kick out a couple of expensive mercs and concentrate guard coverage to just few sectors. Have you ever tried doing so? Or have you ever watched your favorite merc quit because you threw his friend's corpse to the ocean because you didn't have afford to pay for the funeral costs? The game has no beauty if you never have to experience something like that. You must resist the temptation to load the game when something goes wrong. Otherwise you will never learn to truly appreciate Jagged Alliance.
Again I have to stress that JA1 and JA2 are very different games - you can't say that simply by improving some elements JA2 made JA1 obsolete. People should play both games because they offer very different experiences.
Last edited: