About the first Jagged Alliance

[Shaewaroz]

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.

 

[kyrub]

I stand by my points. I understand, that you love the game, but it never happened with me, and man, I did try a lot. Let the man who asked try the game, he'll see by himself.

The game is hard, which (you probably did not notice I said) is its best point. And I loved the iron-man battles (in this respect, Ja2 sucks). The cover is more challenging in Ja1 than Ja2 as well, once you learn which bush is the "one that stops bullets" or that the hollow trees are, in fact, incredibly "bushy". The real problem is general lack of battle features, the only thing you can do with soldier is kneel or shoot or run. Grenades are incredibly scarce... and molotovs can't hide that. With the lack of variety in the fights, it becomes boring sooner rather than later (and yes, at that point, I am unable ot imagine enemy retaking sectors, because it means re-fighting the same maps again and again... ughh.) When I re-played Ja1, I always felt it is "almost" the perfect game. But the gap to the perfect remains definite and big.

At the end, boredom and frustration (the power plant and I did not mention the original sin of opening the doors and having no way to "not-be-shot"; again: pure hazard is a very bad design.) always killed the game to me. And I confess, despite playing it like 20 times (no games on baby difficulty, mind you), I never finished it. I wasn't able to. Too under-featured and long, frustrating, half fonctional. Almost, but at the end, not enough.

 

[Norfleet]

Opening doors is a pretty hazardous business in real life, too, and a large part of why you hear of excessive force used by police: Doors are almost always involved somehow. I guess the scarcity of grenades and probably rocket launchers makes it massively unsafe to open doors, whereas in JA2, I typically avoid this problem by going in through a wall instead. If you've been to the aftermath of my JA2 battles, you'll find an AWFUL lot of holes blown through walls next to a perfectly functional door.

 

[Shaewaroz]

-zip-

The points you make here are actually completely valid - combat lacks features and doors & windows are deathtraps. Some people will definitely find them off-putting. I can even add another weakness: the enemy AI is pretty terrible. But none of these things can outweigh the strategic complexity, rewarding exploration, the nail-bitingly tense moments and unforgettable story quests this game offers. Like many other classics, it's more than the sum of it's parts.

 

[octavius]

I've never played JA2, and I only played JA1 (and Deadly Games) earlier this year, but I really enjoyed the games.
So JA1 is definitely worth playing IMO, and will most likely be most fun before you play JA2.
On my chronological play list, where I'm nearing the end of 1996, I've listed Jagged Alliance as my own Game of the Year for 1995 (even beating HoMM).

 

[Shaewaroz]

I've never played JA2, and I only played JA1 (and Deadly Games) earlier this year, but I really enjoyed the games.
So JA1 is definitely worth playing IMO, and will most likely be most fun before you play JA2.
On my chronological play list, where I'm nearing the end of 1996, I've listed Jagged Alliance as my own Game of the Year for 1995 (even beating HoMM).

Originally JA was released for DOS in 1994, with makes it compete against XCOM and System Shock for the Game of The Year Award. Robert Sirotek even mentioned that the release of XCOM hurt the sales of JA because they both competed for the attention of the strategy audience. 1994 was an awesome year for gaming.

 

[octavius]

Hmm...I have listed the release date of JA1 as March 12, 1995 on my play list. Don't remember where I got that date from, though.

For 1994, System Shock was the obvious choice of GOTY, even if I had placed JA1 in that year.

I haven't played much of X-Com, since I was waiting for the remake to be finished. Now that the remake has been finished, and got a good reception, I will most likely play it next year.

 

[kyrub]

So JA1 is definitely worth playing IMO, and will most likely be most fun before you play JA2.
On my chronological play list, where I'm nearing the end of 1996, I've listed Jagged Alliance as my own Game of the Year for 1995 (even beating HoMM).

I actually agree with it. If someone has enough time on his hands... and hasn't touched a simlar, more accomplished game... Jagged Alliance was a revolutionary title. And if you go chronologically, there's nothing better for me. (It did not make it less frustrating, a true love-hate relationship.)

By the way, Octavius, what are your GOTY for previous years?

 

[octavius]

By the way, Octavius, what are your GOTY for previous years?

1985: Ultima 4
1986: Starflight
1987: Dungeon Master
1988: Pool of Radiance
1989: Chaos Strikes Back
1990: Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
1991: Civilization
1992: Ultima Underworld
1993: Doom
1994: System Shock
1995: Jagged Alliance (Heroes of Might&Magic if JA was really released in 1994)

 

[Shaewaroz]

If I remember correctly, the CD version of JA was released in 1995, which is the really the complete version of the game, since the floppy version didn't have any audio other than the music. You can't fit that much audio into floppy discs. The game took some 6-8 floppies (can't remember clearly) even without the audio. In the JA wikipedia page it only mentions the CD version though so I might be wrong.

EDIT: Checked the manual and in the customer support section "game diskettes" are mentioned, so I'm pretty sure the original release was on floppy discs.