Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi: Book Review
The only mercenaries in videogames that I ever encountered or played were either in Mercenaries: Playground for Destruction, or else the mercenaries I could hire in Stronghold Crusader. Actually, that’s not true. I wrote that sentence before I remembered there were also mercenaries in Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed Revelation. I spent a lot of time(and money) hiring those dudes, who always stood around holding weapons in populated urban districts looking like they were waiting on a bus to some sort of Renaissance era Renaissance fair, and sending them to fight city-guards. This was sometimes used as a distraction so I could steal gold or Codex entries, but far more often if I’m being honest it was for “the lolz.”
This is just to clarify that I wasn’t completely ignorant about the concept of hired private-sector military personnel. My father was in the marine core when he attended Texas A&M University, and he was, above all else, an average white Dad which of course by implication meant he was an amateur military history enthusiast. He read Tom Clancy novels, he played Modern Warfare videogames once I’d abandoned them, he watched just about every war movie he could get his hands on (to this day I still whistle the theme from The Longest Day), and he ingested nonfiction history books about submarines, World War 2, and the greatest battles in history. And, because I loved my Dad, I asked him to tell me about all this thus establishing most of my working knowledge of military history.
This also is the reason why I played a LOT of videogames that included warfare for narrative and gameplay purposes.
Given the fact that I played an almost absurdly multitudinous number of Real time strategy(RTS) PC games over the course of my life, it’s kind of a mystery to me how I didn’t play Jagged Alliance 2, or any of the iterations of the series.
Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi is the fifth book in the Boss Fight Books series, and much like the books that preceded and followed it, it’s a fascinating exploration of a videogame that tries to be more than just an explanation of its awesomeness. The ethos of Boss Fight Books by admission of their “About Us'' page is about producing short documentary style books that focus on various elements or components of videogames, the legacy they leave behind, the subculture that they create, or else the impact that such games have had on their writers. And by now, any regular reader of this website (you exist??) knows that I adore these books and am slowly working my way through the series.
I note that I'm slowly working through them because, as of this writing anyway, I’m still working 40 hours a week. My patreon link is at the bottom of the essay(and here) if you want to help with that though.
Or don’t, you’re a free agent and I ain’t gonna tell you how to spend your money.
Though you should buy a copy of Kazemi’s book.
Because it’s great.
Image provided by Moby Games.
First though, let’s talk about the actual game this book is about. Jagged Alliance 2 is a diagonal-down, isometric, turn-based, tactical Role playing game (RPG). The player begins the game watching a cut-scene in which a character by the name of Enrico Chivaldori approaches the protagonist with a request. Enrico is a former election candidate for the president of the fictional Latin American country Alucro. He informs the player that his former wife, Deidranna Reitman, who he married for political clout, has framed him for the murder of his father and is now running the country as a dictator. He provides the player a large sum of money and the task to overthrow the government and allow democratic elections in the country again. From there the game becomes about hiring mercenaries from a Soldiers of Fortune website and taking back various settlements and strategic locations across the country with the end goal of overthrowing Deidranna’s oppressive regime.
I need to be honest before I progress any further in this review: I didn’t like this game.
I’ve tried playing Jagged Alliance 2 multiple times, and even after finally managing to master the in-game controls, I still didn’t enjoy playing it. I’m at a point in my life where I recognise it’s never just “one thing” that keeps me from enjoying a videogame, book, films, play, etc. Therefore in the case of Jagged Alliance 2 I can point to a number of small details that prevented me from enjoying the game. But I won’t bother writing those all out because, as I’ve stated multiple times in various writing projects, YouTube videos, and even in my personal interactions with friends and coworkers, I don’t enjoy negative reviews. And, also, this is a review of a book about a videogame, not the game itself.
What’s important is by the end of my reading I appreciated Jagged Alliance 2 as a videogame and what it was trying to do. And that’s what a great book about a videogame should do.
Image provided by Moby Games.
Kazemi focuses on the production of Jagged Alliance 2, beginning by noting its previous installments, as well as the people who shaped and published the original work. The game was developed by a production company based out of Canada called Sir-Tech, and then later published by TalonSoft and TopWare Interactive. Kazemi includes numerous direct quotes from interviews, both that he did personally, as well as from trade and game journalism magazines at the time of release of the game. These passages will definitely interest any longtime fans of Jagged Alliance 2, as well as anyone who might be interested in the process of development of videogame software. For example, in one early passage Kazemi observes how the in-game mechanic of controlling multiple units evolved during the development process. He writes:
While the Jagged Alliance series is known for its turn based strategy, for much of its development JA1 was a real-time game. Currie was inspired by Command HQ., and wanted to emulate its real-time action. The switch from real-time to turn-based came during development, while playing with early versions of the game. He realized that directly controlling a squad of individual units in a real-time setting meant managing any individual unit was extremely difficult. (25-26)
I note as a small reaction to this passage that I played the third-person, action adventure shooter game Freedom Fighters (and even wrote a short essay about it) and understand what Kazemi is talking about. Managing a group of dudes (and the occasional lady-dudes) with guns in order to fight more dudes with guns is not an easy task, but it was one of the appeals for that game and why I enjoyed playing it. Though it is important to remember that I played the game on Nintendo Gamecube, and the most control I had over these npcs was sending them in a direction using the directional pad(D-pad). Jagged Alliance 2, by comparison, has inventory systems for the individual mercenaries the player can hire, multiple command controls, individual personalities for each mercenary, and individual health bars that have to be continually monitored.
That’s a lot of individuals within a lot of individuals.
THAT, fun fact, was an attempt at humor. And it failed.
The complexity of just managing one or two mercenaries, while also keeping an eye on my financial resources, and trying to progress in the story is a constant task that has to be juggled carefully.
This is to say, Jagged Alliance 2 is not a simple game. It is complex and requires an active and continually changing strategy.
When discussing any strategy game, whether it be for PC or console systems, one inevitably has to discuss two of the greatest examples of the genre, Chess and Sid Meier’s Civilization. One is a near ancient board game that incorporates moving pieces of various hierarchy across a black and white checkered board to defeat an opponent, and the other is a PC videogame created in the 1980s about developing a Civilization (I see what you did there Sid Meier(and I dig it)) through history in order to either conquer rival nations, or else arrive at a peaceful equilibrium with other npcs. Both of these games have established themselves as hallmarks of strategy gaming because they are, to quote Sid Meier directly, “a series of interesting choices.” Every choice the player will make in Chess, Civilization, or Jagged Alliance 2 will have outcomes that will create new choices that have to be made.
And this is what a good, and sometimes great videogame, should be about.
Though on the note of choices, Kazemi points out that some choices were made by developers not always to make the game interesting, but just manageable. The most specific instance is the number of mercenaries who are people of color. Kazemi writes:
Jagged Alliance 2 features an unusually diverse roster of characters. There are 62 playable mercenaries: Ten of these (14%) are women and fourteen(23%) are non-white. The white men on the roster represent a wide range of nationalities. That may not seem very impressive, but for a video game released in 1999, it was a refreshing change of pace to see a bullpen of fully voiced characters for their own personalities hailing from a relatively wide variety of backgrounds.
According to Co-Designer Shaun Lyng, the diversity was a practical solution to a problem: If you have 62 playable characters, the player needs to be able to tell them apart. (45).
image provided by Moby Games.
Racial, Gender, and Ethnic Diversity in videogames is a conversation unto itself, and I have briefly discussed my own experience with it in the videogames I’ve played when I was reviewing another Boss Fight Books entry, specifically Parappa the Rapper by Mike Sholars. The short version is that I’ve played a LOT of videogames, and most of the characters in those games have been white. Super Mario was white, Link was white, Soap in Modern Warfare was white, Eddie Riggs in Brutal Legend was white, Clive Rosfield is Final Fantasy XVI was white. My actual life tended to reflect this as well. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, I attended a predominantly white private school, I went to a university where most of the students and teachers were white, and most of the books I was assigned to read were about white characters. This is all to note that, when I consider choice as a gameplay mechanic, the options I had were limited.
It’s not a strike against Jagged Alliance 2 that diversity was included simply to make the mercenaries different, but Kazemi is keen to point out this fact to show how the game became as complex as it did. And in that same breath, Kazemi is able to show his reader how this decision would eventually develop in game-conflicts entirely because of these differences. A few pages later Kazemi writes:
You might think Vicki and Gasket would get along, as they’re both mechanics with a love of cars. But Vicki is a black Jamaican, and Gasket is a white man “born and raised in the foothills of Kentucky.” If you have Gasket on your team and you try to hire Vicki, she refuses to join, saying “Sorry, man. I can’t in good conscience be signin’ with ya. Gasket is a racist. I can’t lay down my life for someone who’d just as soon like to kill me himself.” The simple acknowledgement that racism exists was rare for a video game in 1999, and it serves as a powerful moment amplified by the fact that your past hiring decision is now preventing you from recruiting one of the best mercenaries in the game (48-49)
This passage is really interesting to me because, again, none of the characters I had played growing up ever acknowledged racism. The fact that a game was willing to not only discuss it, but then also let it affect gameplay is not just unique, it’s an example of rhetorical brilliance. I honestly wish more games would incorporate such a unique detail if only so that it would reveal how commonplace racism can and does exist in interactions between people. Putting aside the politics, the idea that a character's racism, and my hiring of a racist individual could affect my ability to achieve in-game objectives is practically a master-class for would-be companies that try miserably to explain racism’s effect in professional working environments.
Image provided by Moby Games.
And on the note of reality, Kazemi is wonderful in explaining how Jagged Alliance 2 sold a vision of warfare that is, unfortunately, as misguided as it is embedded in society at large. Jagged Alliance 2 is a war game and Kazemi discusses how a military-enthusiast subculture informed the aesthetic of the game. He writes:
The realism of games is precisely the realism of Soldier of Fortune magazine: both JA2 and SOF attempt to give their audience the feeling of what they imagine being a mercenary is like. Generally speaking, war-themed video games are perceived as being realistic, yet there are always three different factors at play: The reality of war, the fantasy of the video game, and the fantasy of war that is manufactured by the military, the entertainment industry, and the media. No matter what a war-themed video game claims to do, it inevitably simulates the cultural fantasy of war, and never of war itself. (61)
I noted at the start of this review that my Dad was a military-history enthusiast and how that enthusiasm spilled down to me. While reading Kazemi’s book I had an opportunity to reflect on how many videogames I’ve played that were either about war, included warfare as part of their aesthetic, or were simply about the military or military personnel. Videogames like Freedom Fighters and Call of Duty were a staple of my media diet, alongside watching movies like Predator and Commando with my best friend Kevin. The number of hours I spent, and the sheer repetition of killing dudes over and again while relishing the pilfering and acquisition of new firearms, could most likely fill up the Library of Alexandria three times. Guns and videogames have been together about as long as peanut butter and jelly and so it can be difficult sometimes to remember that there are games that aren’t about fighting and killing dudes.
Pac-Man is one such videogame.
Pac-Man was purposefully designed the way it was because its lead designer Toru Iwatani wanted to make a game that was not about killing. And Pac-Man, fun fact, is one of the greatest games ever made.
But…so is DOOM, and DOOM is about shooting guns.
And DOOM is, this is another fun fact, really really rad.
Jagged Alliance 2 is yet another videogame which builds upon the legacy of those that came before, while also building directly from the jingoism and romanticism of war which was established over and over again by fun games about shooting guns. I want to reiterate here, I don’t have any high ground to claim, I love videogames about warfare because they’re fun to play. And clearly Kazemi thinks so too, otherwise he wouldn’t have written an entire book about it.
Besides the intricacies of the gameplay elements Kazemi’s book was fascinating to read in no small part because of the sheer amount of research that went into it. Whether examining aspects of the modding community that embraced Jagged Alliance 2, or the details of the software development itself it’s clear that this is a videogame that Kazemi is intensely fascinated by. In one particular passage he notes how the detail of its production compares with contemporary videogame software development. He writes:
JA two is not a data driven game. The code and data both live in the same place: the code files. If a designer wanted to change the price of a gun, she would have to open up Items.c in Visual Studio, change the value from 350 to 450, and then press the “Compile” button. Compilation time on JA2 was probably around 15 to 30 minutes. What this means is if the designer wanted to change the price of a gun three or four times in a row, the changes will take hours to test. Usually the result of long compile times was that designers became reticent to tweak values, settling for “good enough” since they have better things to do than wait around for half a day just to come up with a good price for a gun. (101)
Image provided by Moby Games.
It’s easy to forget as a player that videogames are not clean, polished products that emerge sans effort. These are software programs designed by living breathing human beings who are trying to do their work but are just as susceptible to the pains and rigamaroles of daily life. This is to say, coding is work, and tedious at that, and when players, game designers, and videogame historians observe the early works of the medium these little details reveal so much about how these games were actually made.
At this point I’ve said more than is really necessary to(hopefully) convince my reader that Kazemi’s book is great and a wonderful addition to the Boss Fight Books, and, most importantly, worth reading. But please indulge me a few more sentences.
Kazemi’s book was enjoyable even if the game was not, and it made me appreciate the efforts, ideas, and impact of the game even if I couldn’t appreciate playing the game itself. Writing these reviews I sometimes perceive that I’m repeating myself, but upon reflection this is only further proof of how great the Boss Fight Books series is. Kazemi has written a book about a videogame I never heard of and never played and yet by the end of it there was a joy in having learned more about a group of programmers who had a vision of what their game could be and all the choices that went into making it. Kazemi loves this game, and that passion is infectious.
By the end of this short book the reader is sure to find something, even if it’s just one individual choice, to hop onto their laptop, surf the web, and find a merc who is ready to fight…as long as the price is right.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.16.2024
If you’d like to read Kazemi’s book you can purchase it on Boss Fight Books website by following the link below:
Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi: Book on the Tactical Warfare Game – Boss Fight Books
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