I’ve decided to copy Shane Liesegang and do a list of the 10 “most impactful” games, and try to find some trends in the games that I pick.

New Jagged Alliance title for DS is in the works.

I hope it gets out the door, provided it doesn’t suck. JA2 is one of my favorite games of all time.

I promise I’m going to write some stuff about GDC, but I was kind of stopped dead in my tracks by the news that a Jagged Alliance movie deal was just signed.

WTF mate?!?!

Call me “cautiously pessimistic” on this one.

So I’ve posted before about Jagged Alliance 2. And now I’m going to post some more. It’s one of my top 5 games of all time, so you’ve gotta give me at least once a month to talk about it.

One of the more emotionally powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game was in JA2. The basic setup is that you get to pick and choose from a roster of about 50 mercenaries to send on missions. Each merc has a distinct personality, and you typically have to pay more money to hire experienced mercs with better stats.

One day I noticed that a merc named Barry had an excellent explosives skill (92/100) and was dirt cheap at $6700/wk. Comparable explosives experts cost double to triple that amount. His profile said that he learned his skills in the classroom. But I figured, hey, great deal, and I hired him.

I drop him into a combat sector with the rest of my team, and everything is going great… until he sees his first dead body. He actually makes sounds like he’s becoming ill, and his morale drops to 0! The guy is now completely useless as a merc–his action points are greatly reduced. (A great added touch in the game is that when a character has low morale and you click on her to give orders, instead of saying “Ready!” or something, she says, “What do you want?”) But here I was, cursing this merc, and thinking, “Damn. This kid is fresh out of school. No wonder he can’t stomach the sight of a dead body.”

The important things about this situation are that

• this bit of story didn’t occur during a cutscene–it was merged seamlessly into the gameplay
• it had a direct impact on gameplay so it forced you to stop and think about the situation
• what it made you think about was how most of the experienced mercs on your team are actually hardened psychopaths, and that Barry is probably the sane one

There were other interesting things like this in the game. The crazier mercs would shoot anybody. Some mercs would shoot civilians when ordered, but not their teammates. Some mercs wouldn’t shoot civilians. The primary verbs in the game are MOVE and SHOOT, but the game actually made you think about what the verbs meant to the individual mercs.

Of course, this also led to some pretty hilarious ways you could tweak the game. There’s a well-known exploit in the game where you can spend as long as you like in the very first sector training your skills (usually you’re interrupted by enemies, but the first sector is a “safe” zone). So you can take the worst mercs in the game, like the schoolteacher Flo, and turn them into killing machines by having them practice marksmanship for 1000 days. Then you get this amazing mercenary that racks up hundreds of kills, who still says, incredulously, “I… killed somebody?!” while efficiently disposing of the last of a crew of elite soldiers guarding a military base that she stormed solo.

Okay, apparently the strategy game publisher Strategy First is offering free 3-hour demos of most of its games. When checking out the website, I discovered that one of those games is Jagged Alliance 2, which is possibly my favorite game of all time.

JA2 is a true classic. It’s squad-based tactical combat in the mode of X-Com, except I like it even better. It takes place in a modern setting, and you control a team of mercenaries charged with liberating a small country from their ruthless dictator, one Queen Diedranna. The combat system itself is great, but the real gameplay feature that shines is the overhead map. Basically, you are dropped off in a sector of the country and told: neutralize the queen. Any way you want. Have fun.

You can take the suggestions of the townspeople and do the sane thing by taking over the easier cities and sectors first, gradually working your way up to the country’s capital. You can, on second play, totally tweak things and try to send one badass merc into a tough sector early on to hopefully win and collect all the awesome weapons, giving you an early game advantage. Hell, if you think you’re tough enough, you can blaze a trail all the way to the queen (good luck with that).

And yet the open-ended gameplay isn’t what makes this (possibly) my favorite game of all time. The best part about JA2 is the game’s personality. And man, does this game have personality in spades. You can control up to 18 mercenaries in 3 teams of 6, if I remember correctly. You get to hire mercs from mercenary employment agencies, via the brilliant mechanic of your in-game laptop. You have about 50 mercs to choose from, and each one has a very distinct and memorable personality.

For example, all of a merc’s stats are out of a possible 100. More experienced mercs generally have better stats, but they also cost a lot more money. As a new player, you might be surprised to see a very cheap merc with not much experience and an explosives score in the high 90s. If you hire him, like I did, you’ll see his profile wasn’t lying when it said that he learned all his skills in the classroom. The moment he sees his first dead body, he’s horrified, his morale drops significantly, and he becomes morose and almost useless. I was floored the first time I saw this level of character depth, and the game maintains this depth consistently across almost all its characters. Some mercs work better with each other: they will shout compliments when their friends do well, and they’ll get depressed when a friend dies. Other mercs hate each other (notably Buzz and Lynx, ex-lovers) and will sometimes refuse to work together on the same squad.

Anyway, while the game has great combat, long-term strategy, and story, it’s the characters that make this a game that you should try out. So go on. Download the demo.