Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I Love The Smell of Cash-Stuffed Briefcases In The Morning

2025-Apr-01

Although I had a superb illustration of the Aqua Teen’s home ready in the chamber to go with a yet to be written post about the Aqua Teens, I went with another topic. Rushed the graphic material too to get this thing published before the end of the month. I know there is no score to be kept by turning these things in by some timely fashion. Be that as it may, I do not like to see the links on the left side of the blog page seeing a month with just one single blog post. There is so much opinion stuffed inside of me! There must be more than one 1000’ish word screed per month inside of me. Note: I did not make the end of the month deadline. Hopefully next month will be fat with blog posts.

I have more than a thousand words brimming inside me about the recent PC game Jagged Alliance 3. (Maybe the game is also available on video game consoles. Frankly I don’t care. PC gaming has been my modus operandi for quite some time.) The third volume of the turn-based strategy series Jagged Alliance was made by different developers than the original two, and was released more than twenty years after the release of the first two.

When you make a sequel to a movie who’s last iteration was decades ago, often you get dreck. You can still get the original gang of creators back and often you will still get a terrible movie. That is not the case for video games.

Fallout is a famous example of a bygone video game having new life breathed into it. Fallout is now a franchise big enough to get the big evil rainforest company to produce a high-brow television series of it. The video game series started its mass fame when Bethesda Interactive bought the rights to make Fallout 3, a decade after Fallout 2 was released to the delight of nerds on The Internet. Purists might disagree with the path taken by sequels not made by Black Isle and published by Interplay. I think most additions to any PC playable Fallout iteration of the Fallout series are aces in my book. Either way, the remake approach to Fallout 3 was well received.

The reason I figure sequels of movies- especially comedies- produced decades later from the original often suck, is that there is no reason to make a sequel. Of course there are ruminative reasons by the investors of a sequel’s production. I mean artistically. It’s not impossible for a late sequel to actually being a great movie, just improbable. Games are less about having something to say and instead providing options to the audience; my favorite games that is. Game mechanics are often worth revisiting. Even good ones, or especially good ones? Remaking game mechanics often sounds more rewarding then remaking other creator’s narrative decisions.

A remake is more or less what happens with any sequel is developed from a game of a bygone era. Although the remake aspect of Jagged Alliance 3 is superficial compared to the switch between Fallout 2 and 3, it is still a modern real-time strategy game and not a pretty update to the 90s Jagged Alliance games. I for one am glad Haemimont Games went with the quality of life updates that come with modern video games, despite the slight dumbing down of the number of options available. I felt the same way about how Firaxis approached their decades later remake of X-Com.

The words are spilling out of me about this game because I have spent an embarrassing amount of my time on this game over the past few weeks. Sixty hours total in the last month. Enough time to read War And Peace.

In the past few years there were greats that I have played; mentioned here on the blog. I do not think a game has lulled me into so many hours of playtime like this since Satisfactory, and the Civilization or Total War games. RDR2 and Cyberpunk 2077 sure are fun and recent. They rarely had me fixed to my chair playing the game for hours upon hours. Maybe a handful of times when they were new. After I played both of those games a few dozen hours, the drive to play eased off. I still enjoy them. That enjoyment is something that comes in small jaunts. Perhaps it's the real-time nature of those games. They can get exhausting.

Turn based games offer the idea of relaxation since they do not require immediate action all the time. The end result can sometimes be hours of tense repetition of turns until they end up to your liking. That does happen often in Jagged Alliance 3. It did in the first two! Hell, that’s how I play most turn based strategy games. Always with a hint of scum saving. It’s already an unperfect world. Why not have the game be less unperfect with a little bit (or a lot) of saving and loading.

My first turn based combat strategy game was X-Com. The real X-Com. The 90s one. Well, not the real ‘real’ X-Com. X-Com: Apocalypse. It was the third game in the series. Made a few years after the original. In fact, I remember playing it in real-time rather than turn-based. That was a novelty of the third iteration. You could play it with the traditional turned-based system. I was a middle schooler that wanted actions and noises!

Without a doubt I scum saved the hell out of that game. What I do vividly remember are the vehicle battles could look like Keystone Cops if the game speed was accelerated. Also the first vehicles available had an art-deco futurism look. Space Cadillacs fighting sci-fi invaders. There were elections among companies living in the last human city. Great ideas despite it being remembered as a ‘lesser’ X-Com.

Eventually I got around to the real X-Com. UFO Defense. Not long after. In turn based style, because that was the only way to do it. X-Com: Apocalypse was a bit of an aberration in the mainline of the series. The original did not hold me long enough to play further than my first Muton. This was in early high school. There were so many other games available to me. Ones that could flex my primitive GPU. Forgettable shit I will always remember like Citizen Kabuto or Dark Reign 2. Damn they looked good on my chunky CRT monitor connected to my Creative Labs Annihilator GeForce2.

Eventually I did get around to being fixated with the ultra-intricate nuts and bolts of classic X-Com: UFO Defense. When you ask? Here at the fredlambuth.com blog, we are always trying to talk about the medium itself. When it comes to X-Com, I got into it because it was free. In the late 2000s, my only avenue for gaming was a laptop that did not have a regular internet connection, let alone a fast one. I came prepared for this condition by loading my hard drive with free and easily available PC games.

Right now I cannot say how easy it is to find PC game hits from the 90s. In 2009 it was remarkably easy. Thanks to that ease, I found myself dedicating a slab of time playing all the games I wanted to play in my childhood, but could not. Jagged Alliance 1-2 is one of those gems that I milled out of the grit. What a game! I had heard of it in my nascent PC game playing days but dismissed it as tawdry compared to the sci-fi weirdness of X-Com. There were nerdy strategy elements I wish I knew about, along with the hammy action movie cheese.

With Jagged Alliance 3, the action movie cheese is oozing all over the place. It’s tolerable because video game writing does not suffer much from hamfisted writing. A horse I’m often beating to death on the blog here is how I care more about visual storytelling in video games rather than scripting or dialogue. Jagged Alliance 3 does have intelligent visual design that follows the standards of 1980s action movies. The action movie cheese the storytelling is built from becomes exciting when the players' decisions change the result.

Jagged Alliance 3 by Haemimont Games is excellent in every category a game can be measured. I personally find planning out a minor military campaign carried out by world class professionals to be irresistible. The game had a head start in my interest.

This is the sort of game that rewards mistakes. You learn, overcome, adapt. Not just how to make sure you’re doing the battle correctly. My mistakes came from not budgeting properly. Unlike X-Com, Jagged Alliance has no ‘home’ or ‘base’ built into the mechanics of the game. There is a campaign map that brings benefits to your units, roaming the countryside, helping the parties involved in possible military overthrow as the player sees fit.

I prefer to only refer to online guides in minor spurts. Part of what I look for in a video game is its ability to tell the audience how it should be played. I myself should have been less click happy in the dialogue scenes. Had I done so I would have found out more naturally how to take more advantage of the landscape, or basically how to be a better manager of a guerilla war effort. How to stretch your meager forces all over the countryside to meet a much larger foe.

If I were younger, I might have preferred a super-hardcore remake of the original two, forgoing quality of life for the sake of more options afforded to the player. I am middle aged and appreciate the developer making a flashier, leaner, but still daunting strategy game built with gross action movie stereotypes.