![]() Freebie goods that JA2 placed in local buildings you liberated have been cut back, and it seems that locks are much, much harder to break even on the flimsy shacks that pass for Arulco's Home and Garden Network. But in Wildfire, many ordinary soldiers wear and shoot stuff that gun collectors' dreams are made of. The original JA2 provided a subtle advantage to your enemies in the form of weapons and supplies that were usually just beyond what you could find or afford yourself at any given time. It's only a slight exaggeration, too, to state that many enemies are walking arsenals, even in the early scenarios designed to ease your entry into the game. Where the dictator Deidranna's forces appeared in reasonable numbers before, they now show up for the same combat situations in overwhelming numbers. Or, more than occasionally, because enemy numbers, skills and fire power have been drastically ratcheted up to increase the difficulty level of Wildfire, in lieu of AI improvements. Starved for resources, you may occasionally feel while playing the title as though you were Steve Jobs and Apple trying to defeat the evil occupying forces of Bill Gates' Microsoft. Key people who can provide access to guns, talent and money are simply very suspicious of your small group of mercs. It takes a lot more effort to convince people, especially important NPCs, to trust you in Wildfire than in JA2. new subplot involving the Mafia has been added, but it's main purpose seems to be driving down loyalty for your side among the populace, thus creating more enemies and less money for you (see machismo, above). There are no new mercs, structures or resources. Grass has been added to some areas to provide more cover, and objects have been moved around to supply a greater strategic challenge on a number of screens-but that's it. The visuals haven't changed much in this mod. (The main difference, to these uneducated ears, is that the new weapons' sounds distract in an annoying way, like a very short, distinctive piece of music played over and over.) And just as you'd expect, there are more weapons, and all of them have been rebalanced to cause more realistic damage. There was nothing wrong, per se, with the batch of weapons sound found in JA2, except that the modders felt they weren't authentic. The first clue that we're dealing with a Wildfire mod coded according to this philosophy is the fact that, of all the things which could have been redone from the original, it was the weapon sounds that were singled out. Sure, that's a deliberate exaggeration, but not by much. ![]() It took them only 15 hours on a hard setting, with one arm tied behind their collective backs, one eye closed, while being forced to listen to boy bands. hile most people might find it difficult getting through a game on a moderate difficulty setting in 80 hours, these folks are ticked at same title's short game time. Army attrition rates and weather patterns are off. Explosions don't look real, and the animated destruction of body parts seems phony. This kind of player complains that weapons don't act realistically and that there aren't enough varieties. Typically, strategy games are the main target for this input, though it's a theme elsewhere, as well. Wildfire, then, is a mod, not an expansion, much less a new game, and comes from a part of the modding sub-genre we might call "game machismo." If you've ever haunted game boards before, you probably know what I mean-that portion of the gaming community which feels a particular title, any title, is nowhere near tough enough. It was a very minor add-on with no new features. ![]() I reviewed both games positively in national magazines when they first appeared, but ignored JA2: Unfinished Business, which showed up a year later. Though it reduced the distinctive personalities of mercs to nothing but voices and images, the game's clever mix of tactical combat, strategic juggling of resources, random enemy movements and heavy dose of roleplaying made it extremely popular at the time. It was really the breakthrough title for the series. Five years later, Sir-Tech released Jagged Alliance 2. It was up to you to figure out what those individual quirks were and how to best manage your bizarre collection of associates as you worked in non-linear fashion towards both small and larger goals. The mercenaries you hired didn't simply have stats-they also possessed quirky personalities. It was an alternative to the X-COM series, a squad-level tactical game whose distinction lay in its roleplaying elements. Jagged Alliance first appeared a decade ago.
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