lesegut's review against another edition
5.0
A phantastic account of how JA2 came to be. My only beef with this book is that I'd love for it to be much longer. Perhaps Kazemi can compile an Unfinished Business edition with more interview excerpts. :-)
like_being_here's review against another edition
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Every videogame deserves a book like this.
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
funny
informative
fast-paced
4.0
1) "Just a few months after its release, I found a dozen copies in the discount bin for $0.99 each. (The game did not sell terribly well in the United States.) I bought all twelve copies and gave a copy to anyone I knew who seemed like they might be remotely interested in it. To this day, I will bend over backwards to twist a conversation about X-COM into a conversation about JA2 because there is no game I want to talk about more than JA2. I don't want JA2 to remain obscure. I want it to change people's expectations for what a video game can be. I want all future video games to pale in comparison."
2) "JA1 development began in 1992 in Montreal with a three-person team under the banner of Currie's development studio, Madlab Software. Currie first recruited help from Shaun Lyng, an acquaintance he'd known since childhood. Lyng was writing a novel at the time, and he asked Currie if he needed any help with the story for his game. Lyng began by helping on the initial concept, pitch, and design documents. They placed a newspaper ad looking for a digital artist, which a Concordia University film animation student named Mohanned Mansour answered. Mansour had next to no experience with digital art and didn't even own a computer, but Currie liked his illustration work, and Mansour quickly fell into the role of lead artist."
3) "[Alex Meduna, Programmer/Designer]: [You] have to put in a lot of artificial limitations, so enemies generally don't make the smartest decisions possible to them. There's typically a lot of randomness involved instead. As a result, they're sometimes surprisingly smart, other times shockingly dumb. The dumb can be by design, too."
4) "It turns out that men and women can have various levels of the 'sexist' trait, and men can have the 'gentleman' trait. Women with the sexist trait and men with the gentleman trait get upset when a woman is married off to the Hicks family. Yes, in the JA2 source code, a helpful note explains that a feminist character 'hates men,' rehashing a popular belief in the tech industry that feminism is a kind of 'reverse sexism.' This one decision is the only place in the game where these traits come into play. There's vestigial code that suggests there were more uses planned for these traits. For example, an 'AIM_PENALTY_GENTLEMAN' variable is declared but never used. Presumably this would have been a penalty levied on 'gentleman' characters if they attempt to shoot at women. Several male characters in the game have the sexist trait, but that trait never comes into play for men at all—again, it seems likely that the team may have planned for friction between sexist men and women on a team but never got around to implementing it.
Whatever the eventual reasons were for cutting out other uses, the fact remains that deep in the JA2 source code, some strange social dynamics exist where most women are sexist and it makes them angry about arranged marriages, some men are gentlemen and they're also not too keen on arranged marriage, and some men are sexist but never let it get in the way of their work."
5) "Developers crunched on JA2 through the summer of 1998. By September, the rank-and-file team members were frustrated with everything from the hours they worked to the inconvenient placement of the only general-use office phone. They wrote up a list of labor and management related concerns and took them to Ian Currie, demanding that he address the problems or else the developers would quit the project. Currie felt blindsided and hurt by the list, but also recognized that many of the concerns were valid. He conceded to their demands. Today he describes it as an important growth experience as a manager. The team was happy with Curries response, and development continued."
6) "[The] fan modders' sense of improvement highlights the big difference between the Sir-tech team and the fan community. Sir-tech was not particularly interested in putting hundreds of guns in the game; the developers did so because the fans demanded it. They weren't trying to make a realistic simulation of modern combat. They were trying to make a 'realistic' simulation of an 80s action movie. The developers spent a lot of time riding the line between realism and entertainment, but when it came to critical design decisions, entertainment always won out."
kfan's review against another edition
4.0
I've never played Jagged Alliance 2 (I had never even heard of it until I heard Darius was writing a book about it.) but this book is a really fascinating look at why it's an interesting/important game, what was happening in the world, both culturally and politically, that led to the creation of a game like this, as well as a good overview of game development in general, both then and now. Ultimately, it's a book about the creative process and necessity of compromise, so even if you don't care about video games (I don't) it ought to be of at least some interest to anyone who's ever made anything.
I'm going to see if my 12 year old wants to read this, he probably hasn't heard of JA2 either but I think he would love this.
I'm going to see if my 12 year old wants to read this, he probably hasn't heard of JA2 either but I think he would love this.
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