Good evening, you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakney. With me tonight is our lead irregular panelist, Bruce Garrick. Hello gamers! We're also, once again, joined by two first-time guests. Two gentlemen, I've been very excited to get on the show. First, we have friend of the show and Boston area game developer, Darius Kazami, the author behind Tiny Subversions.com. Darius, welcome to the show at Long Last. I am super excited to be here. Super excited to have you. Finally, we welcome my editor at PC Gamer and a brother Fencer and Red Wings fan, Evan Lottie. Evan, good to have you on the show. How's it going, Rob? How about them Blackhawks? Oh, fuck you. Oh, God. This is just, oh my God, my my winter's turned to shit. You've lost five in a row. Yeah, and they weren't doing hot before that. It's really utterly depressing. It's bears-like, in fact. Yeah, they're there. So I was really looking forward to a great run to the playoffs with the Hawks and the Blues and the, uh, and the, uh, and the, uh, wings trading places, but now the hawks seem to be out of that race. So, yeah, die in a fire. All right. Uh, so as many of you know, uh, Calypso just released a game called Jagged Alliance Back in Action.

It's a new take on Jagged Alliance 2, and I hesitate to call it a remake because it is so

clearly doing its own thing, but it does reuse the same setting and story of the original

Jagged Alliance 2, a game that many of us regard as a masterpiece of tactical RPG

wargaming.

So it seems like now is a good time to finally devote a show to Jaggon Alliance 2

because it's worth reconsidering what made that game so special

now that someone has gotten around to reappropriating it.

So Darius, I thought we'd start with you because I think I've seen you call it your favorite game of all time.

Now you've played a lot of games and loved a lot of them,

but what sets Jagged Alliance 2 apart?

Well, yeah, so I guess for me, my history of Jagged Alliance 2 was,

and I have to go into my history a little bit with this,

I remember just downloading the demo blind.

Or maybe I got it off a PC gamer demo disc in 1998 or something.

That seems highly likely.

And I remember installing it, and it was just an amazing demo.

It was wonderful.

It was one map. Well, I guess it had two levels to it, and so I guess it was two maps, technically. But the second map was a secret, and it was just one of these great 90s demos that just had so much content. I played it probably, I was in high school, I played it probably every single night for a year. I would just play through this map

over and over again, just mastering it. And so, Jagged Alliance 2 when it came out, I was there the day of

to purchase it at the, you know, I don't know, electronics boutique or whatever the hell we had back then.

And so it was something that I looked forward to, and I was afraid that it wouldn't meet the

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