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Jagged Alliance

Day 6, Brenda gets captured. As I kid I completely missed it, and she got killed waiting for the rescue. But even as an adult with the full grasp of English language, it’s kind of confusing: her sector gets invaded from a direction that shouldn’t be possible, and once you recapture it, you can find her coat, but without any indication where to look. Actually, there’s an indication, if you equip her coat, you’ll get a message, but no other item uses this mechanic, all the notes can be read without “equipping” them.

From watching Zemalf’s playthrough

I learned, among other things, that there’s M14 hidden in Sector 10, which I already captured. And I was pleased with myself to discover that you actually don’t need a stone to trigger the trap, you have enough time to dodge it. Rifles in this game are a big deal, mostly because there isn’t much firearms balance. They are simply better in every way.
The encounters are ridiculous at times. Opened a door, one enemy, trying to hit him, gun jam, trying to hit him with the second merc, gun jams, enemy throws a grenade, luckily, one of the mercs had a 2nd gun, fires it, missed, and the duo receives a second grenade as a present. Reload.

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Jagged Alliance

It would have been very nice if the keys you found would have been labeled. Because they are distinct, but you have absolutely no idea which door they fit. So I went to reconquer Brenda’s laboratory only to discover that none of the 3 keys I have until now fit.
Day 4. Fired Snake, who was the weakest link. Hired Static, a great mechanic with good markmanship. In theory, you can have up to 8 mercenaries deployed. In practice, until now, at least one is constantly repairing stuff. Another one is a permanent doctor, healing two most injured mercs. So you are deploying with 4. One one of them is probably Elio, who’s a cheap “mule”. So you actually have just 3 guys fighting.

Day 5, situation is improved since I replaced Wolf with Lynx, a great marksman. And since now I have 2 sets of upgraded Spectra Armor, my mercs take less damage.

Capturing the first refinery is not easy, even if you know what you’re doing. In the previous sector there is a stock of silencers, and I had Fidel, explosive expert, to disarm the C4. And yet it took me a couple of tries anyway.
Still, that’s 6 sectors captured in a day.

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Knight of Seven Kingdoms

When the Trial of the Seven started on the 5th episode out of 6, I was confused, because there isn’t that much to tell.
Turns out they created a whole Dunc backstory, how he was robbing the corpses, and tried to get a passage to Free Cities. None of that makes sense. Neither the final fight. In the novel, Dunc overpowers Prince Aerion, because a flail is useless prone.
Here, he’s engaging in a long swordfight, getting stabbed multiple times in addition to the spear wound he got early. Then prince throws a sword at him. Why is everyone
throwing long swords?!
Also, there are supposed to be 3 Kingguards. I don’t understand why they cared to depict only two. It doesn’t make any sense, as there’s entire point of the battle being 7 against 7.

The only change I appreciate is how they twisted the ending. I haven’t read the other novels yet, so maybe it is canon, but Egg in fact lied that his father agreed to Dunc’s terms, and just ran off with him.

PC Gaming

Jagged Alliance

Damn, this game is hard. I have no idea how I completed it as a kid. Maybe that’s why I only managed it with the bad ending.
At first, I was pleased with myself. Finished the first day with 3 sectors captured, a lot of good equipment, all the mercs are injured, but now I’ll get to hire better ones, right? Wrong. Not one good merc accepts to join on the second day.
And my mercs are out of shape, so either I hire few more even worse mercs, or waste a whole day healing.
What’s worse are the enemies with grenades. Enemies with guns can miss. But grenades are almost guaranteed hit, and also risk or permanent injuries. Permanent, for the rest of the game, on the second day of playthrough.
And all this without understanding English that well back then. The game does give you clues, but they are quite vague. Like your employer saying that everyone is feeling unwell, must be the flu, and a guide he gives you (which you can decline) mentiones that the source of the water is to the north, and you need to connect the dots that somebody is poisoning the water supply.

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Jagged Alliance

As I mentioned I completed Jagged Alliance once, but it was a very long time ago.
This is somewhat of an annoying game. You start with hiring mercenaries. Some of them don’t have weapons at all. Some have a pistol, but no ammo. There’s plenty of .38 ammo to begin with, but if you hired someone with .45, you may run dry.
If you didn’t hire a medic: though luck. After taking a single hit your mercenary will continue bleeding out. If they seriously hit, they also lose HP… permanently.
The inventory space for each mercenary is very limited. So you also need to know that some of them come with useless items, like detonators without the explosives.
In general, you need to know a lot of stuff. On the first day you’re told that you can’t get any money until you find a stolen purifier chip. Where is it? Nobody tells you. I went north and found it on a mercenary there, but I wonder if I went west, would I be stuck without source of income for a few days?
On the other hand, if you know where to go first, you may be good, as some of the items are not random. For example there are some best vests (maximum inventory slots) in the first couple of sectors. If you know where to head first.
I think I didn’t know there were quick saves in the game. Otherwise I’d abuse that option as a kid. Although there’s just a single save for an entire day, a day may include multiple fights, and if you quit the game, that quick save is lost. How do I know that? Guess.
Another thing I surely didn’t know: there is a sneak move. It’s nowhere in the UI, you just need to read the manual to know that Shift is sneak modifier. How efficient sneaking is without cones of sight or any alert indication for that matter is another question. The only way I know enemies saw me is when the bullets start flying.

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Jagged Alliance 3

I lost count of how many revive attempts were there over Jagged Alliance. This one is convincing, though, at least at a first glance.
I finished both Jagged Alliance 1 as a kid, and Jagged Alliance 2 as a teenager, but honestly, I don’t remember much.

They brought many of the fan favorite mercenaries, like Ivan, Scully and Shadow. Also, each mercenary has an absolutely unique perk, in addition to common ones. And they also immidiatelly introduce the relatioship system: MD asks more money if you’ve already hired Steroid. Characters also have quips throughout the mission to reflect on certain events. And those are voiced, which is doubly impressive.
Unlike most tactics of the past 10 years, Jagged Alliance 3 doesn’t use the 2-action-points system from Xcom. Instead, each character has different number of action points available. This is pretty powerful, as Ivan, always the best starting merc, can fire two bursts from AK in a single turn.

I wanted to complain about enemies not dropping their weapons. But it makes sense, as that would be too hard to balance. And by the 3rd area I already had my entire team with AKs anyway.
And the most impressive bit is that tactics actually works. In the fight for the bunker, my squad was wiped out at first. I repositioned them, and won the fight without serious injuries.
Despite each mercenary having their own inventory, there’s one nice detail that reduces the micromanagement significantly: ammo is stored in a stash, so there’s no need to manage individual magazines.

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Dune 2000

Completed Atreides campaign of Dune 2000 as well.
For Atreides, there’s one interesting mission where you start without a base, and need to capture a starport from smuglers, reference to Gurney Haleck episode from the original book.
The “superweapons” for both Atreides and Harkonen are somewhat laughable. Atreides airstrike (basically A10 from Command&Conquer) cannot destroy a single turret, not a refinery. Considering that unlike Death Hand, those can also be countered with rather cheap missile towers, it’s quite lackluster.

Sonic Tanks are surprisingly good against buildings, and I ended up using them quite a lot, despite their tendency to friendly fire.
Fremen are fun, as much as anything is fun in this game. They are invisible, and do considerable damage to buildings, so if you start with an airstrike, Fremen can usually finish it off. The only problem is that a destroyed building always produce a few riflemen, and those finish off Fremen quickly, so basically it’s a suicide squad.

Still, there are a few nice ideas in the final maps, like the back entrance to the sardukar base, accessible only to infrantry, which Fremen can use to destroy the Construction Yard. Then there’s a bridge from Imperial base to the Harkonen base, that allows you to destroy Harkonen Construction Yard as well.

I was curious if capturing Emperor’s Palace allows you to build sardukar. It does. They are very cheap and deal tons of damage, but like all the infantry in this game very squishy, so a single tank can take a bunch of them.

I’ll skip the Ordos campaign, since I feel they are all pretty similar: you turtle in your base, until you accumulate a bigger army than AI can supply, waste this army on enemies pre-built defences, and repeat the process over and over again.

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Dune 2000

Completed Harkonen campaign.

One awesome feature that amazingly was present all the way back in ’92 are the carryalls. They speed up your economy by carrying harvesters to and from spice fields, and they also carry units heading for repairs, if they are free. And, unlike in many other games, they actually circle instead of hovering in one spot.

The campaign is hard and easy at the same time. Since every mission you start with an empty base, and your opponent is given a considerable army, surviving the first minutes can be ridiculously hard, considering how fragile most of the units are. But if you manage to survive, defensive turrets are incredibly cost effective, so after a while your defences become mostly impenetrable, considering how bad pathfinding is. It turns out into almost a tower defence.

I played this game as Harkonen mainly to see the Devastator tanks. They are Mammoth tanks from Command&Conquer, just with stupid splash damage. If Ordos’ Deviator captures them, they sometimes decide to selfdestruct, dealing more damage than the would otherwise.

The only mission I actually enjoyed is the penultimate one, because if you capture the mercenary base, they will fight for you. That’s the only time you get an ally, and quite a useful one too. Also, that’s one of the few missions where you don’t have to hunt up to the last harvester to win. In the last mission, I spent probably 10 minutes hunting the last one.

There is one decent CGI at the end, where Harkonens bomb Emperor flying palace, and he commands to release the Sardukar. The strange thing, though, that it plays after we already destroyed the palace and the sardukars with it.

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Dune 2000

I’ve never played Dune 2000 back in the day, maybe because I wasn’t a fan of Dune 2 in the first place. Although I love both Command&Conquer and Red Alert dearly, and I did complete Dune 2 once. But I decided to give Dune 2000 a try. the original version doesn’t work that well on Windows 10. The cutscenes aren’t playing, the speed is either too fast or too slow. So I went with the Gruntmods version. It supports resolutions up to 4K, although the maps in this game are so tiny they would fit in 4K twice.

The engine is from Command&Conquer, with a couple of transparency effects, like the electricity indicating a worm. There are no rally points, and no queuing. Which is especially annoying, since in this game buildings need to be placed on concrete. Concrete comes in blocks of 2×2. But for the basic resource gathering refinery you need 3×2, so you end up placing 4 concrete blocks before placing a factory.

One element I don’t remember in either earlier Westwood games or later ones, such as Red Alert 2, is the need to upgrade buildings. Basic barracks produces just the machine gunners, and for rocket troopers you need to upgrade it.
The only nice detail I found about this game is that despite all three factions having light tanks, they have different stats, with Atreides being the baseline, Harconen being stronger but slower and Ordos being faster but weaker.
The game also has live-action briefings before missions. Curiously Harkonen’s mentat here is called Hayt and he’s a gola, just like in Dune Messiah. Why not use Piter from the original Dune book?

I mean, he actually acts like Piter, the deranged drug addict, and not like Hayt the boring phylosopher anyway.
The main problem is that campaign isn’t much fun. AI gets those random drops of reinforcements that you can’t predict, and in general quite overpowered even on “Normal”. On the other hand, the pathfinding is terrible, so you can confuse your opponent by building cheap walls.

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Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne

Completed all Warcraft 3 had to offer.

Orc campaign in the Frozen Throne is considered a bonus campaign, because it’s not really a strategy. Instead, it’s a ARPG. Another precursor to World of Warcraft. Considering it’s still an RTS engine we’re talking about, it’s pretty impressive: with a hero stash, side quests, respawning enemies and even dungeon instances.

Still, it tries to introduce the Frozen Throne Orc units, like Troll Batrider, but since you can steamroll everything with your heroes, it’s kinda pointless.

The final mission is basically DotA: you control only your overpowered heroes, while bases spawn units.

The death of Admiral Proudmore that was immortalized by Warbringers doesn’t seem that glorious:

I rarely do final thoughts, but since it was quite a long journey I as well might. Reign of Chaos is simple, but enjoyable, even if Reforges changes make it slightly broken. Frozen Throne is mostly gimmicky, and not something I’d return to.

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Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne

Lich King is weakening, so Arthas travels to Northrend to help, while Sylvanas gets autonomy. She’s a one-trick-pony, even if the trick is very powerful: Possess. Still, I can understand the sexy zombie appeal.
There’s a certain power creep. In Reign of Chaos, maximum hero level was 10, and so was the maximum level of the creeps. Now you get creeps up to level 15, while Arthas gets downleveled every mission to represent Lich King getting weaker.
Still, the missions are some of the easiest in both campaigns. As Sylvanas, you can mass frost wyrm, while Arthas gets three dungeons one after the other. I completely forgot there was a Chtulhu themed Forgotten One.
I remember the last mission as very chaotic and frustrating. I think they’ve changed the map, but it is still annoying as hell. Not sure if in the original AI was as efficient in countering, because when I went frost wyrms, it massed the naga flyers, so I had to wait for Illidan to start channeling to have any chance, otherwise it becomes a complete mess.
Finally, Arthas duels Illidan and even wins, becoming one with the Lich King.

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Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 12, 2026

Second campaign is for Blood Elves, led by Prince Kael, whom we’ve met in the first campaign. Humans abuse them, and they also feel the need for a magic source, since the Sunwell was destroyed by Arthas.
Their Spellbreakers are amazing, an Human version of Driads, basically: immune to magic, with dispell, and mana burning effect on top. Dragonhawks are specialists: either to disable towers or frostwyrms. Since elves don’t have heavy infantry, they get naga instead.
The dungeon is basically practicing the same trick over and over again: block enemies with sturdy spellbreakers, then flamestrike the middle of it, as spellbreakers are immune.
Then comes the DotA mission. I didn’t remember it was there, but it is DotA: you can control only your heroes, and all the other units spawn automatically, and you fight for the caged Illidan.
My main problem with the Blood Elf campaign is how gimmiky it is. You put against netherdragons, that have heavy armor, so resistant to archer, but weak to magic, but they are also immune to magic, so they don’t have weaknesses at all.

I ended up going into High Upkeep and massing Dragonhawk Riders, basically playing Warcraft as if it was Starcraft.

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Death Stranding

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 10, 2026

Completed Death Stranding.
We meet Heartman. This one is a bit heavy on metaphors even for Kojima. His heart stops every 21 minutes, then he gets automatically defibrillated. Also, he has a condition that makes his heart be shaped like a cartoon heart. Also, he lives near a lake that is shaped like a heart. Also, his family died in an accident while he was getting a heart surgery. This dump is lengthly.
Then we finally reach Amelie. She’s the BT from the beginning of the game. The boss fight looks amazing, but it’s boring in reality: both Amelia and Higgs are merged into the giant, and you shoot Amelia while avoiding shooting Higgs who’s taunting you.
Then there’s a stealth boss battle with Higgs, where you need to sneak up on him or counter him enough times.
Then there’s a boxing match with Higgs. It’s impressive that they developed this mechanic for a single boss fight.
Then Amelie tells us that she was never trapped, and just wanted you to be her errand boy. And to finish it, you need to travel back. All the way back.
Then you fight a blue whale. Although “fight” is a strong way to put it. You shoot it as it flies by, mostly.
Then there’s the epilogue. It’s an epilogue of the epilogue’s epilogue. The problem is I did not subscribe to all that Extinction Entity theory. Or the separation of Ha and Ka. Or the Beaches. Or the chiralium. It’s a well crafter story, which I didn’t like at all.

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Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 5, 2026

First of the Frozen Throne campaigns is again for the Night Elves, but they have a few units unique to the campaign: Sentry, which uses Archer voice and Spirit of Vengeance model, but is able to cast Bloodlust, and owlbears, that have Stomp.
You also get to construct ships, including Frigates from Warcraft 2.
I really enjoyed the Broken Isles mission. It’s what you later came to expect, small islands which you can visit or skip in any order, in order to battle their inhabitants. Here’s a den of hydra. Here’s a murloc village. What would become World of Warcraft later on, basically.

Then comes a dungeon mission, which is the first mission I didn’t manage to complete the optional objective, collect all 10 pieces of Guldan’s orb, without a guide. They are tucked away something brutal.
One cool detail is that we are shown a few flashbacks of Guldan through the temple, and in the end we find his headless corpse. You know, because Skull of Guldan is a thing 😆

Other missions are quite simple, if usually they try to split your heroes and base, so you have to juggle two at a time. Also, Reign of Chaos campaign rarely gave you 2 heroes. Here you get 3 often. The final mission you need to play with naga army, which isn’t very fun, because they are quite basic. But the previous mission I got to do mass wyverns.

The story is surprisingly a nothingburger: Illidan gets his hands of Eye of Sargeras, which is supposed to shake Northrend or something. First Maiev tries to recapture him, brings his brother and Tyranda onboard, but then Illidan saves Tyranda and everything is forgiven. Considering the fact that we seemingly prevented him from earthquaking Northrend, I don’t see the point.

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Death Stranding

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 3, 2026

In the 6th chapter BB28, which by this point Sam calls “Lou” is taken away, which makes avoiding BTs even more annoying than usual. And you’ve made to run back and forth between an inconveniently located mountaineer and a doctor. I ended up just arming to the teeth and taking out the stalking “wolf”, then you don’t need to sneak past the ghosts anymore. If that wasn’t enough, you need to make the final delivery in a snowstorm, where you can barely see for 5 minutes of real time.
In the end of the episode, we’re transported to World War 2 this time. Again, we fight the Cool Guy, whose name is Clifford.
Also, turns out Sam had a wife called Lucy, and they planned to name their son Lou. It’s her in the picture, not his sister, if he even has a sister.
Also, Deadman is a Frankestein monster, literally created from cadavers. That explains the forehead scar.

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Warcraft 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 1, 2026

Instead of following with Frozen Throne, I decided to give Classic campaign a try. As I suspected, Reforged completely broke the balance of the original. In my ways, the original is easier: Human riflemen are much more potent, for one. AI focuses on closest enemy, not on the most injured one.
I was surprised that the Culling map, where Arthas competes in killing infected townspeople, is completely different in the remake. In the original, your base is at the top, in the remake, it’s at the bottom. Not sure why the changes.

Also, as I suspected, the final mission in the Human campaign in original wasn’t anything special.

Can be easily done with mass gryphins, and Malganis is rather useless in it.

Also, we came a long way, didn’t we?

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Warcraft 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 28, 2026

The Night Elf campaign is bizarre. First mission, you can construct only archers, and need to overrun a double base: orcs and humans. I only managed that by zerg-rush.

Then the second mission you need to sneak past Doom Guards, which I now understand demons from Warcraft 1. Which is easy, because it turns out night elf invisibility mode kicks in almost immediately, and even stops enemies attacks: if a demon was swinging his sword at an archer that went invisible, the archer won’t get hit.

But then you need to plow throw Undead base, with a limited and not very sizeable army. I’m not sure if on Normal you’re supposed to destroy the entire base, but on Hard I only managed to run through everything.
Best Night Elf unit are the Dryads. They are fast, ranged, magic immune, have automatic dispell and slow poison. Maybe you can’t only mass them, but you almost can. Paired with bears, they can win some battles without even micro.

Funny, I always thought Malfurion is an elk-centaur, just like Cenarius. Turns out he’s a druid riding an elk. Also, I didn’t remember Illidan is his brother. And they were both in love with Tyrande.

Arthas points Illidan to Skull of Guldan. They have this clear homoerotic tension between them, must be because Jaina left Arthas, and Illidan spent 10K years in prison.

The skull is what allows Illidan to turn into demon, kill Tichondrius, second dreadlord killed in this game, and get expelled, all in the length of two missions.

Final mission is another last stand, and it is as unfun as the Undead one. That’s the only mission I decided to complete on Normal, as on hard it gets quite ridiculous.
The idea is that you first help defend the Human camp, once it falls you retreat to the Orc camp, and finally you hold final land of defence in your own Night Elf camp. But I managed to stop them at Orcs.

A nice detail, when Medivh tells his story, there’s both recreation of events from Warcraft 1, where you actually hunted him in a dungeon, and from Warcraft 2, where it shows two headed ogres and troll axe throwers.

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Warcraft 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 26, 2026

In survival missions, I always try to flip the script and destroy the bases that spawn enemies. In the last Undead mission, I didn’t manage that, but otherwise, it is not hard. I didn’t even realize it’s the final mission in their campaign.

Orc campaign starts pretty easy, despite them lacking early heal. The only point I was doubting myself is when facing Cenarius. He has ridiculous amount of HP, and either self-heals or has some kind of invulnerability skill.

You also get the chaos orcs in that mission, which I didn’t remember. Their warlocks are similar to Undead necromancers, but with a fireball skill, which I never used, because it required too much micro. They replace shamans, which is ironic, because shamans are great without micro. Also grunts, kodos and wolf riders all become “fel” and get chaos damage, which is good against any armor.

Then there’s the plato mission with wyverns. It isn’t hard, as in the enemy can’t beat you, but because the opponent has almost infinite gold, and you can only deploy from zeppelins, it’s also takes forever to beat him. I ended up cheesing the dwarf hero with wyverns.

In the last Orc mission, I’ve got Spirit Walkers, which I think is a bug, since those were only added in the Frozen Throne expansion.
It is quite ridiculous, because Infernals, which are one of the best units in the game, can land in the middle of your base, stunning your peons and killing half of your troops. They have heavy armor, which means they take less damage from piercing attacks, and more from magic attacks, but they are also completely immune to magic, so nevermind, they have no weaknesses.
But actually, it’s no so bad. The Tauren hero I left at the Human base, because Infernals tend to target him, and he’s a great meat shield and also buffs human knights. And the fel orcs don’t have trolls with them, so they can be cheesed with mass wyverns.
When Hellscream kills Mannoroth in the canyon, I always thought the pitlord injured him. Turns out, he died in the explosion 🤷‍♂️

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Warcraft 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 22, 2026

Undead’s “Into the Realm Eternal” where you breach the Elfgate is also not fun. It’s the same problem, where the opponent is able to recover from almost any loss.

The next two missions are far easier, though, and I wonder if it is because you get crypt fiends, which are tankier, or just a bad design of the former.

What they did really great in the remake is the rebirth of Sylavanas.

I appreciate the small details: like the fact that not all paladins carry warhammers, some of them wield sword and shield. There are also unique high elf heroes you need to fight.

And of course there are the Blackrock clan orcs. Now this one I remembered. In Warcraft 1, orcs had warlocks. And Warcraft 2 they had dragons (albeit green). So when I saw orcs with warlocks and red dragons, I assumed those are their regular units. But no, turns out this was created just for the campaign. Those orcs are easy prey for mass frost wyrms.

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Warcraft 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 21, 2026

The funniest thing is that I managed to execute tower rush on the first Northrend mission.

It was all fun and games until final mission of Human campaign, Frostmourne. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but Mal’Ganis was able to counter my every strategy, recovering every time. I thought that I could do mass griffins, he went mass gargoyles. I tried mass tanks, he went mass meat wagons. I went knight, riflemen and priests, he managed to destroy me with abominations and frostwyrms. The only way I managed to beat that mission without looking for a guide is by eventually destroying both his mine and town hall with tanks, so he ran out of money. No fun, just frustration.

I forgot that Arthas killed Mal’Ganis. And Uther. But the dwarf friend isn’t killed directly, looks more like an accident during release of Frostmourne.

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