Before you even begin to play Just Cause 2 you need to throw out all your inhibitions. Take away your hateful bias on games with no story, poor voice acting, horrible dialogue, no sense of real direction, and absolute perfect controls because Just Cause 2 has none of the above. Instead, I want you to take a trip back to your days as a small child playing in the sandbox. The days where your Hot Wheels firetruck could save a burning city and your G.I. Joe could fly around clutched to the bottom of your helicopter. Where the only real boundaries were the sides of the sandbox and ultimately your imagination. Once you are in this state of mind, feel free to play this game. I can promise that if you take my above instructions to heart, Just Cause 2 will be one of the most fun games you will have ever played. Now on with the show.
Rather than bore you with the story, I'll sum it up like this: it really doesn't matter what the story is. You're a guy named Rico who works for "The Agency" and are sent to Palau to find your mentor. That's all you need to know. What's absolutely brilliant about the story is that in order to advance, you must blow sh** up. Meaning that if you want to move on to the next mission, simply finishing the previous one isn't going to be enough. You'll have to go hijack a helicopter, tether a tank to the bottom of it, infiltrate an enemy base, blow everything up with both your helicopter rockets and your tank's arsenal, hop back in said helicopter and do it all over again. You don't have to do it that way but I absolutely chose to. Once you accumulate enough "Chaos" more missions and extras open up allowing you to venture further into this amazing game. The fact that in order to further yourself in this game requires you to blow a lot of crap up is ultimately what this game truly entails. Blow everything up, explore everything you can, do it in a way that's truly unique, and the story will follow slowly behind. Like the fat kid in P.E. class, just keep doing your own thing, he will catch up eventually.
The main ability Rico possesses that allows for unparalleled creativity and exploration is his Grappling Hook. You can latch onto anything that has a surface. Sniper in the building being a pest? Grapple him out of it! Want that helicopter shooting rockets at you? Grapple to the cockpit and hijack that motha'! Need the enemy vehicles chasing after you to leave you alone? Simply DUAL-GRAPPLE the front of their vehicle to the ground and watch as they stop suddenly and flip through the air! What's dual-grapple you ask? Well, it's a new ability that Rico has allowing us, the players, to attach one end of his grapple hook to a certain object, and the other end to another object! Get creative with this because you can yield some ridiculous results. One of my favorites is to dual-grapple a helicopter to a jet plane and use the helicopter as a wrecking ball. Never before have I had so much fun in a game doing absolutely nothing (yeah that's right Grand Theft Auto, never before).
It's this overall sense of creativity and truly open-world environment that makes my inner child glimmer with joy. If I want to do something, I most likely can. Within the first few hours of the game there was a civilian completely pissing me off. So I strapped him to my helicopter, flew to the highest peak in the game and set him down on top of it. Whether or not he ever got down I have no idea. I do know however that I was able to think of this idea and actually execute it. You own this island, and the engine behind Just Cause 2 actually allows it.
What makes this experience even more exciting is the "Screen Capture" that is included. To put it simply, during your game you have the ability to record exactly what you are doing. You can either choose to start a new recording, perform said stunt and stop recording, or you can simply have the game save the last 30 seconds of gameplay. Once this is completed, you have the option to either upload that video to your YouTube account or save it to your system's memory. At first I was concerned with uploading it to YouTube thinking it would take forever, but it is so seamless and smooth I was in awe. It's a feature that NEEDS to be included in every game from here on out. Finally, a sandbox style game that when you play by yourself actually allows you to share it with your friends! I can't even count the amount of times I have done something ridiculously badass in the past only to be left with no real evidence. Just Cause 2, you saved my reputation. Thank you.
Overall Just Cause 2 is a fantastic journey that will never leave you bored. If you are a fan of this style game (Grand Theft Auto, Mercenaries, Infamous, The Saboteur), you are going to be a fan of this. If you are one of those individuals that has no imagination and loves to have the game play itself, do us all a favor and simply don't play this. You can play hundreds, upon hundreds of hours with this game and still find things to do. As I said in the first few sentences, throw out everything you know about videogame's and story-telling, and open up your imagination because Just Cause 2 is your new toy. An absolute must-buy for any fan of the genre.
These are the worst guns in video games. Unlike weapons that are useful and practical, these only take up space in your inventory.
Being a completionist can be fun, but some games are more like chores than fun. Here are the worst games to 100% complete.
The Yakuza Games
Haha, yeah, currently over 100 hours into Yakuza 0. Considering going for 100% and well on the way but may not get there. Cat Fights are a real chore.
I use to be a trophy hunter, was getting around 20 to 30 platinums a year. Had a saying of Play-Beat-Platinum, play and enjoy the game like there wasn't no trophies, beat it and at least get 50% then look at them and see if I'll platinum and platinum it. I think death star was a pain, the servers was ending so i had to rush and play that for awhile none stop. NGs2 was hard because of that online trophy but easy if you had the partner that can do it for you while you grab the enemy attention. Grinding idk, death was grinding last one I had to grind for platinum literally 1 trophy needed was dungeon travler or something vita gave up on it. After that I stop trophy hunting get like a 1 platinum a year or 0.
Yeah, if I enjoy a game I usually go for the platinum unless there are some unreasonable trophies in there.
For Yakuza 0 I've invested too much time in it to give up just yet and most of the content is good fun, apart from Cat Fighting which is broken and dull after a couple of fights.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 was literally the last platinum I got on PS3. After that, I went into PS4 kinda deflated and getting them where it felt appropriate.
I genuinely HATED that platinum, but it was a personal challenge I took upon myself. It was a lot of "get 1,000 kills with [insert weapon]" and it got to be a bit tedious. Master Ninja really pissed me off, but the WORST which you alluded to was that bloody Gold trophy for missions that you needed to do online because the AI was useless and got wrecked in moments. I jumped on the game a bit late so I struggled with finding a partner for at least 1.5 months. After that, I burned out hard with trophy hunting. I still came back for games I really enjoyed (Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, Nier: Automata, and a few others that escape me) and low hanging fruit that was just a bit time consuming and I didn't want to buy new games at the time (Final Fantasy XV). Total, it becomes clear where I taper off since I've only plat'ed 33 games since there inception of trophies which really isn't much.
Screw Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 lol. That game was pure nightmare fuel.
I say never force getting a platinum, its not worth the trouble definitely if it costing you to waste time on chore like grind. Those brainless design trophies.
Dead rising was the worst one I’ve ever tried. I haven’t tried it with the modern console “rest mode” but the 360 didn’t have that.
Was GTa4 the on where you had to collect a shit ton of pigeons around the map and there was no help in finding them?
The saving grace was that there was only on average 50 collectables with the two exceptions being graffiti and oysters from memory horseshoes and photos were capped at 50 each.
But for me it was all the other grind that was way more painful in SA like the car export lists which even with guides took way longer than collecting stuff
There was a guide book that came out with the game that had all the pigeons in it. I actually still have it
One of the more recent games I got a Platinum in was Killzone: Mercenary for Vita. What a crap game, that requires so much terrible grinding.
Awful game, awful experience.
Oh man..wish i could get a vita. I've been trying to get a preowned too(in my country) but no luck.
I can vouch for Just Cause 2. It was the reason I quit achievement hunting. 86 hours in, the game bugged on me during one of the last side quests (it failed no matter what I did) and my save file got corrupted. Wiped it off my drive and never looked back.
I downloaded the ‘complete edition’ or whatever it was called for $2 about 7yrs ago in hopes of trophy hunting it for a platinum. It always sounded fun and I would like to commit time to it but not enough for a platinum trophy
A look back at some of the most iconic moments of horror from non-horror video games.
