First-Person Shouter

So, I’ve been playing with Just Cause 2. Not playing it, but playing with it.  Apart from completing the two introductory missions, I have not played Just Cause 2: the game. The fifteen hours I’ve spent have been with Just Cause 2: the toy.

And it’s quite a toy. Mind-bogglingly huge, eye-bogglingly beautiful, and oil-bogglingly flammable. Once the intro missions were done I just started running around, then driving around, then flying around, then skydiving around. I’ll steal a car and smash into some soldiers, jump onto their jeeps, fling them off, drive the jeep off a cliff, parachute onto a boat, get chased by a chopper, grapple into the chopper, sky-dive off it onto a plane, and then fly that around. Oh, and in between I will blow up anything that can be blown up.

Following the recommendation of the PC Gamer Blog and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I’ve employed the BOLOpatch mod, which allows for additional fun, making your grappling cord unbreakable.  You can also toggle other options, like multiple grappling cords (in case you want to tie a bunch of things to a bunch of other things) and infinite ammo, which allows for double-barreled mayhem without having to stop to pick up spare clips or grenades. Sure, it’s a huge cheat, but I’m not playing the game yet. I’m just playing with the toy. Anything goes.

Some other mods I’d like to see for Just Cause 2 are as follows:

Panau's version of public transportation.

1) Unpoppable Tires. How many car chases wind up with me constantly having to switch cars because someone has shot out my tires? All of them. Not that switching vehicles isn’t fun. It is. One mouse click flips you onto the roof of your car, another makes you spring onto any other car in the vicinity. I switch cars all the time, but sometimes I just want to drive real fast off a cliff or over a ramp or into a building, and having all my tires pop as I’m trying to do this is annoying.

Note: I would still like the ability to shoot out everyone else’s tires.

Five dollars for a headset? I'm walking out of this inflight movie.

2) Safe Landing Notification: My current hobby is to visit an airport, jump onto the roof of a taxiing jetliner, ride it into the stratosphere, yank the pilot out, and take over the plane. Then, I like to fly it to another airport and land it safely. Then I like to turn around, taxi, take off, and visit another airport, again, landing safely. When I’m not blowing things up I like to do things safely.

This is not always easy with a mouse and keyboard, and I would like the game to recognize when I’ve done it because I feel quite chuffed about it. Maybe an achievement, maybe a bell going off, maybe just the relieved applause of the terrified passengers. Something. When I mess up and the plane explodes, it’s pretty obvious, so when I manage it safely I think the game should notice as well. If this were a GTA game, flying planes around would definitely be a side-mission of some sort.

If only I had another Silverbolt to land on when I jump off this Silverbolt.

3) Black Market Shortcut:  I’m constantly calling my black market dealer to drop off one vehicle or another, and it’s always a little production requiring a bunch of clicks and cutscenes. I’d like a hotkey to just spawn the vehicle I want without the game crawling to a stop. In fact, as I play I find I need a little Silverbolt plane delivered to me roughly every ten minutes, so if I could just set it on auto-deliver that’d save me some time.

Have I stopped moving? Have I stopped shooting? Am I on a very small strip of land that probably doesn’t have quite enough room to launch a Silverbolt plane? Then I need a Silverbolt plane. Just drop one without all the chit-chat.

Didn't plan on this, did you, Al Gore? DID YOU?

4) The Jerks Mod: By now everyone has picked up on the best line of dialogue in the game. When you blow up an oil pipeline, your character sometimes spits out this defiant, pithy line: “Try transporting fuel now, you pipeline jerks!” This may be the best line in a video game, ever. I’d like similar lines to be added to the game to celebrate other events.

When hijacking and destroying a passenger jet: “Try maintaining an immaculate safety record now, you airline jerks!”

When destroying a wind turbine: “Try providing a clean, safe alternative to oil-drilling now, you wind turbine jerks!”

When impaling an enemy with your grappling hook and dragging him behind your car: “Try to not be impaled by a grappling hook and dragged behind my car now, you normally-not-impaled-and-dragged-behind-a-car jerks!”

Die, deeply nuanced characters with intriguing backstories! Die!

5) RPG Mod: The only sad thing about the world of Just Cause 2 is that it would be an amazing setting for an RPG. Apart from jumping off things, blowing them up, or blowing them up shortly after jumping off them, there’s not a whole lot to do with this huge, beautiful, glorious world.  So someone should make a mod that would create a world full of bustling characters with quests and side-missions and an economy and a mythology and lots of RPG-style gameplay. Someone can do that, right?  Right.

EDIT: Much more, and better, on the sandbox of Just Cause 2 by Tom Francis.