I also used some inventive (and not so inventive) swearing when I failed that mission, twice, and saw my progress erased. Yeah, when it says you restart at the last checkpoint it does mean it. It’s only because outside of missions it saves your progress as you go, that you notice it so much when you fail a mission. Moral: just go for the mission objectives in a mission, forget the rest until later. Once I did this, that mission got a whole lot easier.
anaqer
1642
Wasn’t that an agency mission, with a chase scene on ice at the end? Gah, I must have died at least six times trying to 100% that.
I considered that, but I had saved at the beginning of the checkpoint so when I re-loaded I was going to give it one more try. I suppose I could have aborted the mission then and there to thin out the bases but didn’t think of that.
Yes, it was. I eventually tried it again, went slower, and got through the 4 vent controls. The ice thing annoyed me too (I was jacking a car and bit it on a rocket while I was QTE’ing the driver. arrggghh!!!), but thankfully that segment isn’t that long.
Saint’s Row 2 really did checkpoints right. I recall in one mission I was at the graveyard when one of the guys on the hit list showed up so I took a detour to kill him, but ended up failing the mission. When I restarted at the checkpoint in the graveyard the guy on the hit list was still dead.
Anyway, I like that there are only 7 story missions in JC2. Every story mission advances the plot fairly significantly. When you compare it to GTA the ‘story’ in each mission is fairly forgettable. Now, the narrative in JC2 isn’t its high point, but I generally like the way they deliver it and how you take part in it. It’s like they designed the game play first and the story around it, which not enough developers do.
Eh. JC2 has about 5 or so main missions, so I don’t mind that if they were a little stingy with the checkpoints in some of them. Everything else in the game is pretty much autosaved.
JeffL
1645
There are MISSIONS in this game? I may have to get around to trying those one day. ;)
I did a mission the other night where I had to kidnap this one guy and take him to the completely awesome Bolo Santosi. He’s in a limo, and once I finish shooting his guards in the face with a shotgun, I take over the limo and he starts screaming at me, asking if I know who he is, and I’m ignoring him as I take a limo around hairpin turns down a mountain. Thanks to someone’s terrible driving – I won’t say whose – I hit two cars and a forest, and go flipping down the mountain as this guy bellows that I better set him free.
The limo lands on its roof and stays there. I bail out, and so does he. The limo explodes.
We look at each other for a long minute. Had this part of the game been voice-acted, I think it would have gone something like this.
“Okay, so… I’m gonna grab another car here.”
“Sure, fine.”
“Do you – I mean, do you care what type I get?”
“What? No, no… anything is fine.”
“Look, here’s a four-door sedan. This should handle fine. Should I…?”
“No, I can get my own door.”
“Okay. Oh, don’t forget your seatbelt. Roads are murder! Heh heh…”
“Heh heh, yes, they are… okay, we can proceed.”
“There’s a gas station up ahead, you, uh, need anything?”
“No, I am fine.”
“Okay. I’ll just… I’ll just drive, then.”
Most polite kidnap victim I’ve ever seen.
I like that you hit a forest. That’s a great summation of this game. “Then? Your car hits a FOREST and EXPLODES.”
anaqer
1648
It seems to me that the devs had such a huge boner for the parahooking mechanism, they made a conscious effort to let other means of transportation feel decidedly cumbersome.
I like the other modes of transportation. Driving across Panau from one end to the other leads to a lot of adventures. If I just parahooked my way to that point, it would be a beautiful journey, but much less eventful than driving. Helicopter and air travel is great too, though obviously I would have preferred rudder control to give me more fine tuning control. As for the boats, obviously the slower boats/ships really are cumbersome, but some of the faster speed boats are great fun. Have you done the water races that require you to jump over embankments? Those can be a lot of fun.
Yes, I wish that flying had finer controls like a rudder. However, the only vehicle that I upgraded from the black market is the airplane and at 4 stars it handles fairly well.
Are any of the other vehicle worth upgrading and buying?
I believe that the Rowlinson helicopter gets a gun at six stars.
Case
1653
The higher level helicopter (I forget the name) gets rocket launchers at (I think) level 4.
No, you have to get to level 6 for that. I used it all the time at level 5 and it was still machine-guns-only.
Also, the sports car, which is weaponless for most levels, gets a machine gun turret at level 6. I haven’t upgraded the other two cars to level 6, but they both start with turrets. I’m wondering if there’s a rocket upgrade for them later.
The sports car is -crazy- fast. I love that thing. I think I have yet to drive it for more than two minutes, but it’s worth it!
There usually is a rocket launcher or autocannon upgrade at level 6 for vehicles that start off with a gun. The speedboat, for example, gets a second weapon at level 6. I never upgraded the tank. It already starts off so strong and so powerful with the autocannon that I’m not sure how much better it can get.
I am going to keep kicking this thread each time I play this game because 1,652 messages is only about 75% completion by Just Cause 2 standards.
I mean, seriously, has anyone ever 100%'ed this game? I was amused to see on Steam that they don’t even have an achievement for full 100%! 75% seems to be the max.
Last night I enjoyed giving my wife a tour of the game – she had to yank me out of my deep Panauan trance to go over our budget which seemed to her sleep-deprived mind to be out of control, but fortunately a half hour of tense haggling cleared things up, then she came back down and slumped in a beanbag while I toured around and visited the Mile High Club at sunrise. What an amusing little place! I really wished I’d bought the air gun so I could have blown some of those annoying bartenders right off the thing. Then I failed to base jump all the way to the ocean, which I should have done.
Other highlights:
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Blowing up rows of smokestacks or fuel tanks with a helicopter, just get in line and hose down the whole row.
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Getting the laptop in the nick of time. Next time I’ll clear the damn base BEFORE doing the mission. (I hate getting blown up by helicopters that I can barely locate before they rocket me to death… level 4 heat is no joke! If I can just get my cursor on the fucker I can grapple it, but sometimes I can’t even manage that.)
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Stealing the armored car. WOO!!! I just wish they’d left me one to play with. Looking forward to unlocking that bastard from the black market… I have $600K+ in cash and nothing to spend it on…
What are your tricks for evading helicopters?
I used to just take helicopters over by grappling to it. That was a little too easy though, so I made a self-constricting rule about never doing that so that the game would become more exciting. And boy, did it! Most of the time I try to evade them by running in between buildings and cover and get angles where they can’t shoot at me, and when all that fails, I use grapple-shoot-pulling to skedaddle out of there. It also helps if you launch yourself off a cliff and lose altitude fast, because a helicopter can’t drop altitude that fast. I also try to get trees between me and the copter so it can’t shoot me. This becomes especially exciting when the helicopter in question is shooting rockets, not just miniguns.
I made a lot of progress the past two days. I finished all the strongholds, did agency mission #5, got up to 8 faction missions done, and did got 100% takeover on a few settlements and bases.
Mostly good times. A few of the agency mission anger me, but that’s like. On the Red Pill/Blue Pill one I was a hairs breath away from failing but did the QTE and beat it.
That said the %complete must be weighted as it says I’m at 22% complete (with 16 hours played) even though I haven’t discovered 100 locations, much less get 100% in that many.
I’m close to unlocking the next agency mission(s) so I debating if I should run with that or just blow shit up.
As to how do I avoid copters? I try to jack them. Pretty basic, but there you go. Usually when I jack one more show up so I have a dogfight of sorts. I’m 50/50 on winning that and escaping.
