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Right now Steam is having its Summer Sale. There’s a heap of games being offered for a 24-hour discount, and needless to say I wasn’t able to resist the temptation and bought Just Cause, Just Cause 2 plus all DLCs, and Homefront.
In this post I’ll talk about Just Cause 2, one of the hidden gems of gaming. I don’t know how I could have missed this when it came out earlier, but I am glad I picked it up.
I’m a fan of “exploration” in games. Well, other than FPS games where the story is linear and you don’t really get to wander out too much to explore. In RPGs though, usually I do 1 or 2 main storyline quest and then I’ll just start talking to people and wander off doing my own thing until it’s time to move the story forward and I’ll do the next main quest.
In a lot of ways, Just Cause 2 is very similar to an RPG. In the game, you are a super spy – Rico. At the beginning of the game you’re told that your old friend and mentor, Sheldon, may have gone rogue, and it is your job to locate him and perhaps, eliminate him. You jump out of the plane over the island country of Panau, located in South East Asia, and you’re off!
After going through the mandatory main quest + tutorial mission, you are basically left pretty much alone. You are told that there are 3 major factions on this island country, and your job is to get in close with them to get more intel (not the chip maker) about Sheldon.
Panau is a damn interesting place, especially more so since I’m in South East Asia, and this fictional island country is modelled after at least 2 countries that I can identify – Thailand, and Malaysia.
First off – all the signs, be it road signs, shop signs, billboards etc. They are all in a script that looks very much like Thai writings. I can’t read Thai, I can’t speak Thai, but they sure as heck look like Thai in the game to me. There is also a prevalence of Tuk Tuks in the game, which is like the hallmark of Thai traffic. The vehicle is called a “tuk tuk” in the game too. I know Philippines and Indonesia have them too but they aren’t known as “Tuk tuks”. If you accidentally run over or hit a civilian while driving, they will curse at you either in English or in Cantonese (this is the part where I am reminded of Malaysia). The scenery, the landscapes are just beautiful. The roads are realllllly long, and sometimes you literally just drive around for 20 mins or so to get to the next mission. Then the cities, towns etc, have MALAY NAMES (like in Malaysia). Like there’s this place I remember offhand called “Pekan Buaya Tidur”. I know it probably means “Sleeping Crocodile village” or something but it’s very nice to see attempts at authenticity.
One of the earliest NPCs you will encounter is called “Jade Tan” (again reminds me of Malaysia, and Singapore, with this name) and her accent is just about correct for us here speaking to foreigners. The thing that got me was she actually said “Selamat Jalan!” at the end and left. That’s pretty damn cool! By the way, you devs, please listen up. The name “Tan” is pronounced “ton” here, like “a ton of bricks”. So it should sound like “Jade Ton”. My name is Tan too and I hate it when you guys call me Tan (as in “having a sun tan” way).
However, I think there is a bug with the road system. In the game, sometimes vehicles will go the WRONG WAY too up highway ramps. The arrow on the ground CLEARLY says I am going the right way, yet I can see cars and trucks coming HEAD ON at me up the ramp or even on highways IN MY LANE! Also, driving on the right side (like in America) is weird in Southeast Asia. I don’t think I have ever come across any countries here driving on the right.
Of the 3 factions, 2 of them had leaders that were pretty interesting to me. The Ular chief, spoke pretty much fluently but added sprinklings of “lah” in the speech, probably the devs trying to inject some authenticity into the game. However, it sounds so strange and the “lah”s seem to be placed at the wrong sentences. As a native speaker I immediately cringed when the Ular chief tried to speak like a local. As an example, here is how to use “lah” correctly. Instead of saying “Hurry up! We’re running out of time!”, we say “Faster lah! No time already!”. Yes, “lah” doesn’t HAVE to be at the end of a sentence, although it usually is. And there is no way we’re going to say “Comrade, your performance is exemplary lah” when we’re giving a real compliment. Adding a “lah” at the end turns the sentence into a sarcastic one – The meaning is now “Your performance is fantastic lah. Now the whole world knows we’re here” when we’re trying to be covert.
Then comes the Reaper chief. Her name is Bolo Santosi (what the hell kinda name is it for an ethnic “Chinese” anyway?). The information in-game tells me her group is made up of ethnic Chinese fighting against the Panau Government. Anyway. she is voiced by a true-blue Singaporean – Liz Sutherland. Apparently, according to IMDB, she’s born here in Singapore but currently based in London as an actress. While the accent is true-blue Singaporean Singlish (ACCENT ONLY), the way she spoke is definitely NOT the way we speak here. The grammar, sentence structure etc – they are all too western. Here, we clip sentences, drop “irrelevent” words like “the”, “a”, “at” etc. It is very apparent that she is reading from a script instead of speaking naturally like how we speak.
However, the saving grace is that her underlings, her men, all spoke with authentic Singlish accents but do not sound like they’re reading from a script. +1 for that!
And speaking of “lahs”, Bolo Santosi would be the PERFECT one to use “lahs” everywhere, but yet, there is none in her lines. And again, her lines are too western. Grammar is too perfect, sentence structure too precise.
Just Cause 2 is touted as a “free-roaming” game, as I mentioned in the beginning. After the initial missions, I just went driving around, meeting up with the faction leaders, doing their missions, or even just visiting towns and cities collecting Weapon and Vehicle upgrades hidden among them all. The interesting part of Just Cause 2 is that the hero has a grappling hook which can be used for multiple purposes. The most basic is of course to climb tall stuff – walls, buildings etc. The more esoteric ones are like to hook a car to a statue and then you drive the car and pull the statue down. Or, to hook onto a helicopter that’s firing at you on the ground, and you zip up there and hijack the helicopter and turn its guns onto your enemies!
By far the best use of this grappling hook, to me, is to TRAVEL. Just zip around the city, hooking buildings and swinging around like Spiderman. In fact, it’s EXACTLY like Spiderman I’d say. Except that Spidey doesn’t have a parachute that you can deploy if you missed the building and falling to the ground 40 storeys up *grin*. Also if you need to travel pretty far but lack a vehicle, you can always jump off a mountain and then use the parachute to sail to your location!
Oh yes did I mention that you are ENCOURAGED to cause mayhem and destruction too? Yes you get points for blowing up stuff. The bigger they are the more spectacularly they blow up, and yeah I get a weird sense of gratification from blowing stuff up too. Especially if you have an armed chopper and you train its weapons on stuff to blow them up. Realllly cool! You get points for blowing up as many things as you can under 60 seconds too! I think so far my record is 30 objects blown up in under 5 seconds.
I also love hijacking vehicles. There is really no point in sticking to just 1 vehicle that the Agency may or may not have provided for you. Just use that one and then go up to a vehicle that you fancy on the roads – jump over and hijack it! I love it!
In all, this game has an “RPG-feel” to it. A friend of mine commented that I should have played the Grand Theft Auto series, because they are similar to Just Cause 2 too. Maybe I should. Too bad though, cause I saw Steam had a sale of GTAs1-5 for only US$7.95 a couple of days back, but I didn’t pick them up.
Before I leave, have a look at the video below – it has most of the elements I talked about in this post – the zipping around, the hijacking etc.
Related articles
- Singlish (96lines.wordpress.com)
- The Malaysia ‘Lah’ (laurenzapata.wordpress.com)
