Yahtzee Croshaw posted his Top 5 of 2010 list recently.

SPOILER ALERT!

Yahtzee picked Just Cause 2 as his #1 game for 2010.  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more validated.

I liked Just Cause 2 as much as (I dare say more than) he did for what seem like all the same reasons.  Like him, it’s the only game I want to keep playing even though I finished it long ago.

I love this game so much that I feel guilty for having not played the first one.  I’ve honestly considered letting it bump Super Metroid as my favorite-game-of-all-time.

It’s not perfect.  But I don’t care.  It’s too much fun.

I posted some of my thoughts on Just Cause 2 last year, but didn’t go into detail about why I love this game so much.  Instead, I heaped adoring praise upon the game and asked a bunch of rhetorical questions like a giddy kid.

I don’t wear giddy well.  So I wanted to explore more about why this game is so much damn fun.

Why Just Cause 2 Is So Much Damn Fun

Why is Just Cause 2 so much damn fun?

1. It’s Hard to Die.

I don’t have time to die.  I have a day job.  You say Just Cause 2 is too easy?  Phht.  Yeah, easy to have fun with.  No one has ever explained to my satisfaction how dying and having to repeat something in a game is fun.

At its simplest, Just Cause 2 is about fun, not challenge.  That ain’t bad.

2. It’s big.

Among modern games, I think Panau is second in size only to the landscape in Fuel, which currently holds the Guiness World Record.

More world means more to explore.  Exploration is fun.  Therefore, Just Cause 2 is fun.

Specious?  Yes.  But Just Cause 2 wouldn’t be as fun as it is if Panau were much smaller.  This has to do with the gameplay it offers; more on that below.

Fallout 3 was fun, too.  (Right?)  And Fallout 3 is big, right?  I never came close to discovering all the locations it had to offer.  But I didn’t feel compelled to, either.  In Panau, I wanted to explore all day long.  I attribute this difference in attitude to #3 below.

3.  It’s easy to explore.

To explore everything Fallout 3 had to offer, you had to walk.    Walking isn’t much fun.  It’s too slow, and I don’t have time for it.  Plus, in Fallout 3, you often walk right into a big bad something that wants to kill you and stands a good chance of succeeding if you aren’t on your toes.

That works for Fallout 3.  I get it; it’s simulates surviving in a postapocalyptic wasteland.  Well done.  But to say Fallout 3 is fun for that reason is like saying The Road is fun to read.  Maybe this deserves a separate post, but sometimes I wonder whether Fallout 3 is actually fun.  It’s compelling and thought-provoking and engaging and immersive, but fun?  Hm.

I digress.  Just Cause 2 is easy to explore.  Because exploration is fun, making exporation easy makes the rate of fun-having go up.

Just Cause 2 doesn’t let you fast-travel to any location on the map from the outset, but it comes close.  You can move quite fast with the parachute and grappling hook working together.  You can summon a helicopter with a bit of misbehavior and fly it for as long as you like, anywhere you like.  The entire world is available to you from the start, unlike the GTAs of the world.  With the game’s fastest jet, you could probably fly by the game’s 400+ locations in an hour or two.

There’s an interesting subtlety here; a bit of design wisdom.  Just Cause 2′s size is so important because it’s so easy to explore.  Think about it: Rico can cover a lot of ground really fast.  That ability is one of Just Cause 2′s draws, and so the world has to support it by being so big that you aren’t running into its edges very often.  Because discovering the edge of your universe is no fun at all.  In fact, it’s disillusioning.

I reel when I think of the design forces that must have led to Avalanche making the world so big.  Panau is like a perversely-awesome 3D manifestation of scope creep.  Unless one of the devs tells me otherwise, I’m forced to think that the size of Panau was a side effect of other design decisions.  That is, they made the world so big only because other decisions demanded it.  The world’s characteristics rarely contribute as much to a game’s fun as its gameplay, and I wager that Avalanche settled on gameplay first and let the world grow to support it.

4. “Open” means open.

I love open-world games.  But I’m irritated at how closed some of them are, at least when the game starts.

Because Panau is open for business from the moment I start the game (or at least pass the tutorial mission), I have complete freedom to play in the sandbox however I want.  That’s more fun than it would be if I knew I’d be coming up on artificial barriers I had to surmount.

Contrast this with a game like Grand Theft Auto.  Ever since its open-world foray, the Grand Theft Auto series has restricted new players in the places they could go in the world.  Only once they achieve milestones in the game do those areas open up.  Rockstar did the same thing with Red Dead Redemption.  Pandemic did it with The Saboteur.  Even Fallout 3 does it, though to a smaller degree, by cordoning off some areas with “gates” that could be surmounted early with sufficient effort but were really meant to be opened gradually via milestone achievement or character leveling.

Don’t get me wrong; I loved all those games.  But I had the most fun with Just Cause 2.

While I’m on it, Fallout 3 does employs another trick that I find less irritating than GTA’s but still contrary to the spirit of open world games.  It had “pockets” of world with a limited number of entry points, like the supermutant-controlled Washington Monument area.  Within these pockets, the spaces’ designs reminded me of a theme park (as well as many deathmatch maps).  It seems big, but it’s really much smaller than it looks.  The illusion comes from the motion you must perform to navigating winding paths that have been crammed into a small area.  The paths are decidedly linear, and pollute the openness of the world.  Fable II and III do this too, but pull off the illusion better than Fallout 3 did.

5. It improved on the traditional scavenger hunt.

I’ve always been a fan of scavenger hunts in games.  I like having the distraction when I’m not following a more mainstream objective.  But Just Cause 2 made a big leap forward and did their scavenger hunt right, with the simple addition of a hot-or-cold meter.

I never found all the hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto 3, and lost any enthusiasm to find them after finding the first 10 or so by accident.  Never tried to find all the bobbleheads in Fallout 3.  Both tasks were too difficult without help from the internet.  These were tacked-on scavenger hunts that didn’t contribute a lot of fun because their novelty wore off as soon as I realized how unreasonable they were.

Just Cause 2 does it better.  Rico’s signal finder is a facepalmingly-simple mechanism that changes its scavenger hunt from cruel to fun.  (I wonder if there’s a hot-or-cold game I could get for Izzy that uses simple transmitters and a receiver to give her something to do around the house when she’s older?)

(I hasten to say that Fable II’s trashtalking gnomes were another great advance in the scavenger hunt motif.  Still never found all of them, though.  Takes too long to cover ground in that game.)

Then, Avalanche threw us a bone and added completion meters to most of the areas in which scavengable items can be found.  Doing so effectively shrinks the area I know I have to search.  That eliminates repeated searches, and so gets rid of a fun sink that turned me off to searching GTA’s world.

But it doesn’t eliminate all of it.  What will keep me from attaining 100% completion in Just Cause 2 is the fact that many of the scavengable items are located outside of any completion-metered zone.  That’s frustrating.  Avalanche might have dramatically increased the range of the signal finder, or provided some kind of hint on the map.

That notwithstanding, the items that are in metered zones are fun to find, and there are a lot of them.  Maybe half of the item classes offer immediate rewards when you collect them.

But I have to say it: I spent a frustratingly long time trying to complete Panau’s capital city.  At about 95% completion, I had to develop a systematic search pattern to find the one water tower that had eluded me for hours.  Ugh.  I would have appreciated the ability to call Sheldon and purchase some kind of satellite support that painted my targets, making them substantially easier to see from the air.

6. For the most part, missions were fun to play.

Some of Just Cause 2′s missions made an impression on me.  Most of them were simply-designed, amounting to chase this, asplode that.  Others were a little more epic.  My favorite was probably the mission that had you jet out of a hangar toward a missle that looked like a fat grain silo slowly lifting into space.  It was fun to play because it was so silly, so over the top, that I wanted to do it again just because it made me laugh.

Just Cause 2′s mission design may have benefit most from the Avalanche engine that powered the game.  The designers seemed to have unprecedented freedom in constructing missions from set pieces of epic size, but they used that freedom wisely, revealing the most impressive set pieces at just the right moment.

I don’t recall being really frustrated by any of the missions.  (GTA’s infamous “Supply Lines” mission is my basis for comparison.)

But I don’t recall being bored with them, or feeling like I was repeating a formula too often.

I completed all the faction missions before I tackled any of the agency missions.  So I backloaded a lot of the “big reveals” to the tail end of my experience.

7. Rico is overpowered.

Nothing stands a chance against him.  Just Cause 2 does what other games only let you do with cheat codes.

And yet, when you think about it, there are actually no powerups to speak of in the game.  This relates back to the open-being-open idea: when the game starts, you’re fully equipped. Go nuts.  The only thing that might overcome you is the sheer size of the world.

A lot of the fun I had with Just Cause 2 came from therapeutic rhythm of the chaos I could inflict on the world.  The game bleeds fluid motion that doesn’t constrain me to asploding something in a particular way.  I get to play mobile explosion generator.

The combat is satisfying because it has weight; it’s responsive and my actions have instant visible and aural impact.  And when I’m not shooting, grenading, or jumping out of cars right before they hit something, I’m flying around to my next target.  The magic juice seems to be the speed with which I can wreak havoc.  A village can go from peaceful to WTF!? in 5 seconds flat, and I can be whisk myself away just as fast and go do something else.

Rico’s aresenal is fun to use, and his tools give him superpowers.  And nothing–not even gravity or momentum–holds him back.  He can effectively cancel any opposing force at will.  That’s fun.

8. Outstanding presentation, eclectic design.

I belong to a peculiar church of thought that puts me at odds with a lot of indie game developers.  A better-looking, better-sounding game is more fun than a comparable title with less.  Or, more specifically, fun is diminished by distractingly-poor presentation.

Visuals and sound effects, or higher production values overall, make something more fun than it would otherwise be.  Think about it.  Watching fireworks on the Fourth of July is fun to whatever measure.  Watching them on TV is less so.  Walking through your neighborhood on a nice day can be fun.  Using a Wiimote or a Kinect to run through a fantastical mountain landscape with landbridges that beckon you to explore them is moreso.

Well-executed presentation can make a game more immersive by giving your brain less work to do.  You have to imagine less, so you can spend more time focusing on playing the game.  This deserves its own post, too, but I’m not a believer in the “text adventures are better because you get to imagine the world!” argument.

Just Cause 2′s fun was in no way harmed by lack of presentation.  The Avalanche Engine makes draw distance virtually irrelevant, and that’s really important when your world is a autocratic multi-climate archipelago.  The world teases you with its expanse, and you’re rewarded with immersive visuals up close and far away.

But Panau is also a lesson in design.  Its size and bona fide openness demands extra attention to detail on the small scale to keep things interesting when the game’s pace ebbs.  It doesn’t disappoint; Just Cause 2′s—area?–design is great.  It’s proof positive that you can create compelling set pieces with few polygons.  Structures beg to be grappled, cover is plentiful in big gunfights, and there’s impressive attention paid to zones’ verticality that other studios would phone in with big terrain.

Then there’s the variety that defines the world.  Eclectic?  I was struggling for an adjective, and my English-degreed wife thought this was best.  The world wasn’t made with a rubber stamp.  For every class of thing there is in the world, Avalanche made sure there were several representative pieces.  The world has a variety of biomes that keep the terrain interesting.  The terrain is peppered with small locales to explore, and tucked away in some of Just Cause 2′s nooks and valleys are some unique structures serve as mission backdrops or as just fun things to look at.  The game uses color effectively, avoiding any sense of blandness.  At worst, textures in the settled areas feel a bit flat.

9. Boom.

Just Cause 2′s explosions are visceral.  The demolition industry has one of the highest job satisfaction rates in the world, and this game plays to that.

I don’t think games appreciate explosions enough.  What Burnout “gets” with car crash appeal, Just Cause 2 and The Saboteur “get” with explosions.

In a video game (lest someone miscontrue), preparing to blow shit up, watching shit blow up, and knowing that I was the direct cause of blowing that shit up (as opposed to, say, watching something blow up in a triggered cutscene) is fun as hell.

10. It’s whimsical.

The bad guy falls to the ground as Tom Sheldon and Rico share a martini on the room of a building that was hit with orbital lasers.  Rico jumps between intercontinental ballistic missiles in mid flight.  A brothel is suspended from blimps.

Just Cause 2 shows a degree of whimsy that rivals Loony Tunes.

Just Cause 2 doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.  It is in touch with its inner craziness, and embraces the absurd to comic effect.  Just like it’s more fun to dance when you’re doing it with someone else, Just Cause 2 is fun because it’s having fun right along with you.  To have made this game must have been fun, because I get to feel it vicariously every time I play the game.

Contrast this with another open world favorite.  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was whimsical, too.  Jetpacks.  I mean, c’mon, right?  But then Grand Theft Auto IV got rid of all that.  In what was perhaps the start of a trend continued by Red Dead Redemption and soon L.A. Noire, Rockstar decided somewhere along the way to “grow up”.  That’s no fun.

I really, really hope Just Cause 3 doesn’t do that.  In fact, when I think of things that could make Just Cause 3 better than its predecessor, the first thing that comes to mind is being able to surf a space shuttle into an oxygenless outer space, crash it into the aforementioned orbital weapons platform, and then skydive back to earth, with Rico bursting into flames as he reenters the atmosphere.  Of course, you could still survive by simply grappling the ground moments before impact.  And of course, he’d begin to sing “Rocketman” on the way down.

Avalanche, you can take that idea if you like.  It’s free.  I have others.  Hint: grenade fountains.

Because seriously… why not?