This holiday season is threatening to be huge beyond measure, so here at GameSpy we're extremely busy playing all of the upcoming games. As such, this has lead to a distinct drop-off in the amount of time that I've been able to spend with a certain obsession that most gamers will instantly recognize: World of Warcraft. See, between Halo 3, The Orange Box and Ratchet & Clank Future (yeah, I play PS3 games from time to time... when they're good, that is) I've been putting in the console hours, leaving my beloved WoW on the backburner.
This has been surprisingly painless and I honestly don't miss it all that much, but it strikes me as funny because just two short months ago you couldn't have convinced me that I'd ever be able to escape from WoW's clutches. Outside of work, going without WoW has meant that I've had more time for other pursuits, so I've been using that time to go back through my 360 library to revisit some of the games that I may not have spent as much time with as I'd wanted.
Paid Off
I've also been trying to spend more time with friends and family (something WoW tended to overshadow at times) and last night my fiancee and I enjoyed a quiet night of movie watching. We rented this excellent documentary called "Maxed Out" which does for consumer debt what "Supersize Me" did for fast food restaurants. The focus of the film was on predatory lenders and how these corporations use fine print to make the poor into indentured servants. It's tough to watch a movie like that and not come away infuriated, so I turned to my Xbox 360 for a little venting session.
After watching an hour and a half of people's lives getting destroyed at the hands of huge corporations hungering for that universally precious dollar, I needed to blow a bunch of things up... but not in a Halo 3-style competitive multiplayer way. I dug out an old copy of a game that I had just barely played for five seconds a few months ago: Just Cause.
Now, Just Cause definitely has its faults (targeting, getting caught in the geometry), but it's also an interesting kind of proto-Crackdown in that it's got a big open world and lots of things to take malicious glee in blowing to pieces. It's also got a revolutionary vibe that went perfectly with the "stick it to the man" mood I was in last night.
While playing, I noticed two things that struck me as reasons to really love Just Cause. First, once you get an attack chopper (like an off-brand Apache), the game functions as an awesomely updated version of Jungle Strike, an ancient relic of the 16-bit days wherein you fly a helicopter through an isometric jungle environment and blow stuff up in a variety of missions (that mostly focus on blowing stuff up). I used to love that game on the Sega Genesis, so as an extension of that, I love it that much more on my Xbox 360. The controls are a little wonky because you can't strafe in the helicopter (which technically makes no sense whatsoever), but the magnificently lush environment and satisfyingly epic explosions make up for it.
The second (and significantly more comical) thing that struck me as I was tooling through the island paradise of San Esperito in a helicopter that didn't have any weapons at all was that Just Cause can also function as a tongue-in-cheek "Magnum P.I." simulator. Your character Rico vaguely resembles Tom Selleck, but the real resemblance comes from helicopters flying through lush jungles. If this sort of thing excites you as much as it does me, I recommend grabbing an mp3 of the "Magnum P.I." theme song and throwing it on your 360 as a custom soundtrack -- believe me, '80s hilarity will most definitely ensue!
