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mikemcn

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Most Beautiful Game of the Year?

By mikemcn 50 Comments

Just Cause 2 was a great game, a Huge open world, a great sandbox for pretty much anything you could imagine. Avalanche made a formidable successor to a game that many people wanted to love but never quite could. What they did best though, was that they created a tropical Island of fantastic proportions. It is a magestic, vibrant island filled with great locations and unique landmarks. 
 
I recently bought all the DLC for the game (50% off on steam.) and decided I would take the DLC monster Truck out for a spin, I wanted to put it through its paces so I took it to the lower right corner of the map, an area with nothing but a few rundown Dirt roads broken up by ruins, rivers and dense foliage. Not a single NPC or building in site, just, me, the landscape and a Flame covered monster truck.   

I was Quickly reminded of how beautiful this game was, the colors, and the shapes of the mountains, valleys, and beaches all come together to make something amazing. The sense of scale is unmatched, Rico is dwarfed by the huge trees around him, the jagged cliffs and the huge rivers.      

  
Color in this game is key to its beauty, it is the complete opposite of games such as Call of Duty and Gears of War, which seek to create something gritty and dirty. JC2 is all about vibrancy, everything pops, The obsession with dirty worlds in games is kinda of deppressing, I much more enjoy games when they are visually interesting and not just monotone. Certain games (Fallout 3) need that dirty feel, but often its totally uneeded.
Avalanche's use of texture Grading, allows for seemingly huge draw distances, the most distant objects are simply 2d pictures, created in a way for them to have depth. As you approach polygons are added on to make it become more 3 dimensional. The trickery is seamless. Games need to take advantage of this technique, it does so much towards creating a world. The days of fog at the edge of your view are gone. 
 
The other thing JC2 does so well is the size of the world, in the above picture, pick a point, any point. In Just Cause 2 you can go anywhere you want, from the snakeing rivers in the foreground to the snow capped peaks at the very back of the picture. You could play this game for 200+ hours and still not get a full grasp on everything there is to see in the world. 
 
Just Cause 2 is an amazing game, im sure it was a huge undertaking. It may have gotten fairly standard reviews from some people, but I think its underrated sometimes simply for its visual strength. Crysis may be technically (As in how fancy it's polygons are) more impressive, and Limbo and Flower may be more artistically unique, but Just Cause 2 easily deserves a place as one of the best looking games ever made. (Or at least the best looking game this year.)
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