Tales of Interest: Just Cause 2’s Mile High Club

Posted 04/08/2010 at 6:32pm | by Nathan Grayson

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In Just Cause 2, anything can happen. Well, ok, maybe not “anything,” but every conceivable event involving a parachute, grappling hook, explosions, and crazy moon physics. So I’m keeping a diary of my high-flying adventures, because it’s actually mathematically impossible for the above combination of factors to not be entertaining. So read on, and feel free to comment about your experiences with the game as well! Also, if you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s part one. 

One of the coolest things about Just Cause 2 is that if you can see someplace, odds are, you can go there.

I saw an airship. I goed there.

I began my journey by performing Just Cause 2’s equivalent of hailing a cab. By which I mean I whipped out my rocket launcher and fired it indiscriminately until Panau’s evil military dictatorship got angry enough to sick helicopters on me. From there, hitching a ride was as simple as one, two, grappling hook, gunfire, intense helicopter battle. And I think there might be a “three” in there somewhere as well.

The airship, which initially registered as little more than a blip on my radar, was literally miles away, so my helicopter’s puttering pace quickly became intolerable. And that’s when I saw it: my new steed. My winged stallion. It was a jet whose movements could only be described as straight up mockeries of the sound barrier, and it was flying straight toward me. I only had one chance to make this work. When the glorious metal bird was nearly upon me, I leapt out of my helicopter, fumbled for the “launch grappling hook” key, and said a quick prayer.

Thankfully, the god of grappling hooks was on my side that day, and so, after kindly helping the plane’s former owner out of his seat and into a nice, brisk 10,000 foot freefall, I had myself a brand new ride. I am, however, nothing if not fickle when it comes to flying vehicles, so the plane was a distant memory the second I reached the airship. What I found, though, wasn’t a new airborne means of transportation to sate my Tiger Woods-esque aviation lust. No – it was a party. In the sky.

Thumping techno music, scantily clad male and female strippers dancers, open bars – this airship had it all. The game informed me that I’d unlocked an achievement called “Mile High Club,” which was really just chuckle-worthy icing on the cake.

But Just Cause 2 isn’t a mid-air nightlife sim. It’s a game with its own Chaos Meter, for Pete’s sake. So in lieu of partying it up, I decided to try popping the airship’s balloons by pumping them full of lead. This didn’t work, but -- despite the fact that the balloons were apparently made out of Kevlar -- its owners weren’t too pleased with my actions. So they pulled shotguns on me, which was a bit unexpected until I remembered that I was playing Just Cause 2.      

Now you have to realize that – at this point – I was merely acting in self-defense. They (mostly) started it. And the party wasn’t even that great anyway. So I may have grappled the airship’s trigger-happy owners together, and then I may have proceeded to shoot at them until they stopped shooting at me. And at some point before, after, or while that was happening, everyone else on the airship may have died. Of perfectly natural causes, of course. Nothing out of the ordinary or involving 10,000 foot freefalls, you know, just off the top of my head.

After that, the party grew understandably dull, so I found a plane sitting on the airship’s deck and took it, since I had a hunch its original owner probably didn’t need it anymore. And so ended my airship adventure.