I miss my monster truck in Just Cause 2

 I miss my monster truck from Just Cause 2.  Such a fun game!  Here are some screenshots to remember it by.

Crrruuuunnnnchhhh

Vroooooom

What goes up must come down

 

Just Cause 2 Just Needs More Ammo

I picked up Just Cause 2 on the Summer Steam sale for a grand total of $4.99 (plus $0.66 for a DLC weapon).  The game is an extremely fun mix of Grand Theft Auto and Batman.  The game is set in an open world sandbox where the player can do pretty much anything they want.  On top of this, the player is equipped with a Batman-like grappling hook that expands the game play past the traditional Grand Theft Auto car jacking and hooker killing. Also the games narrative pits the protagonist, Rico, against the local island government giving him plenty of opportunities to cause CHAOS (as the game calls it).

Also, it's a beautiful game when it wants to be:

I've enjoyed my stint so far with the game and I've definitely gotten my five dollars worth.  However, there is a glaring  hole in the game play that kills the game: the lack of ammunition.  To make this even more infuriating, the DLC weapon packs (which you pay real money for) require the player to then buy the weapon from the in-game black market, but the game does not provide any ammunition from within the game world with which to refill these weapons.  So the player is stuck always having to waste all their in-game money on restocking weapons from the black market meaning they miss out on all the other neat toys that could be purchased.

The DLC weapons are clearly the worst offenders and a black-eye for DLC everywhere, but the regular weapons are always short on ammo as well.  The only way to get ammo is to kill enemies and rarely is there an enemy around with the weapon type the player is needing ammo for, resulting in the player constantly having to juggle weapon swaps.  Its an obvious game design blunder that should have been fixed by adding ammo drops from the black market.  If the black market helicopter can air drop me everything from a fucking motorcycle to a private jet, it sure as hell could drop me an ammo crate.

But this is why cheats exist and I can continue happily along my way now with unlimited ammo.

Fixed: Just Cause 2 crashes on Steam

Like many gamers, I bought a copy of Just Cause 2 during the Steam Summer Sale and if the forums are any indications, I was not alone with Just Cause 2 crashing repeatedly.  Specifically it would crash on fullscreen settings.

The immediate fix was to open Steam's game library and right click on Just Cause 2 and then select Set Launch Options and enter /failsafe.  This forces the game to launch in windowed mode.  The game ran just fine for me in windowed mode.

However, I was not satisfied that I couldn't play this game in fullscreen so I did the normal checks to see what may be causing the issue.  First I verified the game files on Steam and the check completed without error. Next, I made sure it wasn't Steam community causing the issue and with the community overlay disabled, it still crashed.

The final step I took was to upgrade my nVidia drivers.  I opted to not only upgrade my drivers, but also to do a clean install of the driver in the process (which is available with the nVidia installer now).  This cleared out all old profiles and other settings.

After the upgrade and a couple PC reboots, Just Cause 2 started and ran just fine in fullscreen.  I hope this post helps anyone else having this issue.