Game Stats

• Released: March 2010.
• Developers: Avalanche Studios & Eidos Interactive.
• Publisher: Square Enix.
• Genre: Action, Third Person Shooter.
• Platforms: Windows(Vista, 7), Xbox 360, PlayStation 3.
• Multiplayer: No.
• Modding: Some but not officially supported.
• Average Rating: 8.5 of 10.

The Story

You play the game as the main character who is called ‘Scorpion’, his real name being Rico Rodriguez. Your initial goal is to find a rogue agent on the island that has apparently been assisting the island’s evil dictator Pandak Panay.

You soon find out however that the rogue agent (Tom Sheldon) is actually on your side and something more sinister is going on.

This is as far as I have got with the story as of yet, and to be honest it is not a very interesting story. If you’re looking for a game with a deep story you certainly won’t find it in Just Cause 2.

The Gameplay

The game takes place on the fictional island on Panau which is extremely large, even with the fastest plane it takes a good 5-10 minutes to go from one side to the other.

The island also has a wide variety of lush environments, such as urban cities, deserts, jungles, forests, towns, lakes, rivers, mountains, snow and ice.

Just Cause 2 has some of the best graphics I have ever seen in a game yet at the same time maintains surprisingly low system requirements.

The character has a very handy grappling hook which can be used to hook onto pretty much everything, you also have a reusable parachute which can be combined with the hook and used as a means of transportation, this opens a wide variety of combat strategies to you, for example you can parachute into a enemy base or use your hook to climb over the walls.

There is a decent variety of weapons in the game, ranging from a pistol to a rocket launcher, you also have grenades and remote bombs which brings me to a small issue, grenades are woefully underpowered you have to throw the grenade quite close to your target in order to kill them.

You progress through the game by completing faction missions and the storyline missions which gain you ‘Chaos’.

Chaos points are awarded whenever you destroy something, new missions, weapons and vehicles are unlocked as you accumulate chaos.

There are also a number of collectable items scattered around Panau, weapon and vehicle parts which are used to upgrade weapons and vehicles. Armor parts that increase your health for every five you collect and money stashes.

There are also collectable objects for each faction with give you a little chaos boost.

Overall

Ignoring the poor storyline Just Cause 2 is an excellent game, perfect for them times when you have nothing else to play.

The environments are extremely beautiful and quite detailed so you can pretty much ignore all the missions and have fun flying around and exploring the island.

The missions once you get down to doing them a pretty decent, certainly nothing amazing but worth doing. Another thing I should point out that annoys some people is the terrible voice acting in the game.

I would certainly recommend you get Just Cause 2, there is a great demo on steam which gives a pretty good preview of the game.

Overall I would rate this game 8 out of 10.

Videos

Installing

First open the terminal and type the following:

cd ~

wget -t5 http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/qucs/qucs/0.0.15/qucs-0.0.15.tar.gz?use_mirror=kent

This will download the latest version of Qucs, once that is done you will need to extract it:

tar -xvzf qucs-0.0.15.tar.gz

If you want to delete the Qucs source archive you can do so by using this, if not skip this next command.

rm qucs-0.0.15.tar.gz

Now you need to move the folder to where you want to compile it, if you don’t mind it being in your home folder skip this:

sudo mv qucs-0.0.15 /usr/src

cd /usr/src/qucs-0.0.15

Next move into the folder and download the dependencies required to compile Qucs:

cd qucs-0.0.15

sudo apt-get install libqt3-headers

Finally you can compile Qucs:

./configure

make

sudo make install

Once this is done (hopefully without any errors) you can run Qucs simply by typing:

qucs

That’s all, although I’d suggest adding a shortcut to your menu.

Anyways, enough of this, time to get to work.

Install requirements

GNU C++ Compiler (g++)
libSDL runtime & development files
NASM (Assembler)
GTK+ 2.0 runtime & development files
libVorbis development files
—
Subversion (SVN) – to download the latest EDuke32 source
Timidity – software MIDI player

First check you have the build tools installed by running

gcc –version

You should be given the version, if you get something like ‘command not found’ you will need to install the build tools.
If the version is below 4.0 you should upgrade your build tools to version 4.3 or greater.

If you using Ubuntu you can use the following command to install the build tools.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

If you not using Ubuntu you should search your distributions package manager for the build tools.

All the required development files can be installed on Ubuntu using the following, again check your package manager if you are using a different distribution.

sudo apt-get install subversion timidity libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev nasm libgtk2.0-dev libvorbis-dev

Getting EDuke32

Now you need to get the latest version of EDuke32.

cd ~
svn co https://eduke32.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/eduke32 eduke32

I assume your going to build in your home directory, if not I suggest you use /usr/src

Building EDuke32

Once EDuke32 is downloaded you can build it.

cd eduke32/polymer/eduke32
make

If the build completes without errors you should find two executables in your current directory.
Next you need to make the directory where you will place EDuke32 and Duke Nukem 3D.

mkdir ~/duke3d
mv eduke32 ~/duke3d
mv mapster32 ~/duke3d
cd ~/duke3d

Using EDuke32

Alternatively you may install EDuke32 globally, (I.E in /usr/bin) for information on doing this read the EDuke32 wiki.
Now simply get your version of Duke Nukem 3D and look for the file called DUKE3D.GRP. Move this file to where the EDuke32 executable is located. (I.E ~/duke3d)
Once that is done simply run EDuke32 with:

./eduke32

Important Note: ensure that the DUKE3D.GRP file is LOWER CASE, such as duke3d.grp or EDuke32 will not be able to read it, hopefully this will be fixed in future.

Update
There are APT repositories for Debian and Ubuntu for easy installation.

http://wiki.eduke32.com/wiki/APT_repository

This process is much more involved than normal as newer versions of WINE have broken MP3 playback support, so you will need to recompile WINE.

Cleaning up

First you will need to remove any old versions of WINE and libmpg123, how you go about doing this depends on what package management tool you use, I will be giving the below instruction specifically for Ubuntu Linux 9.04, but may also work on other Debian based distributions.

• Open the terminal
• Type ‘sudo apt-get remove wine mpg123 libmpg123-0 libmpg123-dev’

Getting the needed stuff

You will be needing quite a bit of stuff before you can begin compiling, first you need the latest WINE source and libmpg123.

• Get WINE from here
• Get the latest version of libmpg123 from here

Also get the needed compiler tools, this is ‘build-essential’ on Ubuntu. There may be other packages you will need but you will find out what they are when you get to configuring WINE.

Compiling and installing libmpg123

This step should be pretty simple to manage and it should not require anything besides the compile tools.

• Extract the source of mpg123 you downloaded and stick it in a folder
• ‘cd’ to that folder and type ./configure –enable-static –prefix=’/usr/’
• If configure went well type the following
• ‘make’
• ‘sudo make install’

libmpg123 should now be installed.

Compiling and installing WINE

• Extract WINE into a folder and cd to it.
• run ./configure –with-mpg123 –prefix=’/usr/’
• Configure will warn you about any missing libraries, you should install these using your systems package manager unless you do not need the features they provide.
• If your happy type ‘make depend’ then ‘make’
• Wait for WINE to compile, this will take about half an hour on a average system
• Once the compile is complete type ‘sudo make install’
• Now test out wine !

Installing Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodmoon

• Insert the disk or mount the disk image for Morrowind
• Go to the disk directory and type ‘wine Setup.exe’
• Install Morrowind
• Repeat this same process for Tribunal then Bloodmoon, do not do in any other order.
• Get the latest Bloodmoon patch here
• Mount the Morrowind image or disk and play