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D.B. Cooper: not his real name. Not even his real fake name, which was Dan Cooper up until the point that the news media mangled it. Cooper's claim to fame - and it is not inconsiderable - is that in 1971 he boarded a commercial jet bound for Seattle, told the cabin crew he had a bomb in his briefcase, and successfully extorted $200,000 from the airline. That's over a million in today's money. Landing at Seattle he collected the cash and four parachutes he had asked for, let the passengers go, and asked the pilots to spin the engines up again and point the plane back the way it came. Half an hour later, he jumped out and has never being heard from since.What does this have to do with Just Cause 2? Quite a lot, I think, and not just because Avalanche's game is a derring-do affair where skyjacking is a fairly common occurrence. What makes D.B. Cooper's case so interesting - and so relevant - is that he clearly had both savoir faire and a certain degree of expertise. Savoir faire to make the whole grotty business of ransoming seem upbeat and rather dreamy. Expertise that extended to cover the selection of the correct aircraft to skyjack - the Boeing 727, it happens, is an ideal jetliner to jump out of for several dull reasons - but that also ended, rather abruptly, at the question of how to pull off an actual skydive. You'd think that this would be the part of the deal you really wanted to get right. Given four parachutes, Cooper selected an inferior model as his primary chute, and then chose a reserve chute that was clearly sewn shut and would never open. He also parachuted into total darkness and driving rain and fierce winds wearing a flimsy mac and slip-ons, leaping towards the unknown and - presumably - an annoying kind of death stuck at the tippy-top of a fir tree.
There's the connection. Just Cause 2 demands that you approach its madness with a degree of calculation, but also a certain ability to ad-lib. It requires a willingness to be surprised as well as merely delighted. It wants you to be a killer, yet it acknowledges that you will simultaneously be a klutz, Most importantly, although D.B. Cooper is a crook who endangered many lives, it's hard not to find yourself rooting for him. He was polite - he even overpaid for his on-board drinks - and cut a dashing figure right down to his flapping trenchcoat and twinkling tie pin. Just Cause 2's hero, on the other hand, is a hero who often feels like a crook. And that gets to the very heart of this particular game's greatness.
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