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After spending many hours re-crisscrossing Liberty City to wring many single-player Trophies out of Grand Theft Auto IV you would think I'd get tired of open-world sandbox, third-person action games. Not so. Seeing Mercenaries 2 fall to a bargain used game price of 20 bucks (it's now $20 new) was enough for me to pick that game up and go hunting for Trophies in its rough Venezuelan countryside. I'm about 80 percent complete according to my saved game, and while I think the critics were generally right about how glitchy the engine is I feel pity for the folks who spent what is clearly so much time getting the many, many vehicle models to look just right. They really are nice.

Who don't I pity? The guys who made the AI. It must have been really tough, but at the same time they dropped the ball pretty badly on all but slow-moving vehicles and turrets. Tanks are a true menace in the hands of the enemy, and even attack helicopters can bring a nearly flawless mission to a quick end if you're not careful. A recoilless rifle manned by the AI quickly proves the design decision to eject you unharmed like a rag-doll from an exploding vehicle was a good one. It would be no fun to drive all across the map, get nailed by a single shot, and die in your vehicle.

The AI though is dumb as a doornail when it comes to environmental hazards and thinking of its fellow man.

Friendlies will run off treetop sniper nests after enemies, plummeting to their deaths. They'll sometimes run into the water and die on the spot, unable to swim (unlike you). Jeeps will race right past you into a river, killing the passengers and detonating the car. They'll fire rocket propelled grenades at you when you're standing by one of their friends in a jeep, their own fuel tanks, even one of their own buildings. And since everything can be blown up in this game, often specactularly so and with accompanying splash damage, it can turn a quick attempt at a surgical strike to capture a High Value Target into a bloodbath. HVT's are worth half as much dead, but I've become so frustrated with the enemy accidentally killing their own officer before I can carve my way into their base that a little while back I started accepting it and just verifying them by snapping a photo of their limp bodies and fleeing the scene as reinforcements rumbled into range.

That said there was one time where, surrounded by slow-moving, heavily armored, machine-gun-toting anti-air vehicles I raced back into a bunker area where I'd successfully subdued an HVT. I was out of rockets, short on grenades and C4, couldn't call in any air strikes, and it was time for me to go. It had taken six attempts to get to this guy. I plugged him, snapped his photo, and ran like Forrest Gump -- Forrest Gump with large tattoos and a mohawk.

Accepting these dead HVTs turns out to have been a mistake. There's a gold Trophy for capturing all of your HVTs, and only a silver if you just verify them -- something I didn't know until after I'd overwritten my oldest saved game with my current play through.

Still, I don't know how many more times I would have put up with driving or flying clear across the map and, ten minutes into the mission in a hairy firefight seeing some dope empty a clip into the giant fuel tanks next to their commanding officer. There they would stand and shoot with their sidearm or rifle when they should really be giving a Wile E. Coyote wave before getting blown to kingdom come.

Update: After capping the final HVT last night I was awarded...nothing. Why not? It looks like you have to kill every HVT or capture every HVT. You can't do some captures and some kills! This is really annoying. Unless, and I haven't tried this, the final battle needs to be re-run and qualifies as part of the kill-them-all Trophy?

Update 2: They key thing is to do all of the Allied HVT's then bribe China to let you do *their* HVTs. Once that's done, finish the game to go after Solano and then you get awarded the Justice For All trophy. This is a relief. But once again, during another playthrough I just tried 3 times to capture an HVT who was killed 3 totally different ways by the AI before I could get to him. *Sigh* It's going to be a long replay.