f13.net

Anyone else getting this? IGN gave it a 9.9. I haven't checked other sites yet but I'm expecting good scores because, well, frankly, it's Bioware.

My wallet says I've had it on reserve since 9/14/2004, so I'll go with a resounding "Yes."

It is BioWare. They can do no wrong, even if I didn't like NWN.

The guys at my local EB said they played a demo of it and that it blew chunks. That said, I've good reason to believe it's awesome because some of the guys at my local EB wouldn't know fun if it hit them in the face in the form of bricks. Buying the limited edition myself.

Deffinatly getting it, haven't seen anything of/about the game since their last year E3 trailer I think, but that was enough to convince me that I must have this game.

And like Strazos said, it's Bioware. Sure NWN was dissapointing and I never did go back to it once it supposedly had enough mods etc. to make it a good game, but Baldur's Gate and Kotor fucking owned.

Too bad Jade Empire is another X-box abortion. Lets hope they do better job porting it to PC than KoTOR2.

How is Jade Empire an Xbox abortion?

Edit: Oh, and I just went and looked at IGN. As much as I like Bioware, and I'm sure it wasn't their doing - the only way you can get a member of their staff to write a SIX page review is with cashmoneys. They've no reason to spend that much time pimping a game and that's....lame. That said, I don't doubt that Jade Empire is indeed awesome.

It's probably their publisher, who is, if I'm not mistaken, now Vivendi via Atari.

Yeah, they have the cashmoneys.

It's probably a good game, but the TV commercials look terrible.

God yes, I still haven't figured out what's up with that.

Hmm...I'm cashed out. I wonder if it's roughly the same length as KoToR. Could just rent and beat it then.

IGN said 22 hours. So I suppose it's probably 15-18 hours.

I have a demo disk I got with my Xbox mag. I'll give it a play in the next day or two and let you know what I think. (Yes, feel free to throw rotten fruit at me for having an XBOX mag sub. What can I say? I like the demo disks and I need bathroom reading that won't get me in trouble with my daughter.)

I had my order in with EB for the Limited Edition yesterday.  Also, Still Life comes out on Thursday (for the X-Box as well; PC players will have to wait another month.)

Bruce

The demo is not the best way to judge the final game, as it was done immediately before a major combat polish and balance pass.

Good to know.  Going to EB tonight to make sure I get my preorder in.

I was in a Gamestop the other night, and a friend of mine asked the guys working what Jade Empire was going to be like. They were having trouble finding their words, so I threw in "The Baby Jesus" as a descriptor....they lost it for about the next 5 minutes.

TEH WINNAR IS ME!

It's been repeatedly stated that they aren't going to port it to PC.  It's an X-Box exclusive.

They are working on a different engine/system(no more d20) and setting for doing more RPGs on the PC.

Alkiera

This is the game that'll probably get me to finally buy an Xbox. Every other Xbox-exclusive game I've been tempted to buy has ended up on the PC (Halo, KotOR, Riddick) except for Ninja Gaiden and that's the kind of game that might frustrate me and make me stop playing after only a few hours.

Edit: I preordered it, cause, well the whole exclusive preorder Limited Edition character/style thingy kind of sucks (frickin marketing people). I'm not going to open it until I see if Fry's a) gets in LE copies even though they are supposed to be preorder only and b) has their usual $10 off sale on the big new release titles.

Ok. Well I played the demo.

Good graphics. Cool lucking cutscenes. (Yes it had a couple of cutscenes in the demo.) The fighting was interesting and pretty fast paced. Definitely an action RPG which I like. I spent alot of time using my characters flip like Yoda and land behind the opponent technique. Mostly cause it was fun and I was fighting a big giant ogre thing.

Coming from someone who works for EB: I agree. I had another manager come in and tell me it sucked. And that Bioware should of went with the awesome combat system they CREATED for KotOR. Somehow, after the created part, I just stopped listening to what he had to say. With that said, I have pre-ordered it recently as I've made the decision to ditch my PSP in favor of loving my XBOX.

Too bad its an X-Box exclusive. Was looking forward to playing it.

For purely selfish reasons I hope the EB people are right and it sucks. But I doubt it.

And no, I won't buy a third nonupgradeable gimped PC for one game. Thats kinda insane, and just encourages them. Technically there is no reason for X-Box exclusives. Its all in the bribes exclusivity right payments from Microsoft.

Yea, I know. Who would want to play Ninja Gaiden, Phantom Dust or the best of the crossplatform games? It's positively insane.

I wouldn't. I don't care for Ninja Gaiden or Phantom Dust one way or the other. Not my type of game.

But that gets off-topic here. This thread is supposed to be about Jade Empire, neither about people being played by Microsoft, nor about Ninja Gaiden.

Well, Bioware has a good, solid rep. But then again it wasn't so long ago that Peter Molyneaux could do no wrong. After this http://xbox.ign.com/articles/542/542632p1.html managed to sell me the piece of shit that was Fable (greatest RPG EVAR!  :roll:  on pre-order) I wouldn't be so quick to follow the IGN review and (totally) ignore the EB salesdroids..

Yeah, cause, you know, it's not like any of the other systems have exclusives. PCs don't get exclusives, but that's because there's no market reason for it currently. (Unless Microsoft decided PC gaming was competing against consoles. "Exclusive to Windows" might then be a reality. )

Yeah, man, tell me about all those hours I blew playing WoW on my X-Box.

Steel Batallion. If you're a mech fan and don't own an Xbox, you possitivly suck.

Well, I can tell you about all the hours people spend playing it on their Mac. Smart ass. Seriously, when was the last time you saw "PC Exclusive" as part of the advertising or labelling on a PC game? You haven't. In a generation or two, you might see it start happening if consoles continue to compete with PCs.

The game might literally be exclusive to a PC, but it's not something that is touted liike an "XBOX exlusive" or a "PS2 exclusive".

The PC market is different.

A Mac is a PC.

But whatever.  Exclusivity is what it is, artificial exclusivity is just a marketing gimick.

Fable sucks. I said it from day one. To EVERY customer. Blow me.

Fable didn't suck. I preferred what it was trying to do than Windwaker. And at the very least, I liked gallavanting around boasting and marrying women.

But they both sucked comared to most of the other shit on the market at the time. Neh.

I liked Fable. If it's at least as fun as that, I'd buy it and play it.

As for console exclusivity, it moves hardware. Chances are when you buy a console, even if it's only for one exclusive game, you WILL buy at least one or two more. I see no problem with console exclusivity, it's good business when you are talking about competiting entertainment standards. I mean, we all need at least one Betamax system out of each console hardware cycle. You know, like the Game Cube.

What did you do? Go to the SirBruce school of arguing by picking on semantics and pretending you don't know what common terms people are using.

When people use the word PC they mean an IBM compatible machine that probably uses Windows. You know it. Stop being a dumb fuck.

When people mention exclusive, they mean the marketing gimmick, not whether or not it is a literal exclusive. Again. Stop being a dumb fuck.

I guess the mods are just broken people.  I too enjoyed Fable.

I really wish this wasn't coming out right now as I'll have to wait until at least May before buying it.  Spending $400 bucks on a PSP + stuff to go with it (well, it was an anniversary gift, but that money all comes from the same bucket) kinda smashes my gaming budget for this month.  I think my wife would flay me if I came home with an Xbox game the week after also. 

GRRRRRRRR.  Been looking this title for a LONG time.

Edit: settle down, kids.  Yeesh.

Nope I put up with a lot of dipshittedness on these boards but the OS confusion thing isn't one I tolerate.  Historically I point it out whenever it makes sense to.

And exclusivity is still exclusitivity.  WoW and about 1000 other games are exclusive to the PC and no amout of crying about how "Thats not OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED exclusivity!!!^^%!" isn't going to suddenly make them not-exclusive to the PC.

Someone doesn't have to tell me something is exclusive for it actually to be fucking exclusive.

Let me use simple words.  If a game exists on the PC and only on the PC then it is exclusive to the PC.  Because there are many, many excellent games that are exclusive to the PC I, and many others like me, prefer to use a PC as our game platform of choice.

"Har-dee-har-har, we didn't say it was exclusive in 20 point red font on the cover of the box so that doesn't count!" ?

What are you smoking?  And why don't you share?

But doesn't Linux throw a wrench in that "fact" while we are nitpicking the hell out of things?

If you run Linux instead of windows you can play even less games then Mac users or at least last time I checked thats how it was.  Its a shame too because 2-3 years ago Xwindows was well designed to the point where any joeblow could get a good OS, not deal w/ M$'s bullshit monopoly and operate their computer with little to no inteligent thought required.

Holy shit wtf are you guys blabbering about?

PCs do get exclusive titles, but they are rarely called exclusive, because the vast majority of PC titles are exclusive. The understanding is that a PC game is exclusive unless specifically stated otherwise. (Although that is changing)

It used to be that consoles and PCs all had lineups that were nearly all exclusive. You certainly didn't see a lot of NES/Sega Master System crossover.

PCs will always have more exclusive games because making console games requires more specialized knowledge, licensing fees, specialized development environments, etc. The barrier to entry is much higher in a variety of ways. I do think that A-list PC titles will be exclusive less and less in the future.

Anyway, about Fable, it sucked, and will continue to suck in slightly-improved form. All hype and no substance.

Is this true?

If so, that's too damned bad. I cut myself off from buying any more xbox games after Fable. The PC is the only gaming platform worth my gaming dollars, though I guess a new xbox game would be an excuse to pull my old tv (and xbox) out of storage so I can play with lo-res aliased graphics on a 480i screen with a 5 year old gimped pc. Oh wait, that's why it's in storage.

Hey, why not aim lower and make it PS2-exclusive next time? Or N64, since we're going for crappy hardware that's years out of date?

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream.
Think I'll get me some of that LCD revenue stream.

Don't you need to go dress up for another SCA meeting?

No. (http://www.winehq.com/)


That's still true.  Lots of people like me have silently converted their spouses to using Linux without much fanfair.

But anyway, PC/Mac titles by their very nature tended to all be exclusive titles.  Consoles simply weren't as powerful as your average gaming PC until a few years ago, and no game developer would take a game and port it to a platform that was graphically and aurally inferior.  Current generation consoles have changed that, but the businessmen are still catching up.

If playing PC exclusively and not even owning a console makes you ren faire material, I guess I'm the one wearing the poofy pants today. ¬_¬

Eh, that's okay. I like a woman in a bodice.

Hey, Stormwaltz. I'd put a bet on you having easy access to as many Xboxes as you want. I don't think you quite qualify for the camp being pointed out here. Aside from that, it was just a silly jab at Sky. But you probably already knew that.

Edit: I have no clue why I started this with "Hey Stormwaltz" instead of just quoting you.

Yes, it's true. And me thinks you need to get an HDTV to go with your phatty projector.  :-D

Murgos thought he was going to score points by turning a gaming thread into a SirBruce style argument about semantics which made no sense because everybody but him knew exactly what was meant by the words PC and exclusive when used in a thread about a console game. I argued because needless bullshit like that pisses me off and makes me want to remove people from the gene pool. In other words, he pushed a button by being some kind of anal retentive freak who thought he was making a point.

Yes, PCs get exclusive titles. But it is not a word commonly used with PC games because most people assume that for the most part a PC game will be exclusive. (Though not as much anymore.)

Can I go to court for permission to remove his feeding tube? Please?

Hey, don't you dare compare SCA folks to ren faire folks, two completely different groups of people.  One of which is silly enough to think strapping a pair of football pads on and beat the snot out of each other with wooden sticks gives them the right to call themselves medival recreationists, and the other thinks overdone shows with pop culture anachronisms is somehow okay in the theme of historical recreation!  Er...okay, so they have a lot in common, but still! :P

As for Jade Empire, I've gotten a lot of play on it via E3, and it's enough to at least make me want to get the game and play through it.  I've been wanting a fighting game RPG every since Mortal Kombat decided to make one and it wasn't an RPG at all, but just a thin story connecting different fights...Bioware has a great track record of creating games with, at the very least, good stories (or the possibility of creating your own, the official campaign for NWN blew chunks).

So, uh, if SCA takes itself seriously...and I mean this in the kindest way, how far is it removed from LARPing? Because frankly, I'd never heard about it until about a week ago. All I know is that there's a group of people who meet at a local old monestary type church, throw on some medieval shit, and reenact stuff. We called them the Sunday Warrior Larpers. Well, a friend and I did.

They're coming for me. (http://www.atenveldt.com/Default.aspx?tabid=34) I must hide.

If you're a member of the pessimism chapter, they even try to bring back the symptoms of the plague, and scurvy.

Look douche:


And you're the one trying to use semantics as an argument:

What else do you call trying to draw an imaginary line between a Mac and a Windows PC?  It's a bullshit semantic argument that I fucking busted you on, get over it.

Here is simple proof, answer this question, "Is a Mac a Console?"  If not then WHAT THE FUCK IS IT?

A designer statue masquerading as a computer worth using? Really though, why are you people having a Mac vs. PC debate? Take it to slashdot.

And now to bring it back on track.

Gamespot gave Jade Empire an 8.4 (http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/rpg/jadeempire/review.html?q=1). Juiciest quote: "Combat in Jade Empire is fast-paced and fairly fun, but it's actually the game's weak point." That depresses the hell out of me.

I wonder how much IGN charges for those fatty reviews.

Oh wait, I forgot, sluts do it for free.

Edit: After reading the review, it would seem that it's a Fable style letdown. I find that oddly ironic, but don't care much, since I enjoyed Fable.

Whine more bitch? If the game is good suck it up and play it, or don't. I usually keep my PS2 in storage but I don't shit my pants in anger when something good comes out for it.

My final post to Murgos. Shut the fuck up. Quit trying to butcher my posts with half quotes. People here can read. We all know EXACTLY what the fuck is going on, so just stop it.You're not proving a point.

 A Mac is a god damn MAC. Is it a personal computer? Yes. Does PC stand for personal computer? Yes. Do normal fucking people, when they say PC mean IBM compatible that is probably running on Windows? YES. Do normal fucking people know that when you say PC you fucking mean that? YES. Do anal retentive fucktards just fucking pretend that they don't know that people say PC to mean IBM compatible? Apparently Yes.

I can walk into any god damn place that has anybody that does something involving computers and talk about a PC. Every fucking person in that room knows I am referring to an IBM compatible. So just shut it asshole. I can also say the word coke and people know I mean soda pop. I can say kleenex and people know I mean facial tissue. It's similiar, and just to head you off at the path, no, PC is not a brand name, but the examples are also cases of language getting changed over time.

As for the whole exclusive dumb fucking "debate." Again, when you're talking console games, exclusive is referring to the marketing term. We were. So just stop trying to act like you're intelligent and deal with the reality of the god damn discussion. If you can't,feel free to leave the thread.

......now, why'd you post that? Entirely unnecessary.

Because he's going the Sir Bruce route in a gaming discussion and it is pissing me off. Every person in the thread knows he is debating something which doesn't need to be debated because he has a board up his ass.

My guess is he is just hoping to be personally responsible for a thread going to the Den. In any case, I'm done.

Screw online reviews. I enjoyed Fable. Sure, it wasn't the Fourth Coming of the Robotic Messiah, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the game. Me wanty Jade Empire.


Mmmhmm, I sure do like me some women in bodices and garters. Best. Look. Evar.

Sadly my biggest problem with Fable was the loading screens. It felt like I'd take 2 steps and have a loading screen.

Ahh, yes, the infamous Fable "hallway" level.

Bruce

Yeah, I was just funnin' with you. Maybe this was the wrong thread to do that in. ^_^;

Heh, is that a damn happy face giving a thumbs up?

Heh.

I think that's the asian/otaku/anime smile with one of those sweat drops.

(http://www.animefu.com/images/love_hina_1.jpg)

Correction - 1 step. Fable wasn't THAT bad, but I'd never try to convince someone it was what it was being boasted as. Also, I'm really looking forward to the PC port. I'm hoping that's all it needs to make it better. I'm also hoping Jade is really freaking good. I can't justify my XBOX right now, it's really sad.

Buy Phantom Dust. For $19.99 you have no excuse.

For those of you wondering, the demo disc that comes with the LTD Ed. of Jade Empire is total crap:


A lot more reviews have poured into Gamerankings, and one stands out, heavily:


Why?

You're obsessing.

Bruce

Riggs: NO clue why you are ragging on him about all this, but he's right, and you are wrong. In the context of this discussion, a PC is a Personal Computer, and a Console is Not a Personal Computer.

All the foul language, personal insults, and comparison to others doesn't change that fact. Sorry, but just because you seem to think that a "PC" requires people to fall into your thinking that they mean an IBM Windows machine doesn't mean that everyone else does.

When I go into stores and I say I want a particular game for the PC, they send me to the section that includes boxes for Windows/Mac/*nix (if the store is big enough to serve those markets as well), not the section that has Console games. Often, they even ask if I mean Mac or Windows...but they certainly understand that when I say PC I mean "not console", not that I mean "IBM Windows Machines".

Really, the whole digression into PC-not-a-PC is moot because the point that many thousands of games are exclusive to the PC market still stands even if WoW wasn't a very good example of specific to Windows (which wasn't what I was talking about AT ALL, talk about getting stuck on semantics).

The whole coversation was about why you should/would want to buy an X-Box just for a few 'X-Box exclusives' such as Ninja Gaiden, or whatever other fag title Schild had brought up, or any other particular console because of 'marketing exclusives'.  In light of that I thought it was a compelling argument that PC exclusives far outweigh console exclusives (even if they don't call them that) so that a PC is really a very good choice for sole gaming platform, particularly due to exclusivity rather than inspite of it.  Riggs apparently feels very strongly that marketing exclusivity as a compelling reason for purchase of multiple console platforms is a worthwhile expenditure, good for him, I still think he is a psycho and sorely lacking in reading comprehension, memory acuity and has a severe case of 'fear of contradiction'.

Ok, i probably shouldn't derail any more, but i feel i must step up to defend my bretheren: i'm not sure how it is in the US, but here in Aus the SCA definitely does not suck. Having started fencing with them about a month ago i can honestly say that those guys know exactly what they are doing when it comes to both rapier work (they teach the Italian school here), as well as the heavy styles.

Someone mentioned people putting on football pads and going at it with sticks? Every thursday night i am witness to grown men in full plate-mail beating the bejesus out of each other with almost near replica broadswords, spears, maces, etc... It's not for the faint of heart.

Oh yea, and xbox exclusives suck TT (since we are in weird asian emoticon mode)

 - meg

Ah no, the original topic was who was going to get Jade Empire until it got derailed by Tebonas who was presumably commenting on my post about buying an Xbox to play Jade Empire.

He has said no such thing in this thread. The closest anybody has come to supporting "exclusive" arrangements is Haemish.

I'll add a bit too - I was in the local SCA during highschool for a couple years. They had a pike squad (Got to wear a kilt). So we were at a local mall once for some event. And I ran into a couple girls from one of my classes. I was mortified. But the whole - whats under the kilt thing worked in my favor and I ended up going out with one of them for a while.  So geekout for the win.

Edited to add: The funniest part was to stand as still as possible. People would come up and look at you - thinking you were a statue. Then to move and watch them jump.

Also - my predition - Jade Empire will make you think.. "I think I played this before, only it was more fun when it was called KOTOR."

When I was briefly associated with the SCA during college, I was turned off to it by two main issues:

1. Organizational politics -- I swear, you give anyone a little decision-making power and everything becomes lies, drama, and backstabbing.

2. Crazy people -- You know, there are always a couple of foks who take the whole thing WAY too seriously, and put the 'fanatic' back in 'fan'.  Some of the SCAers think they are really Sir Lancelot.

I've since learned that the above two traits occur with about the same regularity in all different types fandom organizations, so perhaps I was judging the SCA a bit too harshly.

Bruce

PS - As for Jade Empire, I'm looking forward to it because I really do need another game to give me an excuse for owning an X-Box.  You know, exclusive titles are really the ONLY reason for owning one particular piece of hardware over another.  If all software ran the same on every platform, we'd probably all be using the same platform.  Yes, I would prefer all these titles come out on the PC, but they aren't.  What bothers me more are the titles like Fable, KOTOR, Still Life, etc. which come out FIRST on the X-Box, and then on the PC, because that puts me in a position of trying to decide if I really want to wait that long for the PC version.  At least with Fable's case (as with KOTOR), it'll have new content, which is great -- but which also sucks, because then I'm annoyed I bought the X-Box version in the first place.

Bruce

The PC Debate in this thread stops here. Got that?

Good.

You've got it backwards, I already have a "phatty" hdtv (http://www.dlp.com/home_entertainment/home_entertainment_product_detail.asp?ID=792) :)
Actually, I've declined membership after thought. I can't see going to meetings and events when I'm not spending enough time (imo) on the guitar and playing shows. Also, armor = teh expensive and I = teh budgeter. Mortgage downpayments are unfair to some and whatnot (and honestly, I'm saving to buy land outright and skip the horrid mortgage costs entirely, which makes me 'teh broek').

As Megrim points out, it's a great way to get into traditional melee combat with some very talented instructors. I still plan to get into this after I'm landed gentry, with an eye to working rapier/dagger (I hate shields). Had to back out because it's /too much/ fun for me right now.
I do. Or rather, don't. Excuse me for discussing my opinion on a game in a forum about gaming, bitch.

OK

I always figured that Consoles existed for the morons who don't realize at this point they are definitely just shitty computers you can't upgrade.  You know the people who will play the latest madden, tony hawk, soul caliber, nba street whatever but are TOO COOL to play games on a computer.

*shrug*

Christ.

Consoles are standardized.

PCs are not. This conversation is positively ludicrous. You all know it's happened a million times across the internet on millions of message boards. Why are we having it here?

Wait, don't answer that. Just talk about Jade Empire.

Because at heart we're still just a dog responding to a bell telling us it's time to eat. 

Stop it, it's the same people doing this every time to these threads.  The thread's about a game, not about how the XBox fucked your wife and ran off with her to Cancun.

I will also chime in and say stop being fucktards about PC vs. Console vs. Other console debate.

Consoles exist because some people want to play games WITHOUT FUCKING WITH CONFIGURATIONS. Some people just like plug-n-play gaming. I am one of them. PC games all too often get hung up on this elitist hobbyist thing that says that a game can't be good unless you can customize it seven ways to Sunday, tweak it for .003 extra FPS, and have 16,000,000 levels of anti-aliasing.

That's great. IF YOU LIKE THAT. I do, sometimes, and sometimes I just want to sit on the fucking couch and play a game without learning how it was programmed. I pay the "premium" for that by buying non-upgradeable hardware. Exclusives are the reason I pick one console over the other, INCLUDING PC's and MAC's and LINUX, or whatever the fuck else distinction you want to make.

Come on people, this isn't raging douchebag week. Stop it.

Don't you DARE hate on my Soul Calibur goodness, For Shame!


Sigged like a mofo, yo.

Stupid shit aside, have any of you bought it and played it yet today.  That's all I really care about.

When does this glorious holiday begin?

I meant it when I said my one post to him was the last post. Not dealing with it because it's not worth it.

As for having played it today, on my way to get it in about 30 minutes. If it's good you probably won't here from me for another 3 or 4 hours. Heh.

I thought the official "in store" date was April 14th.

Today in some stores. Tomorrow in others. Thursday in crap stores.

Tonight at 6:30 in my local EB. So I'll have to wait a little longer it seems.

Just to make myself clear (given the tenor of the rabid flaming that's been going on by other folks)...I did not mean to imply that ALL SCA-ers are the football pad wearing freakazoids.  However, like all hobbies/activities, the people that take part in it are often judged by their lowest common denominator.  Just like there are certaintly cool people in the audio/visual club in high school...the stigma is of the broken spectacle wearing geek.

So to is it with the SCA.  Coming from someone that has not only attended both Estrella and Pensic, has in fact fought in both wars wearing said full armor, I feel qualified to speak of the moronic freaks whos hormones went the wrong way and they decided to wear football pads and beat the snot out of each other with ratan weapons. Again, I have not only seen, but have fought along side the very well organized, and historically accurate units that fight at the wars as well.

I was mostly drawing a comedic parallel with no intent to actually offend.  If I did so, I apologize. :)  Being that I am both a former SCA fighter AND a rennie, I don't really have a leg to stand on to insult folks of either type. :)

Hahaha it's allright man, we are not made of glass. I take it by your post count that you'v not been here too long? If that is the case you'll quickly find that such threads are the norm here. As a matter of fact, most of us feel hollow if we don't wake up in the morning and read up on our daily dose of drama =)

By the way, does anyone know what the processing power ratio is for emulating the current console games on pc?

 - meg

Well, the Xbox is what, 500mhz? I'm guessing to properly run on a PC, such games need ~2ghz.

Xbox specs, iirc.
733 MHz
250MHz Nvidia GPU
64MB 200mhz DDR

I think the processor is a shoot-off of the Intel Celeron.

So, like, how hard would it be to just emulate the game if it an xbox exclusive?

 - meg

I abandoned this thread as soon as Schild was derailing it and I knew what direction it would take (granted, the Ren fair stuff was a surprise). Too many Ataris vs Amiga and Sega vs Nintendo flashbacks to think this would end good. Don't blame this on me, bucko. I bit my tongue more than once to not comment on some of the interpretations prevailing here.

On topic (at least what seems to now be the topic). Yes, Schilds technical details about the X-Box are right. Since the underlying technology is extremely similar to IBM-compatible PCs (only minor patches are needed to get the Linux i386-Kernel running on the Xbox - just an example, no Linux discussions now please) it would be easy to emulate it, and the processor need wouldn't rise much because you don't have to emulate an entirely different system. I presume nobody did it because Microsoft pushed the hardware out at such low prices that everybody who had the faintest interest in the thing just bought it. The price (at least at the beginning) was much lower than a comparable PC.

What did I do now?

You didn't let go of it.

Ever watch a group of dogs eating next to each-other?  Usually they'll stay in their own bowls, but every once in a while one dog will do something to set another dog off, and that dog will snap and growl, and then they'll both go back to eating.  That's normal.  But no fight breaks out and the dinner is not derailed.

Tebonas growled about something, and instead of just snarling back, you bit down and held on like a pit bull.  A fight broke out and dinner was ruined for everyone.

Next time, just let it go.

Bruce

You want to drag me into this, do you? Running low on drama?

I stand by the boldtexted statement, but I saw no need to discuss it. Its a nobrainer anyway. Just a reminder what the X-Box was from day one. A marketing ploy. And, that obviously, that ploy worked on Trippy. Good for Microsoft. Nothing anybody would refute anyway, therefore nothing to discuss.

Your counter to "There is no reason to X-Box exclusives" was "But there are many X-Box exclusives". My answer was basically "Meh, whatever. Lets not escalate this and drop it."

And now Sir Bruce thinks of us as dogs in some kind of submission ritual. Hope you are happy.

To try and get back on topic before it all breaks loose again:

The game is damn fun. I don't know yet if it is 10/10 fun but I like it alot. Fighting is fun. The characters are cool. The feel is definitely ancient China-ish. The story is very typical so far, you are the chosen one. Everything revolves around you. Though I like the hints as to what you are chosen to do.

Now, I'm just waiting for the KOTR level plot twist. Heh. Bioware as the M. Night Shalyman of game plots.

But that's the problem, there is a reason for Microsoft exclusives. Just like there's reason for PS2 exclusives and Gamecube exclusives. The comment was incredibly daft. It's not the sort of thing I'd expect from you. Also, considering Microsoft has the most powerful console and the most robust online capability, there's _very_ good reason for Xbox exclusives. You should just be glad they don't call them Xclusives. Quite simply, if you're a gamer, owning anything less than every console is just going to cause you to miss out on a few good games for whichever one you're missing each year.

As for Bruce he's a stupid troll who's taking a liking to what I'm pretty sure he thinks are "snappy" one-liners.

You're not in China. You're in New York, circa 2027.

Dude, spoiler space!

The official word about Jade and the PC is "We have not announced any plans of a PC version of Jade Empire, but we are exploring the possibility."

*pokes his head in* Loving the game! Got into a frustrating fight (guided fireball spells should be illegal) but persevered.

I've started playing. I'll have a review by weekends end. Unless I have to beat the game to unlock the Monk. Then it'll take a few days longer.

Monk??

Fuck, there goes 50 bucks.

Is that the free limited edition character?

Figures. Heh.

Random unrelated points:

Linux as a desktop: Sorry, it's not there. And this is from someone who has a Linux box on his desk at work. It is a fine server platform. It is not a mature consumer desktop. Unless you think consumers like editing /etc/conf files? Maybe in 5 years someone will come out with a decent proprietary desktop OS running on top of Linux. Then again, you could very correctly describe OSX on a Mac as "a decent proprietary desktop OS running on top of Unix" and it hasn't quite set the world on fire.

SCA: There are two SCAs. The ren-faire roleplayers, and the people who go to fight other people with swords. The two often mock each other, as you'd expect. Ironically, neither faction is usually lacking for dates.

Jade Empire: Different but fun.

I await with eagerness the day my mom calls and asks me to teach her how to use VI.

The SCA here in Oklahoma is known in the geek world as the easiest way to get laid. Of course, I cannot take advantage of it because I'm allergic to penicillin. Still, I came damn close to joining after going to a ren faire and spending an hour or so talking to a lovely girl in a flimsy white dress. Then again, she probably could have talked me into sticking my manhood into a bear trap.

I bought Jade Empire.

The box is pretty.

I played through the first village assault. Good stuff thus far. I'm really going to dig the "on-the-fly" style changes. I actually had to think about what skills to upgrade when i dinged.

On the SCA: funny, everyone I know who does "that' sort of thing is a damn neanderthal. Granted, I would love to do some medieval fighting, but I won't settle for anything less than 100% authentic replica armor and weapons, and we can all imagine how much that stuff costs. Screw that ratan and pipe insulation nonsense. I also fail to see how it's "the easiest way to get laid".

You wouldn't believe how much chicks dig cardboard and styrofoam. </tongue-in-cheek>

Get with the program schildy baby, it's all about the green.

(http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/sabine.jpg)

/stab

Edit for relevance:  Played about 2 hours of it.  Enjoying it quite a bit, it does feel a lot like the adopted asian kid of gay life parteners KotoR and Fable.  Needless to say, it's fun.   Mad props for the 1942 mini game.

Fry's is indeed having a sale on Jade Empire which ends today, 4/14. The price is $36.99 for either the limited or regular edition (they had both in my local store, lying Bioware marketing scum). Their online store, www.outpost.com, also has it on sale for $39.99 but it doesn't say if that's the LE or regular edition.

I fenced in high-school (among other things) and there was some overlap between that group and the SCA group, the SCA'ers who were serious about the fencing were cool people for the most part, the SCA'ers who showed up to one or two practices and then wandered off were usually cretins and to this day I am still not sure what they expected to find there other than excercise and lots of repetition.

I look back at fencing rather fondly and out of all the martial arts type things I've tried I think I would most like to go back to it for a couple of years, well that and Bag-gua (Pa-Kua) kung-fu.

That second disk you got with the Limited Edition? Pop that sucker in and select the option to unlock the monk and you are good to go.

Translation: "dude. Are you people freaking retarded? We port everyting to PC if it sells even remotely well. Now go buy another copy so the good Doctors who founded the company can go buy another Porsche."

Or, "Why would we want to take the time and trouble to port it to the PC, when we can sell twice the copies for four times the profits than the measley amount we'll make selling it on the PC. Buy an X-Box, kekela."

C'mon Haemish you know perfectly well that when they run the numbers and if income - port cost = large profit then exclusivity is just a pipe dream.

Oh sure, unless Microsoft got them to sign a deal saying they couldn't port it. Or they couldn't port it until some ridiculous amount of time later, like Fable.

The only way Microsoft would have got them to agree to that deal is by telling them they would cover part of the income they would have made from ports with money they make from Xbox sales due to Jade Empires being exclusive.  I am sure they have the option to pay back Microsoft any amount of money granted to them plus a little extra, probably, and break the contract.

No one would sign an exclusivity agreement that hurt them financially.  Especially since the point of the exclusivity is to sell more X-Box's which equals profit for Microsoft.  There is no doubt in my mind that Bioware can break the contract if they see it as financially reasonable.  Alternatively, I would be very surprised if there isn't a vague and nebulous clause about voiding the contract automatically if XBox sales don't hit a certain peak, a peak which I am sure will be open to interpretation by a suitably motivated law team.

Funniest part of this game is how the dialogue camera angle makes all the girls look like they have down syndrome.

Yes, I know what asians look like and it's not because they are asian. In some places it makes me wonder how it even got by QA.

"Port times" don't bother me. I'm still waiting on GTA San Andreas to come out on xbox, so I can play it with decent graphics + framerate, and for it to come out on PC, so someone can hack in multiplayer. Shrug, it's just going to get worse and worse as the years go by.

I don't have that issue. The biggest problem I have is that Dawn Star looks very familiar, like maybe she's modeled after an Asian actress and it is driving me crazy.

Maybe it's a 480P issue, but the eyelids flicker and change around and the eyes always look crossed.

That and the heads are lopsided from that view. I'll have to take a picture of it later.

Nope. I'd notice that. The faces look awesome in this game. Not quite Half Life 2 awesome, but pretty damn close for a console RPG.

I installed the monk from my second disk. He's kinda cool looking. His monk spade style wasn't listed anywhere and I couldn't choose it through customizing so I'm guessing it's trainable somewhere in the game.

First impressions:

1. 480p looks like ass. The game is as pretty as a good PS2 game (but not as good as say God of War). Yes, the faces actually look asian instead of anime-asian. But the voices are entirely uninteresting. These people should be speaking mandarian or something, not simolean and english.

2. The controls....Well, I don't know what to say. Uncontrollable would be a good word for it, if only because combos are near unavoidable. It's like RPG controls for dummies. But I'm enjoying it.

3. I like the wealth of styles. In the very least, it makes up for the controls.

4. I love the many characters you meet, despite the linguistic abomination that spills forth.

5. Worst writing in a Bioware game thus far. I miss Black Isle more than ever now. There's random bits of engrish, awkward dialogue, and weirdness. Some of the writing is downright surreal.

6. Gamespot's review is much more fair than the knobsucking IGN review - which they MUST have been paid to give. There's no other possible explanation.

7. As far as immersion beyond the language barrier, whoever programmed the "walk to" points and whoever was on QA for them sucks balls. They should be fired. Characters stutter, take little steps and jerk around. It's obscenely bad. I don't know why this happened - and really, there's no excuse. After playing God of War, this sort of stuff makes me incredibly angry.

8. The world is awesome. The story is great (despite writing issues). It's literally a situation where the no amount of writers and programmers could fuck up what the designer had created.

I realize I'm judging by God of War. Yes. It's the new measuring stick, get used to it.

9. Is it worth buying? Yes, no question. But be angry at Bioware when you make the purchase. One more month worth of QA would have fixed nearly every complaint. Someone got really fucking lazy and impatient.

Agreed with most of what schild said, except the following:

The dialog is great, but the writing is often tedious.  Basically, the characters have great personality, but you'll be rolling your eyes once they start long expositions about the plot.  They give speeches a lot.

The pathing, especially when opening doors and treaure, is blatantly buggy.  Your character stutters and pivots for a few seconds whenever trying to interact with an object.  It happens so often that I'm surprised Bioware agreed to ship with it.  QA is not the problem, the developers knew of this issue but decided it was acceptable for some reason.

Oddly I have no pathing issues. Could it be a hardware thing? We all know that XBOXs have slight differences, ranging from different CDroms to different hard drives.

So far it's pretty fun. The characters are cool. The voices do their part. I'm the type that tends to read dialogue then skip past the voices. The cutscenes are pretty cool. The flying parts feel like old school galaga or something.

Maybe not a 10.0 but I'd say it's better than KOTOR in alot of ways. My only gripe so far is that every single weapon is its own style, so if you put points into a weapon and change later, you've wasted alot of points for no reason.

To see the buggy pathing, start a new game, do the fight, then head out towards the beach. When you have to open the door leading from the school grounds to town, run up next to it, then hit A to try to open it. Instead of pushing A from far away.

Or try opening a barrel or chest from the "wrong" angle. It seems this problem is inherant in the engine, which is derived from the original KotOR engine. Yeah, it's slightly annoying, but extremely minor in my book, and not really worth using as an insult towards the game or BioWare.

I mentioned it as an insult towards QA. Who obviously sucked ass on this game.

If I could send a dead fish to the guy who was in charge of QA for movement and pathfinding, I would.

I tend to agree that it's an inherent problem with the underlying engine they are using, not so much bad QA.  Pathfinding was never steller in any of this engine's iterations, from NWN to Kotor1&2 to now Jade.

Still a fun game though, worth the money thus far.  I can also see why some people looking to force the issue would claim it's basically Kotor3 (not that that's a bad thing) but it's lineage is obvious, even down to the new dark side/light side split.

Had to groan that our hero is from...Two Rivers.  Gah.  Wheel of time is painful enough as it is without reminders...

Xilren

That pathing problem does sound like an artifact left over from the engine's NWN beginnings. I'm amazed at how many profitable games they've gotten out of that thing.

Well, it's not a terrible engine. My only real gameplay problem is the completely uncontrollable combos, but the enemy has the exact same issue. It boggles the mind, but at the very least, the game isn't harder because of it.

So do the female characters sniff and smooth their skirts all the time while the men sulk over how much better at understanding women all the other male characters are and the narritave goes on for about 3 pages about the inconsequential meal they had at some point in their journey?

Not exactly, but that quest where I had to find the local gang mistress a husband so she'd stop beating up the poor baker over a promise of undying love he made to her when they were 6 years old was too close for comfort...

Xilren

I realize I'm nitpicking here, but this is a great opportunity to explain a reality of buggy games.

The pathing issue (more of a flaw than a bug), is certainly known to almost every developer at Bioware, and known to every single tester who ever picked up the controller.

The flaw is obvious and everyone who plays the game for more than an hour or so will see it.  Bugs like these are the kind that QA reports again and again and again until the programmers either fix it or just mark it Will Not Fix.

For games with a decent budget, ALL bugs that end up in the final product were in fact found and reported by QA.  But there comes a time in every project when the publisher and developer draw the line and simply kick the game out the door.  They know exactly how buggy their game is, they just decide to ship it anyway.

I've seen bugs filed as "Will not Fix" and you know what? Fuck the programmer. And fuck the lead designer and lead programmer for allowing that. It's lazy bullshit. For every bug that isn't fixed, I want to pay $5 less. Lazy bastards.

I don't agree with that, even for games with large QA staffs. Games are just too complicated these days to catch everything. Even with good testers there's no way for them to even think up all the strange and stupid stuff players end up trying to do in the game. And PC games are much worse than console games in terms of bugs not found because of all the hardware issues involved.

That I totally agree with.

I've never worked at a game company before so they may have different standards but at all the software companies I've worked at it would be rare for a rank-and-file programmer to be making decisions about what bugs will or will not be fixed on any decent sized software project, unless "Will not fix" is being used a synonym for "Not a bug" (i.e. "working as intended"). The basic process is for bugs to be filed by the programmers and QA. Product management then reviews each bug with the lead/senior developers and QA people to understand the time needed to fix and retest each bug. PM then prioritizes all the bugs in the order they should be worked on and the programmers work down the list until time runs out.

Do any of you guys have problems with Harmonic combos?

As for the pathing, yeah, I know what you're talking about now. I thought you meant in general, like walking around, NPCs getting stuck or something. All I've noticed is you have to position yourself right to open doors and containers. But, since it's the same old engine I usually do it on instinct so don't really notice.

According to BioWare, it's not the same engine:

Jade Empire FAQ (http://jade.bioware.com/game_info/faq.html)

That doesn't mean Everything is new. I think we've properly proven that.


Not really. They can be a bit touchy, and some mobs appear to be immune (to the instant death effects at least). Just so ya know, you have to use the power attack (X by default) to both begin and end the combo.

It's not a Wheel of Time reference. Chinese place names are just that prosaic when translated (Beijing means "North Gate"). Rather than have the characters speak Chinese names, they speak the place names in "your" language. I thought it was actually a pretty thoughtful touch.

Oh I'm not convinced it was an intentional reference, but I groaned just the same.  Out of all the names they could have chosen, they chose that one.  Then again, the Wheel of Time is a fairly well known series after all, and there is some subtle humor laced throughout the dialogue.  God knows I'll finish this hero's journey long before Rand get's his ass in gear...

Xilren

I think you people are just making shit up now, quite honestly, with this Wheel of Time reference FTL talk.

The game is based on Chinese history, mythology, and lore. It's only natural that similar naming conventions are used. Really, all Chinese names have other meanings.

Examples from a recent book I had to read (Son of the Revolution, for those wondering):

Liang Dian-jie = "Liang Good News from Dienbienphu"
Liang Fang = "Liang Liberation"
Liang Wei-ping = "Liang Defender of Peace"
Li Zi-hong = "Li Red from Birth"
Mao Zedong = "Mao Benefitting People in the East"

Names have much deeper meanings in the east than in the western world. Also, family names come first, for those who didn't know.

And yet, the people who made the game were American and there is a very good chance that one of them at some time read at least one of the Wheel of Time books.

Intentional reference or coincidence?  At a certain point it doesn't matter, the truth becomes what it is percieved to be.  Many people who play the game will probably think it is a WoT reference.

You just killed your credibility in this debate.

BioWare is Canadian. (http://www.bioware.com/bioware_info/contact/)

And anyway, you can continue to go on believing that it's either some obscure literary reference,

Or, it's because the village is by Two Rivers, which actually play a small part in the plot.

Careful Stragos, you're in danger of getting into an endless argument here.

I think we may stray (no offense) into raging douchebag week territory. Let's slowly back away from that line. K?

Sorry, just wanted to save that for posterity.

I think the thing schild is saying that in the game industry, often prima donna programmers override or are not properly managed by the producers, which may be one of the reasons project management is an apparent lost art in the games industry. While many of the detail mistakes may be in the QA/Programmers hands, the scheduling that often makes bugs get swept under the rugs is in the project management's hands. I believe lead designers and programmers are the culprits.

It's also an industry wide (and not just game dev, but software dev in general) problem--QA is simply not respected as a contributing component of a development team in most studios.

Look at how the QA career path "ends"--it's almost always an attempt to stepping stone to a different career path, but it's arguably one of the most important contributions to the production cycle--look at how much everyone hates buggy games, and how many games were destroyed due to shitty release versions. Or even look at how it begins--testers are THE lowest paid members of any development team (even the secretary is normally paid more), yet they are arguably of equal importance to the development staff.

To do their job properly, QA needs to be a primary decision maker even in the very beginning of the development cycle--documenting design decisions, planning strategies for confirming implementations work, and continue to work over the course of the project. Instead, the QA process doesn't begin for many products until well after the design, and even development is completed.

I honestly blame Microsoft for this one--they "proved" that it was ok to let the customers QA your product, and that you could even make them pay for the fixes (incremental upgrades, releasing an OS every 2 years, etc.). Once it became "common knowledge" that you could "get away" with that style of QA, you simply can't get companies to do it the right way--there is no "bottom line" benefit that they can recognize.

Anyway, sorry to continue the hijack--this is just a personal soapbox for me!

Too much talking, not enough fighting.

To close the nomenclature issue, I asked Mike Laidlaw, Jade's lead designer, about Two Rivers. He said that they named it such in the Chinese style, because there were two rivers near it. The Wheel of Time was only brought up "after a month and 5000 pages of documentation."

Soapbox is outdated.

I use 'catbox' these days.

What, he never heard of "Find and Replace"?

Relatively new, I work with Samwise, so I've lurked for awhile, but I figured that it'd be better not to appear to be an asshole right out of the gates...

If you think of it like prison, being an asshole right off the bat isn't too bad of an idea.

Oh...well in that case...uh...fuck you?
(I'm not terribly good at being an asshole)

We can get you into an intensive program- give us 2 weeks and you will be telling total strangers to go fuck themselves!

I tried being a reverse asshole. Play nice, pretend you like everyone, lie about being a long-time reader, first time poster.

It seemed to work for, oh, 5 minutes.

Then 4 months later I'm running the site.

Trust me, you don't want to end up like that.

He's got a monkey avatar, he's good in my book.

Pwned.

Teh Winnar is Me, kthx.

EDIT: BTW, please thank Mr. Laidlaw for me for his info. Also, his game, IMHO, is kicking a good amount of ass thus far. Then again, I'm extremely Biased, and would probably sleep with....someone, to be able to QA their games and get in early on the goodness.

He'll also sell his body for a sandwich ladies! Come get some! Bring mayo!

QA people don't get enough money for hookers. And no one wants to sleep with most QA folks. So sorry. You'll have to settle for minimum wage or less. This is where a developer would normally add "bitch" to the end of his statement, bitch.

I don't see why the name two rivers brought up the WOT hate like that. Alot of towns are named for geographical features and its not just the asian language where they are prosaic. Hell in wisconsin there is a town named two rivers. Why? because it is between two rivers people are just that creative about naming stuff.


kaid

Schild, you were kind of like that one guy in highschool: he just shows up in the halls one day hanging out with ue. Everyone assumes that someone else in the groups knows him, no one bothers to ask.

Are you saying it's time to question him and then beat the ever-lovin' shit out of him? Or what?

Swirly time!

Settle down there Pr0nfleck.

I've got the door Way. Do it.

Well I beat it. I immediately made a new character and started again to try it in a new way.

Jebus, I make one offhand comment about something that struck me as ironic 30 seconds into the game and chaos ensures regarding chinese nomeclature including an appeal to a dev for clarification.  If only all such game issue were so easily put to bed :)

Still loving the game.  It is just me or did John Cleese voice the English explorer, and some other well know character actor voice the Arena matchmaker, the one with the creative vocabulation...

Xilren

I don't think anyone actually appealed for clarification on the name. I just looked into it because Mike Laidlaw sits six feet behind me at the moment.


Yes, that was Cleese. The Arena matchmaker was Brian Doyle-Murray, Bill Murray's brother.

Other VAs I found interesting were Nathan Fillion (Firefly) as Gao the Lesser, Armin Shimmerman as Emperor Sun Hai, Robin Atkin Downes (umpteen games, plus whiny telepath Byron in the last season of Babylon 5) as Sagacious Zu, and Kari Wahlgren (Witch Hunter Robin) as Student Lin. Okay, Kari's probably less famous than the others if you don't watch anime...

Must've been awesome for all the sci-fi geeks there to get Armin Shimmerman and Robin Atkin Downes.

(I hated Downes' character from a story point of view, but it was written well and he acted it well. Shimmerman, of course, being Quark, is awesome.)

Witch Hunter Robin?

Once again, Teh Winnar Is U!

Decent show, very well drawn but the story was fairly meh in my book.

Yeah, methinks I was more drawn to the artistic style than the substance.

If the voice actors are so good, it must be the dialog, then.

Just started playing it, lost track of four hours.

Damn awesome game. Unlike others, I like the combat. I'm playing the tank guy, forgot his name - between the regen-chi style and Legendary Strike, I've had battles against big opponents last for 5+ minutes before. It's almost impossible to kill me, I'll take your chi and regen my health... and the pacing is good, too. Not fast enough that I can loose track in large battles, but not slow enough that it feels boring. I like it, I like it a lot...

Awesome game. Major props to Bioware.

Finished the game. It was good but not as good as KotOR. GameSpot's review is pretty close to my feelings on the game. I'm not sure what IGN was smoking when they rated the game. I'd actually probably rate Jade Empire lower than GameSpot did if only because I can visualize a much better game if only BioWare was willing to learn from other action/martial arts games and to branch out from their tried but true, but now also repetitive brand of RPG storytelling.

BTW: If you do finish the game, make sure you "listen through" the credits -- there's some funny stuff in there.

How does Jade Empire compare to Shenmui 2?

Shenmui 2 was a little quirky(ok, a lot, I ignored all the crazy collection oddness), but I loved the fighting style in an rpg and especially the way the various trainers would actually make you practice the moves for a while before you gained the move.

What you're smelling is the fresh scent of $100 bills being burnt.

Funny, I thought that was the fresh scent of publisher crotch.

You mean the infamous Fable "hallway" game, don't you?

Considering how great the game is, I thought Eternal Darkness had far too many "Hallway" levels. Fable doesn't even compare to the poor level design of ED.

I wouldn't go that far. The way the Chapel develops over the ages, that's some cool level design. The Lovecraftian underground city?

Sure, the pyramid and temple were pretty hall-erriffic, but I thought the level design was pretty good. Or I was so entertained by the game I didn't notice. Funny how that works. I noticed every damned annoyance in Fable, because I felt the game sucked balls.

And at least the temple's halls had traps and stuff to make them interesting. The Fable hallway level is a pinacle in retarded design.

No! My money hat! Aiieee~!

Oh you can get another easily enough.

How much would a Canadian money hat cost, like $3.26 US?

KEKE ^_^

Dunno, but I do plan on getting Shenmue II -- I'm a big fan of the Virtua Fighter series -- so I'll let you know.

Then again, ED didn't take 10-60 seconds to load the next "hallway". You can get away with alot more "hallways" if the player doesn't spend 15 minutes of everyone hour staring at a loading screen, more if you were digging for treasure.

I may not have given JE a 9.9, but at least a 9.5 o 9.6 is warranted. I haven't finished it yet, but the 11 hours I've put in it so far - (in the middle of chapter five, WONDERFUL storyline so far) - it's great. I love this game. =)

Welp. My time with Jade Empire is over. The game resets every time it loads the next thing.

What is that thing? Made almost completely non-spoilish - Highlight the text below:

Whirlwind is about to fight the Serpent in the arena. Or....not. The game just feels like resetting.

You don't have an earlier save or an earlier autosave? BTW, I love that hard drive -- I'm thinking of modding mine to stick a bigger one in there -- I had like over 350 saves by the time I was finished with JE.

You know, you *can* overwrite and delete save files... I always overwrote them, so I only had 6 saves - the five autosaves, and the one manual.

Sorry to hear about that, Schild. Try going back a save... I encounted very few bugs, actually. The pathfinding was jerky, but that's not really a bug, that's a bad algorithm. Which is, I suppose, a bug, but one that is always present and not a "why is that happening" thing.

(If you want, PM me, I'll fill you in on the rest of the story =P)

Gamespot also has all 3 ending videos in their game guide, which does save on replay time, I suppose.

It's a fun game though. I like that they tried to do some things differently. It felt very much like a kung-fu movie. (Note: they're not SUPPOSED to be high art, Crouching Tiger notwithstanding).

Good thing for Eternal Darkness, then, that it is about a thousand times cooler than Fable.  If you could go insane playing Fable (your character, not you), then maybe it would have a chance.

I do realize that complaining about hallway games is dumb, since the halllway is as iconic as the crate in our chosen love.  Maybe I am just irritated that Fable pretended it wasn't constructed of hallways.  ED didn't pretend that you weren't trapped in some claustrophobic corridor with a shitty camera angle.  Not to re-rail this thread, but I didn't mind the corridorishness of KOTOR nearly as much as Fable... maybe because there was a good game in between loading screens.

Game 1 done. enjoyed it.  I just know I missed a bunch of side quests.  Either that or there's a host of items with no real use like the nickel plated metal, bezors and other stuff that looks like it ought to be used somewhere.  Can;t honestly say I ever used a harmonic combo at all, but my maxed out long sword was decaptitating nicely by the end.

Have to take my time in game 2 and explore everything...

Hope everyone took the opportunity to listen to the ending credits; some fairly funny stuff in there.... in space!

Xilren

Spoiler:
You need to talk to Kang to use that stuff.

Just got this.  I had to because basically I've been looking forward to the damn thing since its inception.   Returned my Guild Wars preorder to do so. 

Initial thoughts:

* Good voice acting.  Dialogue and writing isn't as bad yet as is made out here.
* Beautiful.  Wonderful scenery, they can really do good things with this engine.
* Initial combat is just jarring. It's like Fable but with more emphasis on anything killing you in 3 hits.  Ohh boy, I'm the chosen one and a drunken sailor 3 shots me because I can't hit block once he's statred pounding me.  (Yes, I later figured the only way out of that is to leap back).  I died a lot with at the beach scene until I got the hang of the combat.
* Monk character's martial arts style is pretty cool.  Fast as hell, which helps.  The spade weapon style completely sucks.  It seemed like I was trying to tickle people to death with it.  I'd love to keep it, but the longsword kicks its ass in comparison at the moment.
* Story's great so far.
* Load times are somewhat long.
* Bad, minimalist manual.  Being in ID this stuff annoys me.

Overall it feels like KOTOR with Fable like combat.  I'm not blown away by this initially, but it looks like it will be entertaining enough to play to the finish.   I still think it was worth not picking up Guild Wars for this.  I already have my MMO fix and was NOT very gungho on GW (I predict I wouldn't have touched it for a month and by then 90% of the people here will have quit. )

Edit: leaving out words is bad.

Rasix, finish the game and tell me what you think ;-) My initial impressions were much the same as yours, but after sticking through it... needless to say, it's much better.

Finished it on Friday.  This is a game, unlike KOTOR2, that has a permanent place in my gaming catalog and will not be traded back to EB Games for pennies.   

This is one of the tightest and best paced stories Bioware has ever done.  My playtime came in at just under 15 hours, but I'd imagine with some do-overs with battles the actual time was closer to 17-18 hours.  This is NEARLY perfect for a these games IMO.  Game probably could have used another major town like area and another 2-3 hours of gameplay and then it would have been flawless.   

Couple things that bothered me:

• No direct control over henchman.  Henchman never attacks the mob you attack unless it's the last one.  Henchman might have not have been there they were so trivially useful (well, the dead monk guy was rather helpful). Also, one out at a time is a fucking crime, I really hope one day someone takes me back to BG/BG2's uber groups of doom. 
• Ranged ghosts were just annoying to fight.
• Did I miss something, or were there no romance angles at all?  I know that might have taken some focus off the main character's epic struggle, but these have been nice touches to Bioware games since BG2.  I just really enjoy love stories in games for some reason.
• Unspeccing a form at a certain point in the game would be kinda cool.   I hate building up a weapon style fairly high and then seeing an OOOH SHINEY weapon form I just gotta use.

This game will get a replay out of me, although I'm not sure I can pull a 180 and go complete cockmuch.   Playing the open palm path just seemed natural and the closed fist portions were a little too extreme.   They've still got to work better at putting in shades of grey into these games. 

Although this one is a tad too formulaic to get my game of the year nod,  it's definitely one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've had.   I'd give it about a 90-92 out of 100.   With tweaks to the henchman system, a better introductory experience,  and a slightly longer story I would push it above 95.  I don't understand the negativity towards this title, it was just hella fun.

Whoa there buddy, you're getting dangerously close to actually reviewing a game.

I'm trying to play the lesbian angle with Dawn Star. It isn't working. There is no romance in ancient fake china.

I could easily review this, but people have already done this, no?  (Plus, I would be useful. Can't have that. )

You can do the lesbian thing, but not with Dawn Star.

It starts and ends with "x".

;)

NO.  Like the game on its merits alone or don't.  If you don't like the platform it's on, that's fine.  If you somehow manage to resurrect the platform argument, you're going to earn my eternal spite and a virtual Doc Marten in your o-ring.   

Anyhow, reading through some spoilers on the bioware forums, I think I'm going to replay the game but at a much more leisurely pace.  It looks like I skipped over some significant minor plot points. I managed to play the game where I missed out on a relatively major relavation and didn't hit the romances although they are supposedly somewhat prominent and available in a variety of lifestyle choices.

I did this in KOTOR and was just amazed at how many sidequests and what not that I missed. I'm just wondering if I can stomach going closed fist or not.  It's just really difficult for me to be completely evil in these games.

Yes, without the annoying font size.

It's not a platform argument, there's no argument. The xbox is a pile of shit compared to my pc. Jade Empire is exclusive to the xbox. Thus I have a negative opinion of Jade Empire.

Besides the fucking smily that denotes I was poking fun.

It really is raging douchebag week, isn't it? See you all next week.

If only you'd be as picky with guitars as you are with platforms. Maybe the guitar thread wouldn't be buried right now, eh? That's the kind of geek talk that I crave, man!

Just because it's raging douchebag week does not mean you can be a crotchpheasant.

Remember that, people.

Sky, if you hate the Xbox and all games that are on the Xbox, stay out of Xbox related threads.

Romances are in there. You can read about them elsewhere, I'm sure, but in brief there are hetero and homo options, and if you play your cards right, you can even end the game with a woman on each arm.

Can I still do that if I'm using a female character, and have a lesbian three-way?

Heh, I just hope you're not including that 7-year-old shapeshifting girl, because that would be creepy.

Yah, I read about that in the forums.  Kind of mad I missed it.  I think I played it too nice and "quiet badass" like.  Still, I should have had a chance with Dawn Star  :|

Going to have to give it another whirl.  Perhaps with a giant bruiser this time. The monk was fairly balanced but was more finese then power.   BTW, in case you feel like responding again Storm, are there any new weapons you can pick up fairly early in the game?  The spade and longsword don't do much for me.   In my game I didn't pick up any new weapons until at least the Imperial City arena.

I do, for the most part. I'm just lurking for clues about a pc port ;)

Can't a guy make a fucking joke any more? I PUT A FUCKING SMILY THING ON IT. Holy shit.

Use the green for your sarcastic banter, it will help.

Meganecro!

This is out on Steam today, and I believe also in traditional boxes.

Anyone have a field report? I've been strongly considering picking it up, but you know PC games and bugs...

Did they add "Fun" to the combat system?

Box says they added additional combat styles and shit.

I found the game to be perfectly enjoyable, so I'm not sure they patched in Schild-flavored Fun.

It's not "Schild flavored" Straz. The combat is the biggest gripe of pretty much anyone who didn't like the game. Hell, the very idea of Bioware making a kung fu game was pretty much funny from the start. And trying to do it for a console crowd, no less.

There are dozens of no name, boneheaded hack n slash/beat em ups that were more enjoyable than this, and the only way you could possibly like it is to never have played any other game that has done it right. i.e. You live under a rock.

[EDIT] Just speaking about the combat. I'm not damning other elements.

Ah, since I find fighting games boring I should be ok with Jade Empire then, because I don't know better?

Sweet!

I always imagined combat in Jade Empire like Kotor. Way too easy to be of any consequence anyway (I played the first time as a melee Jedi but didn't even use special attack modes like Flurry for the first 80 percent of the game).

I'm not even talking fighting games. Just beat-em-ups. Many arpgs are more evolved than this too though.

Crappy targeting, unresponsive blocking, not much need for mixing up your attacks/combos, etc., etc. Pretty much the standard things most people don't want in their games. Especially ones with martial arts in them.

[edit]

I'll just say that, like every other Bioware game, it's one that has to win you over on a completely different level besides combat. Nothing new here.

I couldn't make that jump this time though.

Also, I think it's fair to hold them up to beat-em-up/hack n slash and arpg standards....Since that's pretty much what they were trying to go for this time around.

I live under a rock.

It actually is a lot like KOTOR combat except simpler and without pewpewpew.  I don't care if they doubled the number of combat styles.  Giving me two tubs of unflavored yogurt isn't going to make it taste better.  I'm also taking a "stop publishing bullshit on Steam" position; if I want retreaded crap then I will just fire up GameTap.

One other thing that bothered me about it, and I don't have a good solution to it, was the voice acting.  The game was like a bland dub.  I do realize that Mandarin + subtitles = stupid, but I still didn't care for the voice work.  I just didn't buy Brian Doyle-Murray as a Chinese ringmaster.

Oh, and the light-side/dark-side mechanic was watery and dumb.

I picked this up yesterday.  Only played a little last night, game took forever to install.  More devs need to figure out how to store data in one big file isntead of 12,000,000 little ones.

It's fairly pretty.  Getting used to the combat is gonna take a bit, it's been too long since I played anything with a real-time combat system.

--
Alkiera

Do they have it on PC? Does it work better than KOTOR2? Does it *really* work? Is it possible to play it without getting involved with Steaming POS?

1) Just came out.

2) Not sure what you mean.

3) Not sure what you mean.

4) You can get it in a box, yes.

Jade Empire was not developed by Obsidian, so it's not (or at least 'shouldn't be') broken like KotOR2 is. Team Gizka is moving right along, though. I hope to see them release this year.

Getting it in a box does not necessarily mean that Steam is not involved. You can buy Half-Life 2 in a box too...

Well, that's interesting. Have they done that with other third party games? I just figured it was like a D2D deal, and not so closely knit.

I can confirm that if you buy a box, there is no Steam involved.  I installed last night.  Come to think of it, there was no 'key' at all, tho it does demand the disc stay in the drive.  Prolly some SecuRom stuff on it or some such.

--
Alkiera

Is this playable with a mouse and keyboard or is a joystick suggested?

They seem to have gone to some effort to make it usable with mouse/keyboard.  WASD movement, #s select styles, mouse buttons do normal attack, power attack, and area attack, blocking is done with spacebar.

They also claim to support gamepads, I haven't hooked mine up yet though.  I need to get a powered USB hub so I don't have to crawl under my desk to plug stuff in, as the front ports on my machine are only sorta functional.

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Alkiera

I'd use a gamepad.  You'd end up clicking too damn much with a mouse.

Tell from what I played on a gamepad, I would think the game might even be better on a m+kb. Especially for targeting.

i.e. Jade Empire was probably better off starting on a PC to begin with.

Of course, I'm just speaking out of my ass. Could be way off.

There is no click-to-target.  You activate things by facing them and clicking the 'attack' mouse button.  Targetting in combat lets you cycle through targets with 'tab' and 'q'.

The default difficulty is 'Master', and I had some difficulty.  Then again, I've not gotten to play a whole lot... WoW calls me to play it when I get home, more than Jade Empire at the moment.  It'll be good for me, it's been too long since I played an action game.

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Alkiera

Well, that isn't any different than the gamepad then (you used the triggers to target there).

Wouldn't call it an action game. It's just typical, clumsy Bioware stuff without pause.

It's more actiony that most of what I've been playing lately, which is EQ/WoW/TitanQuest.  I generally prefer to let my character (or more accurately, their stats) do the thinking about combat.  It's certainly more actiony than, say, NWN or KotOR.

--
Alkiera

Combat is best likened to Fable. 

Do you hear that, Ras? DO YOU?

Baby Jesus is crying right now, and it's all your fault.

Combat in Fable is nothing like combat in Jade Empire.

Jade Empire can only be likened to Pit Fighter, but with more movement. It's that bad.

Edit: Honestly, I don't even know how people played this with God of War out.

pee ess too

Buy a fucking PS2 then. Don't settle for mediocrity for nonsense reasons.

As do I. I enjoyed the combat, much better than say Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The one thing it suffered from was the "optimal path." Once you got one set of combos, not much else mattered. I think I hit it around hour 20 or so. The only other complaint I had was the hordes of enemies to slow you down style of level design.

The game wasn't fantastic, but it was no stinker either.

EDIT: And yes, the combat DID play a bit like Fable. I liked Fable too.

There was a lot more homosexuality in Fable.  I mean that in multiple ways.

This never bothers me. If something is zomgoverpowered, I might pull it out when low on health in a boss battle. Otherwise, I like playing around with different abilities for fun, trying new combinations, etc. One thing I don't care for with MUA, it's restricted the amount and diversity of powers some, streamlined ftl. I liked playing with Toad in Spit mode and then respeccing to Tongue mode later for a change of pace. Toad was a must-have in XML2 imo...Got SoW? ;)

The problem, if I might elaborate, with Jade Empire is that you don't really have enough points to go whoring around the various martial styles, not if you want to be any good at one of them.  Pretty much what happened on my play was I stuck with Thousand Cuts all the way to the end.  I used the thing that turned people to stone quite a bit, but generally I just straight-up beat their asses.

You say that like it's a bad thing. :-P

Not bad, just duller than I had hoped.

Cheesing the final boss was funny. Flawless Victory ftw...or lose, possibly. A bit too easy.

That makes at least 2 BioWare games where they leave the bosses with glaring vulnerabilities;

I should not be able to stunlock the final guy in JE. I should not be able to smack the final boss in Throne of Bhaal with Harm and reduce her to 1 HP.  :evil:

EDIT: Should Not, not Should.

eh yeah, it was underwhelming. and the dialog just seemed flat...adding the weird ' old language' dialog seemed utterly pointless ( do they even mean anything?!)
I dislike the combat. it felts like fable except slightly more challenging, the invisible barrier didn't help either. Probably not gonna play it much nor even finish it.

Reminded me of reading about a guy playing a wizard in NWN, trying to nuke down the big red dragon without using the Plot Device... he tried dozens of times, was getting frustrated at how close he got, then one time he won very quickly!  He looked back through the logs to find his cleric pet had managed to stick Harm on the dragon, bringing him to like 3 hp, and his next spell killed him.  Was somewhat surprising.

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Alkiera

Heh, nice.

What happened is that in the end of ToB, you go through a long sequence of fights, which are all too close to eachother to allow for saves.

So I was slogging through it when I get to the Real Final Fight. I was getting low on HP. I was practically out of healing spells. Same with healing potions. Between my Paladin, (dual classed) Thief/Mage x 2, Fighter/Druid, Ranger, and Mage/Cleric, I was very low on spells and abilities, but noticed one of the spells I had left was Harm.

"Oh what the hell, there's no way it will work though..."

*POW*

fuck, now i starting to crave for Max Payne kungfu mod. JE is just piss poor >_< At least there was some enviromental dmg done from knocking gun wielding thugs with drunken fist against the wall and the cool slow mo that has tactical use in Max Payne. If all else fails, Gun-Fu can save the day too.

I actually don't like it when bosses are immune to things just to up the difficulty, although there are plenty of exceptions.  Yeah, you don't really want insta-death to make it too easy, but a lot of the time it just comes off as laziness to me.  If it's part of the puzzle, that's cool, but just a blanket immunity to all things except raw damage is lazy.

See, now I'm tempted to go back through the game and try using Harm on all sorts of shit, like fucking Fierkrag. That bastard was a tougher fight than either "final boss."

It just seems wrong to me that a boss could have 999,999 HP or something, but if I land a single Harm - BOOM, 1HP lolz gg. But I suppose that's what happens when I'm a min/maxing bitch in these games and try to fill every gap in my party that I possibly can. I mean, seriously, who would normally have 2 cleric-types (plus 2 more with minor access) and 3 mage-types?

The number of Magic Missiles I could toss at people was laughable. Almost as funny as whomping "hardcore badass" Drow with a pimped-out Carsomyr.  :evil:

(I need more fucking time in the day to go through that game again.)

Near the end I was just Chi Mode + Focus Mode + maxed Dual Sabers/1k Cuts and just muscled things down. It wasn't terribly exciting, but still fun in an odd way. I didn't find the other styles all that interesting though, but 1k Cuts was fast enough to make the beatings seem painful enough. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have even made it through the first time had I gone with another Martial style at the beginning.

Started off with the goody-two-shoes lesbian route... which, after typing that out, every game needs. I'll be letting it sit a week before I try a Closed Fist play-through, but I guess I enjoyed it enough to warrant that. The only thing I'm actually disappointed about is that I won't be able to mod it to hell and back :(.

I usually work my way through those games using mostly just a cleric with a few levels of fighter.  Normally by the mid game you can have enough self buffs to become a very good fighter (every stat can eventually be buffed up to 6 points via spells) with all the armor you want and the best weapons and spells like Cause Severe Wounds and Harm and Self-Healing and the summon spells and turn undead and all the other utility stuff just makes the game a breeze.

The new rule set Clerics are just ridiculously powerful.

You go through with a solo build? Hmm

For some reason, trying to go through these games with less than a max-sie party has always seemed wrong to me. I mean, good on you for doing it, but having less toys to play with just isn't as fun for me. Lets not even go into how much you'd have to abuse the autosave/quickload functions.

EDIT: On Jade, I went through with 1k Cuts and Longsword, heavy on Focus and moderate amounts of HP and Chi. I abused the hell out of Spirit Thief (chi-drain), and eventually swapped to dual-sabres. I messed around with the other support powers, but only for the Harmonic Combos. Oh, and the shock/paralysis powers are Easily abusable, even without investing points into them.

If you've got a save game before you  then just reload that and choose the option to . That'll give you enough closed fist points to see the "evil" ending.

For 90% of the game, the Closed Fist part of the game is the same as the Open Palm, except that you can be a bit mean to other people.

Actually, now that I think about it, if you have a save point before Death's Hand at the monestary, .