Jade Empire: First Hour or so

As the title of this post implies (do I start out a lot of these like that?), I am an hour or two into Jade Empire: Special Edition for the PC. Here’s what’s up. If you like Bioware games, you will be instantly at home. I mean, I spent the first 45 minutes talking to everyone I could, exhausting all dialogue trees (and gaining experience for doing so!). Pretty sweet. Then, some evil spirit warriors got conjured by an evil assassin and my Master kicked their asses. Also cool.

In general, it’s shaping up to be pretty fun, although I am definitely learning my way through the combat/leveling system much slower than I normally do. The game looks pretty good, for an older Xbox port (I think they spruced it up a bit for the new PC release), except the cutscenes, which got no attention, and thus are outclassed even by the original KOTOR cutscenes. Whatever.

Finally, everyone should know that Nathan Fillion makes an appearance as an important first chapter character. I know, can dreams really be made true that easily. He is rocking some weird speech patterns, but he slips into familiar Nathan Fillion talk pretty fast. He makes a really great bad guy, and he tries a lot harder than some of the actors. Good for him, cause he will probably never do this kind of work again. Which is sad. Anyway, all told, it looks like it will be fun, I’ll probably play through again as a bad guy (or agressive or whatever the idea is). My Rock Band review should be up soon, but who can say.

Sequels!

First off, there is the news that Uncharted 2 has been given the go, which is fantastic, as the first one was amazing… As all of you should know. Second, I guess that Jade Empire 2 is also in the works, and for the 360 and PS3 (I believe) no less. Fantastic. I never really played the original (I should), so this just gives me an excuse to go ahead and play the first one. Finally, I have been remiss in not reviewing about a million games that I have played or am playing. So, I’ll be posting as many of those as I possibly can in the next few weeks. Oh, and Far Cry 2 was announced for 360 and PS3… Do I care? And finally, Warren Spector could have made a Golden Compass game based on the books. That would have been so fantastic. That just makes me kinda depressed. Off to try out the new Heroes V expansion.