I’m pretty sure it’s the best game I’ve bought on Xbox Live Arcade so far (and I’m counting the time I re-bought Puzzle Quest even though I’d already beaten the DS version so I could play the Xbox-only expansion), and it’s in the running for best $15 I’ve spent all year.

The time mechanics are beautiful, and the way the game builds on them with each additional world is very smooth. World 2 seemed simple but pretty; then world 3 took that, twisted it around, and gave me my first “whoa, didn’t see that coming” moment. Then I hit world 4 and had to flail around for a while to un-stick my brain. Now I’ve solved that one, and world 5 is currently making me gibber a bit.

If you have an Xbox 360 and haven’t picked up this game, please do so immediately.

I gave in to temptation and bought a Wii from eBay earlier this week, and the nice FedEx man dropped it off on my porch this morning. My copy of Zelda and the second controller set I ordered haven’t showed up, so I spent a while playing with Wii Sports and the Virtual Console stuff.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I had this much fun with a video game.

The sports games are clearly mini-games, and they don’t have a lot of depth or a ton of graphical polish, but they’re just flat-out fun.

Nintendo claimed that people cared less about shiny HD graphics than about gameplay, and from a morning’s time spent with Wii Sports, I’m pretty sure they’re right.

My friend code is 1375-0438-5340.

I am a lousy fisherman, but I’m currently choosing to blame Ray for catching all of the fish in my tiny village of Homewood.

I’m happy with the DS and would write more about it, but Mario Kart DS has completely eaten my soul, so instead I will simply note that my friend code is 408083-716202 and go back to racing a little pixelated cart against strangers online.

I lack the patience to write a full review, so if that’s what you need you should read peterb’s review, which is pretty much on the money. The game isn’t especially innovative, but it’s very well executed and has a great story. Sure, it isn’t a daring experiment, but not every game needs to be. Sometimes you want a creative and interesting meal, and sometimes you just want a hamburger. Jade Empire is a very tasty hamburger.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the demo for JE that the April Official Xbox Magazine disc had. I bought the issue just for that demo. I don’t think I so much as cracked the cover of the actual magazine. I’d been waiting for JE for about a year and a half at that point, devouring every little scrap of preview news that Bioware leaked.

Normally I try to avoid the preview hype machine. If you go by gaming magazine previews, every game is the best game ever, right up until the point when it’s released and the magazines switch to “Oh yeah, it totally sucks. Sorry for describing it as the second coming of Christ for the past two years.” mode. Every part of a preview other than screenshots is worthless.

Why the exception? Simple: Bioware. Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate II. Neverwinter Nights. Knights of the Old Republic. MDK2. With that track record, how could Jade Empire be anything but great?

I wanted the demo for a little taste of the game, not because I wasn’t sure whether it’d be any good. And yet, after I played it I thought “well, maybe I’ll wait for the price to drop”. It shook my confidence in the game enough that I probably wouldn’t have bought it if the reviews hadn’t been so strong.

That’s… probably not the reaction Bioware expected. What happened?

So far, what I love about JE is exactly what I expected to love — a strong story, interesting characters, and fun combat. The demo didn’t have any of this.

There wasn’t really any story. Your character is flying to a temple for reasons that aren’t clear to do something that isn’t clear either. Pretty much, the demo is just “Here, fight these unexplained monsters. Don’t ask why.” I can’t expect too much story in a short demo, but c’mon, at least give me some idea of what I’m doing and why I should care about it.

The demo doesn’t really explain who your character is. Apparently you kick ass professionally, but it’s not entirely clear why. You’re on some sort of quest, but that’s assumed in an RPG. The actual game sets up a compelling backstory for your hero, but as far as the demo is concerned you might as well just be named Generic Martial Arts Hero #1. Admittedly, it’s hard to expect a lot of character development in a short demo, but this did very little to draw me into the game’s world.

Now, since the demo’s game excerpt is almost nothing but a battle, you’d expect at least that part to come across well, but the demo manages to make the combat un-fun. That surprised me much more than the story and character problems. I have friends who were apprehensive about the realtime combat (see peterb and psu’s bet about it), but I was looking forward to it. I like fighting games, even if I’m usually lousy at them. Turn-based martial arts action would have been boring anyway.

And yet, once I got a chance to play with the new combat system I didn’t like it at all. The problem here is like the story and character problems — there wasn’t enough context for me to be able to enjoy and play the game well.

JE’s combat is more or less the basic rock-paper-scissors system used in every fighting game since the dawn of time (blocks defeat normal attacks, power attacks defeat blocks, normal attacks interrupt power attacks, etc), but there are still a few unique bits. You need to conserve focus and chi. You have a few different fighting styles to switch between — martial styles, weapons, magic attacks, support styles, all with different characteristics. There are different ways to block, some of them acrobatic. Positioning and timing matters in the battles. Focus mode and chi attacks change the dynamics.

The actual game introduces you to these details slowly, and it doesn’t take long until it all feels familiar and fun. You know when to switch to a support style, you know when it’s worth spending chi on a strong attack instead of saving it for healing. It makes sense, and the battles are exciting and flow smoothly.

The demo, on the other hand, just dumps you right into a fight with little more than “Oh yeah, hit A to punch and B to block. Good luck!”. You don’t know what the attacks mean. You don’t really even know what your attributes mean. All you can do is flail around randomly until either you die or your opponent does. Without any information on how the combat system works, it feels jumbled and unfocused, just like the vague story.

So even though the actual game is great, the demo made it seem like something I didn’t want to play at all. It was pretty and had plenty of asskicking, but it just wasn’t any fun. It might have made a good convention demo, something for a chipper Bioware employee in a Jade Empire t-shirt to put through its paces for a crowd while a voiceover fills in all the missing details. As something to ship out to customers, though, it failed completely.

I don’t know anything about making games or excerpting in-development games to produce demos, but this can’t be the best they could have done. The game’s first chapter might have worked well — it’s the usual “here’s your character, here’s how to play, here’s what you’re supposed to do” training session, so releasing that would have drawn players in without requiring Bioware to write another intro for the demo.

About the only reason I can think of for releasing the demo they did instead of the first chapter is that the story wasn’t done enough — maybe they just had the engine and had to whip together something quick to put around it. If that’s the case, though, I think they’d have been better off just not releasing a demo than releasing one that showed their game in such a bad light.

On a whim I stopped at the hateful EB Games the other day to see if they possibly had it. After the guy behind the counter got off the phone with his friend, it turned out he actually had copies to sell me. Weird. I declined his offer of a super-expensive strategy guide (Thanks, but if I get stuck I’ll use the internet for hints. You may have heard of it.) and game insurance (What? No, seriously, what? Who buys that?) and eventually had my prize.

The reviews gush about how this is the best Xbox game ever. The box even helpfully points this out. I was expecting a lot.

I played through the single player a bit. It’s really really beautiful, prettier than I’d expected, but otherwise it’s still Splinter Cell. That’s not a bad thing, but really I’ve already played that twice. I guess I’m happy to have more, especially now that the stupid save-point system is gone, but still it’s not leaving me overwhelmed with joy. It’s all well-done, but at this point I’m more or less feeling underwhelmed. All that hype, and it’s just pretty good. Bah.

Then I tried the cooperative multiplayer. Anything I said about being disappointed?

I TAKE IT ALL BACK.

More later, assuming I don’t get distracted by coop.

Anybody want to fess up to being “FlyawayOneshot”? Or even knowing who it is?

I figure it’s either someone I know who has strange taste in names or it’s another of the desperately lonely people who tends to send friend requests to random strangers. It seems kinda odd, but there are a lot of them around. I guess getting shunned inside a videogame is the double-extra-special geek ostracism. I mean, it’s bad enough not finding someone to eat with in the lunch room.

Well, not me specifically. They just hate everyone who’s left-handed. I’m assured it’s nothing personal.

I’ve been getting pretty into Halo 2 multiplayer, but the controls are awkward for me. The left thumbstick is movement, and the right thumbstick is aiming. The triggers fire, and the buttons on the right do everything else. Basically, the left hand just makes you run around, and everything else is loaded onto the right hand. You generally don’t need to be both aiming with the stick and pressing the buttons at the same time– either they do things like ‘reload’ or ’switch weapons’ where you can’t fire anyway, or they’re letting you jump, so you just need to be moving.

My aim is much better with my left hand than with my right, so I’d like to be able to swap the sticks. Fine, the game will do that if I pick the ’southpaw’ stick setup. Unfortunately, if I do that I’m stuck trying to move with the right thumbstick while simultaneously pressing the buttons with my right hand. You generally need to move while jumping in order to go anywhere useful, and if you’re reloading or switching weapons you probably want to dodge incoming fire so you can avoid an embarrassing death. If I had two right thumbs, this would be fine. Maybe my parents should have exposed me to more radiation and hopef for mutations.

The game will also helpfully let me switch to a southpaw button layout, but all this does is swap the triggers so that the left trigger fires the right-hand weapon and the right trigger fires the left-hand weapon. Huh? Who wants that? Who does it even make sense to? I was hoping that maybe the A/B/X/Y button functions would be mapped to the four directions of the left-hand-side D-pad, but no such luck.

Did Bungie even have any left-handed people test this? How is it possible that nobody looked at the southpaw button config and said “Wow, this is pretty goddamn stupid. We should change that.”?

I know I’m not the only one irritated by this — there are scattered posts about it in the Bungie forums, all helpfully answered by the foul-mouthed twelve year olds who are the scourge of gaming forums everywhere. They suggest that left-handed people “stop being so gay”, by the way. I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t seem to help. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

This is all partially Microsoft’s fault — the controller is designed with the assumption that most players are right-handed, so that’s where the buttons go. I’m surprised that nobody makes a left-handed controller, though. Is there really no market for that?

The Live interface is pretty smooth, and the games themselves flow very very nicely. Weapon balance is nice, maps are pretty, and stuff explodes all over the place.

I need to fiddle with the Clan support a little more, and I’d like to spend some time with the non-deathmatch modes (especially the more vehicle-based games), but overall it’s one of the best multiplayer games since Counterstrike.

Less pico: So far, nothing earth-shattering. Dual-wielding weapons is neat. Things look a little prettier. I played a bit of the single-player campaign, and it was okay but didn’t blow me away.

I think I’m basically bored with the “run down a hallway shooting all the bad guys” FPS thing, and even though this iteration is nicer than the last one, there’s a strong feeling that I’ve just played this before over and over and over. I didn’t finish the single-player campaign in the first Halo, and I bet I won’t finish this one either.

Maybe I’ll be more positive on the game after I’ve spent more time with multiplayer.