jade-empire posts

BioWare is a developer who has a proven track record of making excellent RPG titles. But early on in BioWare's life the team created the concept for the game that, in the end, got rejected outright by Interplay, its publishing partner at the time. IGN reports that during the DICE Summit this week BioWare co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk talked about the previously unrevealed but never released game.

It was called Five Fingers of Death (we love it already) and would have been a kung fu-themed game (complete with movie-style cut scenes) with the Baldur's Gate RPG genre. However when the concept was presented to Interplay Zeschuk stated, "... they laughed us out of the building." Ouch. BioWare later went on to make Jade Empire, an Asian-themed RPG that was more serious in tone to what Five Fingers of Death sounds like.

How popular are the one day sales this week on Steam? Well, one of the five games on sale on Monday, Prey, actually ran out of CD Keys (BioShock priced at $4.99 was put in its place). Today there are some more games cut down to the bone (in terms of their price) for the next 23 hours.

Like yesterday's this this new list has all but one of the games on sale for less than $10 each. The exception is King Arthur. The recently released RTS-RPG is on sale for $19.99 today. The other games are Silent Hill: The Homecoming for $9.99, Stormrise and Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor for $7.49 each, Jade Empire for $3.75 and Mr. Robot for a mere $1.99.

Developer BioWare is working on all cylinders lately with Dragon Age: Origins about to be released, Mass Effect 2 due out in the first quarter of 2010 and Star Wars: The Old Republic coming sometime later. But could BioWare look back and do a sequel to their first all original game Jade Empire in the future?

The Asian-themed action-RPG was released for the PC in 2006, nearly two years after it debuted on the original Xbox console. In a new chat with Strategy Informer, BioWare's lead designer of Dragon Age: Origins Mike Laidlaw, is quoted as saying, "At this point, Jade Empire is a staff favorite and a lot of us love it, so we'd love to revisit it at some point." That doesn't sound like a "No" to us.

Developing PC games just by themselves can be challenging. You have to deal with not one but thousands of different hardware configurations along with updating graphics drivers, the unique keyboard-mouse interface and more. But what about when you develop a PC game that was originally made for a console like the PS3, the Xbox 360 or others?

Some PC ports of console games have been embraced by PC games like Gearbox's superior port of Bungie's first Halo game and more recently BioWare's PC version of Mass Effect. Yet so many other consoles games either don't translate well to the PC formula or fail to reach a wide audience even if they add content that is not in the original version. Today we take a look at the many console games that either failed as a PC game translation or failed to reach a high PC gamer audience.

Click on the image above to continue reading "The College Try: Failed PC Ports Of Console Games"

Bioware's action-RPG Jade Empire was released originally for the first Xbox console in 2004 and in 2006 a "special edition" was released for the PC with some extra content. Now that PC special edition version has finally been ported over to the Mac platform via TransGaming's Cider tech and is now available via digital download.

In case you are unfamiliar with Cider, it basically acts as a "wrapper" that enabled the game to be run on Intel-based Mac computers. Unfortunately, Jade Empire for the Mac is a rather expensive title to download compared to the current price of the PC version. Transgaming is offering the title via its own download service for $39.95.