AdventFalls

I didn't really feel that way. Tho Fan (the fictional language) was the only thing that comes close for me, and that just comes off as 'sticking to the old ways'.

You've been there. Your friend picks up a game from your collection, and you swear upon your mother's life that it's not complete rubbish or that people need to know about it. Said friend rolls his eyes and returns to whatever games 'made it'. We've all been there, calling that game a guilty pleasure, callinh it 'the critics just don't understand it, man', calling it what you want, we all like a game that just never got noticed or people actively hate.  
 
This doesn't seem like one of those games at first. Jade Empire was released on the XBox and PC in 2005, receiving positive reviews and selling at a decent clip. On top of all that, it was developed by Bioware between its astounding successes of KOTOR and Mass Effect. But it's within that frame of reference that this game suddenly qualifies for a defense. Amongst the Bioware stable it's the black sheep that no one ever acknowledges. When compared to games like Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, and even more recent stuffs such as Mass Effect 2, the legacy of Jade Empire is decidedly more muted. Even amongst reviews at the time the reception was less positive than most other Bioware games. Despite this, I manage to hold it in as high a regard as Bioware's other works even if others disagree due to its attempts to differentiate itself from its predecessors.
 
Jade Empire was Bioware's attempt to do something completely different. After several games where the entire conceit of combat hinged on whose turn it was, Bioware decided to create a real-time martial arts system. Instead of a fantasy world that drew inspiration from Western lore and more recent fair such as D&D, the game turns to the other side of the world and generates a world inspired by ancient China. This definitely helps the game stand out from its peers who'd all gone the other direction.
 
People can quack all they want about Bioware games sharing similar plot points and story arcs, but Jade Empire sells them quite brilliantly. While the story isn't quite up to par with others in the Bioware stable it's still a Bioware game- meaning you're already at a good starting point. Each story beat feels like part of a puzzle; you can see there's one missing fact that you know if you could discover would turn everything on its head. 
 
The characters themselves are split between the memorable and the necessary, a split that afflicts most Bioware games. This time the balance is more on the memorable side, with only one or two characters falling into the 'your mileage may vary' territory.  Bioware's romances return in Jade Empire, but with intriguing twists. For those of you interested in batting for the other team, Jade Empire actually allows you to do so regardless of gender. It allows for players to try and influence those character's way of thinking in manners that really do help sell their interactions with the player.
 
That brings us to the combat, and this is where things get much dicier. While Bioware deserves a lot of credit for trying a new combat system, the end result isn't nearly as complex as any of its previous entries. Combat only relies on three different stats, each of which creates derivative stats. The combination of martial arts, weapons, magical styles, and transformations all combine to create some visually inspiring stuff for an XBox-era game, and it makes you feel like a complete badass from a kung-fu movie. The flip side is that it can be mind-numbingly easy once you know what you're doing, and you'll figure it out fairly quickly since there are few stats to tinker with and you'll be favoring only a few different styles. There are only a few fights that can actually present a challenge to the player, and those actually end up hinting at something that could've been iterated on.
 
The game is also very short, especially for a Bioware game. Most games from the company have several towns to visit. This game has three, and access to them is limited by how far into the story you've accessed. It makes the game feel much smaller than it should, which brushes up a lot against its epic storytelling towards the end of the game. For people who don't have a lot of time on their hands, that actually makes Jade Empire an easier recommendation in that they'll actually have the time to commit to it. 
 
With all of that said, I have to talk about the game's morality system. This time it's clad in the philosophies of 'Way of the Open Palm' and 'Way of the Closed Fist'. They're ostensibly not supposed to be simple 'good and evil' choices, and either one can be construed as a 'wrong choice'. With that said, the system is almost completely ruined by the game's execution. While the fluff definitely supports a complex morality system, in practice Open Palm choices are altrustic and 'good' and Closed First are selfish and 'bad'. On top of that, the system is binary like KOTOR; gaining Open Palm points diminishes your Closed Fist tendencies just as surely as Light Side points did to the Dark Side. This is really a game where two meters might've worked out better; one that measured which philosophy you followed and one that measured how you followed it.
 
The system just seems to lack any kind of accountability, especially at the end of the game where a late-game decision can outright swing your character to the other side of the Open/Closed spectrum. KOTOR I had a similar problem, but that decision had some accountability in locking you out of certain end-game gear if you took the swing and the morality system wasn't as complex. Here, the swing is just a slap in the face. 
 
With all of that said though, you're still left with a damn good game. The story is epic, the game is short enough so that you don't tire of the simple combat, the morality system at least tries to not be a simple choice between being a saint or a rapist, and the setting is unlike anything most mainstream gamers have experienced. 
 
It's on Steam for $15 and available as an XBox Original for 1200 points. It's a pretty damn good bargain at that rate, but Steam has a history of offering deals on the game if that's too much for you. Pick it up if you want an RPG that does something different.

Edit: Never mind.

Hey guys- I'm AdventFalls, and this is the BombQuest.

Six months since the previous installment, but this next quest set is a doozy. Today we're taking on a set that includes the rarest quest in my entire collection. Welcome to South Boston.

Six quests, five of them rare, one of them amongst the hardest quests on any Whiskey Media site. First we need to quickly review Whiskey Media policy for how edits can be made. If you're under 1000 points, all of your edits go to moderation. Between 1000 and 5000 your edits to existing pages go through without issue, and can request for new pages to be made. Over 5000 and you can create a new page without hassle.

This means to get this quest set, you're going to need to acquire at least a thousand wiki points. A quick way to acquire them is to take on Wiki Tasks; they're found under 'Help'. These can give you anywhere from 75 to 300 points a pop depending on the moderator and how much work you did.

Let's get cracking and divide these up by type.

Wikid Addiction

• Create a new article on the site

This one can be tricky. In all likelihood you are not going to find a new game to add to the site's database. You're better off adding a new location, object, or character to the game of your choice. The page doesn't have to be particularly fleshed out, the mere fact that you create one and it be approved is enough to satisfy the requirement.

Shotgun Approach/Mowing Them Down

• Shotgun Approach: Edit 10 different wiki pages on the site.
• Mowing Them Down: Edit 25 different wiki pages on the site.

In all likelihood, you'll be well on your way to these quests en route to getting your first thousand points. Grammatical corrections to pages count as edits.

Part of the Problem

• Edit a page on the site and earn at least 1 point.

This one is easy to get, and you'll earn it while you're earning Shotgun Approach and Mowing Them Down. It can be anything from adding a sentence to fixing word tenses within an article. I haven't tested if adding new releases, images, or editing either will satisfy this quest. Feedback is appreciated.

Tactical Nuke/Major Fan

• Tactical Nuke: Earn 500 points on a single submission.
• Major Fan: Earn 1000 points on a single submission.

Yes, they stack. If you manage to earn over a thousand points on a page and you don't have Tactical Nuke, you'll earn both it and Major Fan. I tested this myself on the Harvest Moon 64 page.

These are not going to be easy, and the mod gods are not going to be forgiving if you copy/paste from Wikipedia. You are going to have to generate that much content on your own in a single edit. Here are a couple of tips to creating that edit.

• Create a draft in a word processor outside of Giant Bomb. You probably will get distracted during this and might end up closing your browsing window. Having it in a word processor lets you come back to it.
• Try finding a page that is relatively blank. The less information you find on that page, the more you can add and potentially eek you closer to the threshold.
• Add gameplay information. How do you play the game? Don't copy the manual or talk about button presses, what kind of gameplay does the game have? What enemies are present? What weapons or tools do you have? Important NPCs? The plot of the game? Its critical reception? If it's an older game you're editing, did it leave any kind of lasting legacy? If it's a character, how does his/her gameplay set him/her apart? If it's a object, how is it important?
• Add background. If it's a character, what's his or her deal and what point do they have in their games? If it's a weapon or tool, the game might have some fluff that you can summarize or quote (as long as you mention that you're quoting the game). If it's a game, how was it conceived, or developed?
• Add links. Link the first mention of an object, character, or location that has a page on the site. These tend to give out more points. Don't spam them though, or you risk moderator wrath.
• Add related games. What games or characters are similar to this one? What other games are in its franchise if it has one? What franchises are similar?
• Add related pages. If it's a game, who's in the game? If the game's locations have pages, where does it take place? What kind of gameplay concepts does the game use? What objects? If it's a character or object, what games does the character appear in?
• If in doubt, add more. I've come close several times on Screened to getting Major Fan with Jean-Luc Picard, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and the classic movie 'Network' only to discover I was just short. Add information everywhere you can as well formatted as you can. Hell, I ended up with 1500+ points on the Harvest Moon 64 page. If you need a page to use as a reference for how much work you can do, use that.

I can't walk you through these two quests because they're ones that you have to do yourselves, and it's all dependent on how much work you're willing to put into it.

---------

And that was South Boston! Any requests for a set or specific quest, or should I just keep picking up old quests?

There's always that one game in your collection. The one that makes you feel guilty for liking it, despite critics or your peers telling you it's just not very good. Call it a guilty pleasure, call it 'the critics just don't understand it, man', call it what you want, you like a game that just never got noticed or people actively hate. 
 
This is one of those games. Alpha Protocol, one of Giant Bomb's runners-up for the 'Most Disappointing Game of 2010' (a category that went hands down to Fable III). People didn't seem sure what to make of the game, and Sega didn't seem pleased enough with how the game ended up that i t's effectively put the kibosh on any followups. It's a damn shame because there are amazing ideas in here that could have been interated on. 
 
The one sentence summary of Alpha Protocol is 'Mass Effect with spies'- a compelling sentence. Obsidian Entertainment is no stranger to following in Bioware's footsteps, having created the flawed but conceptually brilliant Knights of the Old Republic 2 after the beloved Bioware RPG. What propelled KOTOR 2 to the point of nearly surpassing its predecessor was developing upon ideas the original had laid down and defying the expectations people had laid upon anything with the name 'Star Wars'.
 
Alpha Protocol does so in much the same way in that this is the first game where you can actually feel like a spy. There have been good James Bond games, and no shortage of espionage- themed outings, but those games never quite encapsulated the 'entire' spy experience of guns, stealth, and charm. Alpha Protocol allowed the player to do any of those three and to make them viable options for your character. That was what made for such a compelling case for this game. But I have to address the game's flaws a bit before I can explain why this is actually a decent game and you can pay money for it without regrets.
 
Part of the reason Alpha Protocol never quite caught fire was the fact that it's an Obsidian game. Obsidian has gained a reputation for, let's be honest, created a conceptually compelling game and then dropping the ball when it comes to technical quality. In this game, there are bugs. The game isn't really optimized and textures can take a bit to pop in. I've seen loot disappear between loads. The AI can be dumbfoundedly stupid at times if you focused on stealth. This is a textbook case of an Obsidian game needing more time in the proverbial oven to properly mature into a AAA product. 
 
The other big problem of the game is player expectation. When any kind of shooting is involved, players have been conditioned to assume that shooter-style mechanics come first and any role-playing trappings come second. Alpha Protocol flips the equation; it's an RPG with shooter trappings. If you want your gun to actually hit something, you need to invest in it. If you want to sneak around and you're not in the tutorial or Saudi Arabia, you have to pay for it. You're not automatically an expert at aiming a gun because that's how the game is designed; you have to play to your strengths and pay to get those strengths.
 
With that said, Alpha Protocol allows for a viable point disperal for any kind of run as long as you invest in one of the guns or martial arts- there are boss fights where you can't stealth your way to victory. Running and gunning is still an option with the right points and strategy, and stealth is a-ok (and possibly the path to easy mode depending on the AI). What helps sell the game is that the game world reacts to how you play. Something you say early in the game can come back late-game, the guys you saved could help you, your actions in a mission can come back to bite you in the ass down the line. It's a credit to the writing staff that they accounted for so many possibilities and made you feel like Michael Thorton's methods mattered.  The endgame can go a million different ways because of all of the shenanigans that you pulled, and that's awesome.
 
Speaking of credit to the writing staff, the story is arguably as compelling as some of Mass Effect's finest moments. There's a sense of tension that seemed absent from the majority of the original Mass Effect, and the characters manage to make themselves memorable in a way half of Mass Effect's party members either didn't quite succeed in doing or needed to return in Mass Effect 2 to make a better impression. 
 
This game is a clear-cut case of 'almost but not quite', but it comes close enough and does enough that other games don't that I can stand by this game and defend it. At full-price it's a dicey proposition, but it's now roughly $20 on Steam and it's old enough to be bought on the cheap if you buy your games used. Go for it.

It's a bargain if you can manage expectations and get it under $30.

Hey guys- I'm AdventFalls, and this is the BombQuest.

Been a while since the last Quest, where we took a good, hard look at Globe-Trotter. Today, we're looking at one that's actually fairly easy, but no one actually does.

Catch and Release. Three quests, and they're quests that require you to do something a certain number of times. They all count towards each other, so thankfully it doesn't force the issue too often.

Namely, you have to add a new release to Giant Bomb. This isn't 'add a new game', this is add a new release.

• Release Me!: Add one new release.
• Release Your Inner Data Monkey: Add 25 new releases.
• Full Release!: Add 50 new releases.

• How do I find a page that needs releases?

• Look for games that were never released in the US (Example: Mother 3, Getter Love!!)
  
• Look for games that predate the PS2/Gamecube/XBox era (Example: Glover)
• Look for games that didn't sell very well (Example: Rocket: Robot on Wheels NO I WILL NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT THAT GAME)
  
• Look for games that are really, really bad (Example: Elf Bowling 1&2)

• How do I add a release?

• The name
• The platform
• The region
• The release date