I can’t really pinpoint when or where I heard of this game. I remember a game magazine had a feature of it, and I remember seeing the green lipped heroine, Jade, as well as the pig sidekick, Pey’J. It was probably during high school. I also remember seeing something about this game on an episode of X-Play. (yes, I still like this show… Sessler is the man.)

Recently, it was the game of the month by the people at the Vintage Game Club. It was also $9.99 on Steam. This was also around the time I was thinking more and more about PC gaming again, and so it all fit fairly perfectly.

I finished it yesterday night, with a crash just before the credits (which I saw on YouTube: link for those that have the same problem).

So without reading the other reviews of those at Vintage Game Club, here goes. (Which reminds me, I need to go read some of them.)

Quick Review

If I still had my tablet, I would draw a graph of awesomeness as a function of time. But since I don’t, I’ll try to use words instead. Basically, it’s an upward curve, with a few valleys along the way, ending with a plateau.

Aside from the frustrating time I had trying to get the game to run properly (read Technical Issues), I remember just gobbling up the experience left and right at the beginning of the game. From the uses of the camera to the inventory system, all felt like a slight play on previous games I’ve played, and at the same time, completely refreshing.

With the camera, I kept thinking of Pokemon Snap, a rails-”shooter” where you take pictures of Pokemon. But this wasn’t just about taking pictures of animals. Without giving much more about the game, just know that it had more uses than just taking pictures of animals.

The vehicles were great, although I blame the lack of a controller to my slight annoyances that occurred at certain points of the game. The combat was simple, but as in the good kind of simple. I actually didn’t understand how simple it was until I had to look it up: Really, it’s just swing, swing towards a certain direction, or dodge. There are some neat things you have to do with your partner in certain parts of the game that add to the flavor of the combat.

This is where my first big valley of vexation comes into play: there’s a part around the mid-game where it might get a bit tedious. You really have just one type of enemy you have to fight, and they’re disarmed in the same fashion. Over and over and over again. Some might find this tedium faster than me, but luckily, it turns out that as soon as I felt the boring set in, it became all awesome again.

Oh, and how can I forget; the story and the characters. I’m not going to say anything more than that I felt really connected with the characters. Very wonderfully voice-acted with a beautiful soundtrack. Everything is amazing in this department, except… I read somewhere that this was supposed to be the first part in a trilogy. The ending really didn’t tie up the loose ends, but opened it up to another game that would follow (which, thankfully, seems like it’s coming for this generation of consoles). I was left with wanting a lot more, not only in the gameplay hours, but with the story.

Since I’m a UI nerd, I have a comment on some of the interfaces Jade would have to interact with. I guess this really isn’t a spoiler, but the “gears” switches that were used a couple times in the beginning of the game and once nearer to the end just seemed really out of place. I don’t know how else I would have implemented it, but it just didn’t mesh with the rest of the world. There are a couple more of these one-offs that I found to be just a tiny bit out of the blue, most of them were brilliantly done. (I remember this one part where I had to take a picture of something, and I was so amazed, I sat there for a couple seconds wondering what had just happened.)

The inventory and the password system both rely on the mouse (but it definitely seems like it was created for an analog stick). It just felt so right using it with my trackball (yes, I’m weird… or am I just that awesome?). More games need to be designed for the trackball… (this is an idea of mine… did someone say Super Monkey Ball with an actual ball interface?)

Technical Issues

If you’re rocking the unibody MacBook Pros (late 2008), you might run into issues running this game. Make sure to set the Affinity of the BGE.exe process to just one of the cores. If you don’t do this, you will have issues with the game running much faster than normal. (Actually, I use this to get through the beginning credits faster.) Just ctrl+alt+delete your way out of the game, right click on the process, and set the affinity to either CPU 0 or CPU 1.

Also, make sure not to pump out all the graphics. This causes some hilarious glitches with Jade missing her torso. I was playing it at everything max, except for anti-aliasing set to mid (I think you could set it higher, but this worked for me).

I had a minor problem with some of the later cutscenes having the audio be a little bit faster than what was happening on the screen. It wasn’t a huge deal, and at that point, I was so engrossed in the game, I didn’t want to restart it.

Conclusion

I can’t believe I waited this long to play this game. Heck, it was on the GameCube, even, and I had that console for a while. I genuinely feel like I missed something as a gamer before playing this game. It was the same kind of feeling I got when I played Braid for the first and second and maybe the third time.

At face value, it just seems like another action-adventure. But it’s much more: In comparison to Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, BGE stands fairly close, but doesn’t match at all to the length of Zelda. (I think is more or less a statement of my weariness of the series than anything else… don’t trust me on this sentence). My goodness this game is short. Less than 10 hours, easy, and I was fairly anal about the whole thing, taking pictures of almost all animals (I believe I’m missing two) and collecting almost all the pearls (except for the Looter’s Cavern 3 and 4 and some random pearls).

But even taking into account the length, some minor annoyances, and a less-than satisfying ending, this game is well worth the time and money. Highly recommended from me.

Sidenote: I keep saying “animals”, but I think it’s generally most living things. I don’t know the specific wording used in the game, but this was faster to type.