Until two years ago, BioWare was best-known for its Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights series, both outstanding role-playing games for a predominantly PC crowd. Then a funny thing happened: they smashed onto Xbox with none other than a Star Wars RPG (Knights of the Old Republic) and handily walked home with Game of the Year honors. Rather than work on the KOTOR sequel, BioWare chose to develop and entirely new property, Jade Empire, and after spending more hours with it than we’d care to admit, it’s all too apparent that BioWare has another game-of-the-year candidate on its hands.