Dynasty is defined as a succession of national rulers from the same family or genealogical line. The New York Yankees and Boston Celtics each typify sports dynasties. Jade Dynasty is an online game, presumably about a succession of national rulers from the same family or genealogical line. Or not. Perhaps it's about historically dominant teams in professional sports. We wanted to find out.

Jade Dynasty downloads to your Windows PC. Unlike Evony, it's not a simple Flash-based game that executes inside your browser. The download walloped our bandwidth for quite a while; it was about 1.5GB. Following the download, installation was trivial. No decisions about hardware configuration were necessary. No nasty messages popped up during the process. Time-wise, the installation seemed a little long, then we thought about installing Windows XP and we didn't feel so bad.

The opening screen was very cool. A floating borderless window includes an androgynous concierge with hip dysplasia throwing Harry Potter's wand at you. We felt a little lost at this point. There was quite a bit happening on this screen. Eventually we located the Start Button.

oops.

Was our mouse broken? Nothing happened when we clicked the button. Perhaps the dynasty had already collapsed?

After repeated clicks on what appeared to be a Start Button, we started clicking on what appeared to to me menu buttons; Account, Website, Settings, Options, Support, and Forum. The Website button opened http://jd.perfectworld.com/ in our browser. No help there.

The Account Button opened another web page in our browser: http://www.perfectworld.com/login. Evidently we needed a PerfectWorld account to enter Jade Dynasty World. Perhaps Jade Dynasty is a continent on The Perfect World. Who knew?

Perfect World rejected us. Certainly we have not achieved perfection but almost certainly we're worth of a free account on a web site.

No matter how we filled out the form, we repeatedly received the message "We found some missing information in your registration form. Please check the fields and try again". No fields were highlighted or otherwise flagged for correction.

After several attempts to prove ourselves worthy to PerfectWorld, we gave up in shame.

Space Invaders isn't looking so bad now.

After copious research here in our corporate labs we discovered our mistake. PerFectWoRld insists that our User Name differ from our Nickname. Why? It's their perfect world, they get to make the rules.

Anyway, after correcting our digital faux pas, we were permitted to create a PerfectWorld account and log in to the PerfectWorld web site.

Nothing else changed. The Start button continued to have no effect. We were stuck in a limbo world just south of PerfectWorld; all logged in with no place to go.

OK, we need to run the Updater. Despite the fact that we downloaded the program just minutes ago, it insists on updating itself. No worries, right? The payoff will be hours of entertainment in the Jade Dynasty. Let the update begin...

<yawn>

The update completed! The Start Button is functional! We click on Start ... and we get this:

OK OK OK. We get it. This is all part of the excitement that is Jade Dynasty.

We clicked on OK (who knows what we were agreeing to?); an informative message box popped up and immediately vanished. Jade Dynasty has closed itself completely. It's all gone.

Our trip to the Jade Dynasty has ended. We cry "uncle" and plug in the Nintendo 64.