Spoiler alert: It is now my favorite game of all time. Period.

I played The Witcher couple of years ago, after reading an interesting review saying that it was one of the best RPGs ever made. The review also alerted that the game suffered deeply from bad translation and bugs when first came to english markets. The second edition, called Enhanced Edition, fixed most of these issues and indeed enhanced some aspects of the game. When I played, I had to agree that the game and the universe were fantastic. I loved the idea of playing with an anti-hero.

The Witcher 2 came and I also loved it. It departed from the Aurora Engine (used in Obsidian’s classic RPGs like Neverwinter Nights) to a home made. The art direction took an overhaul and started to show the real vision. The general gameplay also transitioned to a more action oriented, with a third person over-the-shoulder camera style.

The Witcher 3 was announced and I had to confess that I was a bit worried about the open-world nature. The Witcher main strength, as a series, was the strong story telling. Open-world games tend to have a loose and light story. See Bethesda’s Elder Scroll and RockStar’s GTA series.

The closer to the release, the more excited I was getting. It was one of the very few titles that I have ever pre-ordered.

And it delivered!

Since from the very start, the game shows that it has a fantastic story driven gameplay and strong action mechanics. Since from the very start, it will keep your mouth and eyes opened. It is how I stayed for hours of playing. There are 3 pillars that make this game so awesome:

Story

The most surprising good feature is the story elements. As I said before, open-world games tend to be a bit light in order to accommodate a generic and open nature of the game. They generally just introduce the gameplay elements. But in Wild Hunt, the main story have a purpose, a true life. The plot is complex and it raises in tension each step.

But what surprised me most is the richness of  the side quests. They did not fall into the trap of creating a bunch of generic side quests, like most Assassin’s Creed or Borderlands, or even Skyrim, with several missions that are purely kill a target or get an item. They are more elaborate, with an introduction of context on each of them, multistepped and often with resolution with a moral dilemma. Combat and violence is not always the way of resolving things. In summary, they put a lot of effort on creating all of them, avoiding the generic content-fill approach.

The characters seems deep and believable. They have different motivations: some are greedy, some are brutal, some are kind, some are funny. Geralt cannot be defined as good or evil. He is more complex. You can save one beautiful lady by letting dozens die. You can take part of a monster that is counter attacking humans that are invading its territory. You can date some different girls, but notice that for every decision, there are consequences. You will never face a “right” decision.

Gameplay

They listened to the players from previous games and they changed and tweaked The Witcher formula while maintaining the series main concepts. Alchemy is proved to be useful, magic and combat are complementary. The players are constantly forced to change styles and mastering all the techniques. It creates variable combats and protects the players from being a mere button presser, with monotonous single style of play.

The map traversal is fun and interesting. The land is filled with monsters and mysterious characters. Beautiful landscapes. Detailed cities. Do yourself a favor and avoid the main roads and explore the map. The horse Roach is useful and fun. Fast travel is done nicely (altought I hate where the Crow’s Perch).

The developers got almost all the design choices right. All the information is presented clearly and most of the boring aspects, like loot and inventory administration, streamlined.

Graphics

The third element that hooked me also stunned almost everyone in the world: the graphical presentation is absolutely the best. Skyrim did quite a splash when it came out, but it is nothing, nothing compared to The Witcher. They extracted the most of the technology to bring a very detailed and brilliant world even imagined.

They animated EVERY dialog. All the set pieces are cinema like, with moving, talking, gesticulating and vivid characters. For sure they invented some animation editor to allow to procedurally change camera angles and some gestures, but man, it works really well.

The cities are huge. It takes quite a time to cross one city. One of many. The terrain is so beautiful that they put some situations in the story that the main character itself stops and take a moment watching the view.

In the sound department, all the dialogues are voiced, in an enormous production challenge.

Bonus: Customer friendly

Unlike most of today’s businessmen in these industry, the guys from CD Prokect really mean customers-first. They proved in the past, creating the Good Old Game (not only GOG.com) with no DRM, and they proved this time. The game was fixed and really enhanced patch after patch, mostly due to the players feedback. They are for me the ultimate inspiration for business management for an digital company. It should definitively an inspiration for Konami or EA heads.

My final thoughts are quite simple: it took me months to complete the 130+ hours of the main campaign. I was delaying it on purpose, fearing it would end. I liked so much that I could say that it is probably my favorite game of all time.

Fuzzy Nation is a great story about fighting for what is right and getting personal revenge along the way. Scalzi created a very funny story about an underdog fighting against all odds and powerful enemies.

Jack Holloway is an anti-hero. You can think of him as Han Solo working as a lawyer. He is a former lawyer that was expelled from the job for a not-that-clear fact, losing a very important case on purpose, it seemed. He became then a geologist freelancer on a very distant planet, scanning underground for mineral richness. On the way, he discovered a very different thing. And it puts him in a position to work back as a lawyer, fighting against the former employer, that is no short of money and resources.

Holloway is clever. But this is one of the main complaints I had. Holloway is so clever that you cannot follow what he is thinking. It is, in fact, intentional. The book hides inner thoughts of Holloway to deliver some surprising turns in the story. But sometimes it makes you feel like a mere passenger.

Despite any complaints, it is a solid title. I loved reading it and recommend it. I would not be surprised if it gets a movie adaptation eventually.

I like my notebook a lot. Lenovo did a great job assembling this piece of hardware, the Yoga 2 Pro, bought almost 2 years ago. Light, fast, portable, durable. It came with the weird Windows 8 and the last month it upgraded to Windows 10. It was really appreciated, because Win10 is definitively better and faster but also it is definitively the most invasive of privacy. I was getting more and more annoyed about Microsoft approach on Windows.

In fact, I’m currently in a vibe of doing things by myself to preserve privacy and enhance my general experience, personalizing things.

The main reason that I have to use Windows is mostly games: both playing and making them. But the current investment of Valve to bring it’s Steam gaming platform to Linux and Unity finally building a Linux editor, I was getting much more comfortable testing new things…

At the same time, I started to read very good comments about the new line of KDE kits. KDE, the one desktop environment that I like the most, is reinventing itself again, it major focus on performance. Performance enough to aim into mobile space, they say. It grabbed my attention.

In a leap of faith, I removed the Windows license and installed a brand new Kubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, currently in beta, to check this out

What a cool experience! I’m still rediscovering it, but it is going well so far. KDE is really much faster and more responsive. The app selection is more robust and solves most of the problems out of the box. It lacks a better online app store that the ordinary and very unappealing repos tough.

I’m not going to, for now, give a final impression, because it is a beta phase for Kubuntu and me too. There are too mane quirks to ignore, but It can be just matter of getting used to. Maybe after a month I will close an opinion about it.

The Martian is often described as Cast Away in space. I agree. It presents the incredible task of surviving, alone, on Mars. Just like Tom Hanks surviving on the island.

But improvising life on Mars is several degrees more complex than on that island. This is why the main character in The Martian has to be a very, very very smart guy, a little too MacGyver to be honest. Imagine Apollo 13, the movie, when NASA focuses on converting ship scraps into an oxygen filter, but for the entire duration of the movie, it was done mostly by one guy.

80% of the book, Mark Watney is in dire straights. Always facing high odds of dying. This is why the book is so compelling. It sucks your soul, making you wonder at night “how he can pull this off now?”. Watney must have a clear state of mind all the time. I understand that it would not make any sense to write a book about a normal guy that gets lost on Mars and dies after the first disaster. But Watney is too much the perfect guy to be lost in spaceace.

The book sometimes abuses the technical description of the solution. It could be shorter by a bit. However, and this is not a small achievement, there are at least 2 moments when I was crying due to the narration and climax feeling.

It will become a movie directed by Ridley Scott and started by Matt Damon. I will see the movie for sure.

Without any delay, I give it to you: Mark of the Ninja entered to my Top 10 Games of All Time. That is the how much I liked the game.

This beautifully crafted 2D action stealth game. You are asked to go through the stealthy approach in the entire game, but if you are more willing to make it a blood bath, it is a viable option too.

The controls are sharp and the levels are very well designed. And just like Super Meat Boy, the difficulty level is at the point that it you will get compelled to replay it for a better score.

Music is great, story also very good (makes you wanting to know more about the mysteries ahead). I got really inspired by the Klei production.

I played it until I got almost all the badges and challenges completed. When I finally got almost everything possible, it made me sad to uninstall it.