From: http://gaming.tweaktown.com/reviews/873/1

Sure, the combat system is pretty cool, but it gets better. Perhaps the coolest feature of all in The Witcher is the presence of a time-of-day system. While obviously being based on an accelerated model, The Witcher has authentic nights and days that develop in front of your very eyes. The cool part specifically comes from how the game utilizes the day-night system in its missions and general gameplay - some missions can only be done at certain times of the day, and some areas such as villages can change dramatically in atmosphere from light to dark. Lets just say, when the moon comes rising, many of the game’s baddies come out to play, and the once bustling friendly day time environments turn into deserted spooky landscapes of death. It just adds so much to the gameplay and atmosphere and, thanks to Geralt’s ability to meditate around a fire or rent a bed, you can accelerate time as you wish. It is also during the meditation phases in the game where you can spend any experience points, and create many of the games potions - one of the greatest tools at a Witcher’s disposal.

The potion creation system basically epitomizes the depth and detail you can expect to find in The Witcher. Rather than simply picking up ready potions from the slain bodies of your opponents, more often than not what you will find ingredients instead, which you must then take and combine with other ingredients and bases to create particular potions, and the potions in this game are nothing to be ignored, as they can easily be the difference between defeat and victory, giving Geralt enhancements such as faster life regeneration, slowing down time, special immunities, and things of that nature. There are a fair few ingredients you can acquire, some very rare, and there are multiple ways to go about acquiring ingredients. For instance, if you make an effort to obtain and read books in the game from literature vendors and other sources, you can learn about wild plants and actually go out and pick certain ingredients from the world around you. You have to be careful with potions though, as too many at a time can hurt Geralt as indicated by the game’s toxicity meter, which you can deplete via meditation/sleep.

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From: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1028

What influenced your thinking about the game - and I mean, in specifics rather than generalities. In what ways did other games open your eyes, make you realise this is what games could be and why were they wonderful?

Vince: Fallout – a masterpiece that redefined role-playing and set a new standard.
Planescape - reading in a game has NEVER been so much fun, and according to Avellone, never will be.
Darklands - it’s easier to list what you couldn’t do in that game than what you could do. It saddens me that a game of that caliber won’t be made again, but hey, who needs gameplay when you can look at shiny next-generation graphics? m i rite?
XCOM - The king of turn-based gameplay. If you haven’t played it, stop reading this crap and go play it right now.
And finally, Prelude to Darkness, a brilliant indie game that nobody played:

Prelude to Darkness featured an original, very detailed setting, great TB combat system, multi-solution quests, branching main quest, and many innovative design elements. That was the game that inspired me the most. It has shown me that indie projects can easily compete with and even beat “commercial” games in the gameplay and design departments.

It gets more opinionated after that around turn based games and the state of the industry

More about The Age of Decadence

Genre: games • strategy • Platform: Pc •

Status:

Genre: games • computers • strategy • Platform: Pc •
Developer: Battlegoat Studios • Publisher: Paradox Interactive •
Status:

Genre: games • computers • role playing • Platform: Pc •
Developer: Iron Tower Studios • http://www.irontowerstudio.com/
Status:

I really have a soft spot for game music. For example, there is a kind of music that will always make me think of the Descent series - and if I hear something of that style, or something from the Descent soundtracks, I can almost hear “Good luck Material Defender” again… Or when i listen to some mp3s taken out of Wow, I can tell where I am within seconds of the tune starting. Not to forget mentioning the sweeping music of Guild Wars, and so many more… Years later you are suddenly back in the game. There’s a few sounds that put me right in magic carpet again, even when i hear them used in other games…

So I decided it would be fun to have a couple tunes and maybe a ringtone or two from some games I liked, see if anyone ever ticks, too.... so I set out in search for buyable, downloadable or any version of the soundtracks of games

Here are a couple sites I found

Big archives:
http://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks & http://gh.ffshrine.org/ both have a strong asian/anime bias since soundtracks are big there, released on CDs etc.
http://www.thealmightyguru.com/VGMPF/Index.html - the video game music preservation foundation. Has older titles
http://www.vgmusic.com/
http://www.ocremix.org/ - remixed game music

Composers who offer some music
http://www.billbrownmusic.com/musicmain.htm

Publisher related pages who offer some music
http://queststudios.com/
http://soundtracks.mixnmojo.com/

news & reviews sites
http://uk.music.ign.com/index/gamemusic.html
http://www.music4games.net/Index.aspx

I’ll update this as I find more.
So far I have found the Descent games, Terminal Velocity, several of my favorite RPG soundtracks, and I suspect those tunes will make me want to revisit the games

From: http://www.chmodoplusr.com/IntoCerberon/

Into Cerberon is a mod for Doom 3 that will bring the six-degrees-of-freedom action of the classic FPS game series Descent into the high-powered graphics engine of Doom 3.

I soooo want that!

More about Descent

From: http://gaming.tweaktown.com/reviews/873/1

there is hours upon hours of gameplay if you also choose to focus on as many secondary quests as possible, and despite their non-compulsory status, a lot of effort has gone into making them quite detailed, and not just thrown together time wasters. You can become a dice/poker profession in the game’s gambling scenes (often found in taverns), you can try and score with a few of the game’s female characters (adding some adult themes to the gameplay), you can take up mercenary contracts posted on bulletin boards - the list goes on. There is just so much to do in this game, at times it was hard imagining it ever ending.

And this detail isn’t just subject to the primary and secondary quests, it’s an evident theme across much of the game. The environments and locations you will find yourself, while featuring clear physical boundaries, never feel closed in and ‘staged’ like you can often see in games like this. They feel like living and breathing villages and communities, filled with different characters and identities every step of the way. While the game does recycle quite a lot of the faces and voices you’ll encounter, you never really get the sense anything in how the locations and environments were constructed in The Witcher was rushed - it all feels very carefully crafted with a lot of attention to detail, ultimately creating a quality gaming experience.

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