Jezz, what a great game. I must confess, flat, that it impressed me much less than the first installment. Several features, scenes and the general feeling was already known. Is takes a lot of the buzz and the fun, but what is left is so good that it is still one of the top games I ever played. What impressed me upfront is the level of detail. Batman Arkham City is a product of a gigantic effort and thought. The city is full of small surprises.

The story now is less impressive than the first game. Too many characters, villains in fact, are presented and compound the main story. But to patch all then into a single thread, the rationalization is left aside. The human villains are very plausible, like joker and penguin. But the more bizarre and monster like guys forces the story into a more a too much incredible way. Suddenly Batman stops chasing a psycho mass murderer and stats dealing with an assassin from centuries back, living by a coincidence in the city undergrounds.

Graphically the game is top notch. I would question a bit the excessive amount of colors that populate the city, regardless the argument that a place like that would normally be full of neon colors. The rest is gorgeous. I loved the humor -sometimes a bit dark- of the dialogs. Alfred almost always mocks Batman for being so good so smart so invincible. Joker, probably my favorite bad guy ever, is also a star.

The voice performances are amazing and convincing. In the artistic point of view, there is not much more to say than WOW.

The gameplay is very, very good. Easy enough to not let the flow stops but hard enough to keep you engaged. The plethora of gadgets is a bit confusing, but they make sense in the general situations. Puzzles are rational, challenges are well places and well executed. I tend to buy and play great games due to the fact I do some research before the acquisition. This game is a candidate to be one of the best games I ever played.

PS: Time to time I give my computer a clean installation of everything, formatting the hard drive. Guess what? I lost the saved game coz I forgot to backup this one! jezz, I’m soooo pissed. I was really near ending.

Gamespot:

• Just Right
• Oh Snap!
• Outstanding Gameplay
• Outstanding Visual Design
• Sucks You In
• Superior Animation
• Terrific Voice Acting

Due to my personality, I’m generally a very active and anxious person. Loads of ideas come into my mind every day. I struggle to keep focus on what is important, what I’m currently working.

To “gain” time, I like to listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I am working on something. It is fine when the work is repetitive, and you can free your mind by putting your body into an autopilot, separating mind from body. You can even see your physical existence, like you are dead and see your corpse. It requires training but by perfecting this technique allows you to do multiple things at the same time.

However, for tasks that require both concentration and creativity, identifiable sounds get in the way. Some words triggers some brain switches that makes my attention to direct to stuff that is not the work. And takes a lot of time to force my mind to concentrate back into productive tasks. Listening to music triggers the same switches.

I don’t recall the exactly place where I found about that rain sounds are relaxing. It’s kinda of common sense, but to deliberately listen to rain is not. Investigating the internet I discovered a web site that is so simple that is great: rainymood.com. It keep an infinite loop of a pure relaxing rain recording. With the eyes closed, you could easily feel sad and introspective, with an immense need of a good book and a blanket by just freeing your mind with this hypnotic music. An equivalent solution exists for my Android phone, with Rain Sounds. When the sleeping time comes, it makes a lot easier to put this on and lay down in bed. The sleep comes much sooner. Much calmly. Much rainy.

As an alternative, I’m also a Grooveshark.com recurrent user, BUT, basically listening to the ambient radio station, which have a selection of music that are essentially instrumental, no identifiable patterns and never raise the music energy to the point that is bring our attention. Since Grooveshark is not -currently- blocked on my company, it is a great place to avoid the external noise and focus in the work. With your ears locked, it is time to kill some to-do tasks using martial arts like GTD/pomodoro.

Before coming to Rio de Janeiro, I used to have a small and simple cell phone. In fact, I always defended the position that the mobile phone should exactly and only this: a phone. Make and receive calls. Everything else is geekry.

But then I discovered that my old phone wouldn’t work, simply that, in Rio due to a difference of band used in the state. In fact, only São Paulo state uses a different band range and only one provider operates in this range.

So I had to buy another phone. I don’t have a notebook, so I decided to buy a phone with a typical internet functionality. Therefore a smartphone is a reasonable choice. The best phone available at the store was a Motorola Defy. I, my mistake I confess, haven’t made a single research to see which model is good which ones are bad, so I kinda had to accept that phone.

For my surprise, That is a great model. I love it.

The phone is small, light and very fast. The Android version was 2.2, but I soon decided to abandon the product warranty in order to install a newer version from the independent developers called CyanogenMod. This distro is really good, mostly because it doesn’t not have a full selection of bloated apps.

I’m now a bit addicted about cell phones. An entire selection of websites about phones and phone apps, reviews and whatever now catches my attention, even if displayed in a glimpse of second. But even with a very nearest-to-the-hand-possible tool to post stuff, I still don’t enter in the Twitter world nicely. In fact, I’m planning to remove the automatic Twitter posts from the site. Useless since I don’t use it.

There are several design choices that Motorola took that I really like. USB cable that transform into a power cable is one of the most loved ones. It’s practical and reasonable to have only one cable. I don’t use Bluetooth, but it would be nice to use it also.

Now Motorola is owned by Google, I expect to get even better support for Android.

Chris Anderson got the world’s attention by writing the bestseller The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, where he describes the economic logic behind some eCommerce sites that sell an immense variety of goods instead of focusing on just a few.

In his next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he discusses the free (as beer): why people are so moved by free stuff, and how offering something for free might be a great deal. He gives you a brief and interesting history of the free merchandise, gives several theories (which is the main focus of the book), and several examples that happened in real life.

It has some common aspects with the first book: economies of scale and marginal cost/revenue. He shows that if an item’s cost is too small, you might consider it zero. Imagine HD space: since the price is constantly dropping, a company might consider it irrelevant and gives their clients unlimited space for free. It is not free for the company, but the actual cost is so low that it will not affect your profits in a relevant matter, but will generate an enormous impression for the clients.

Not Too Small to Matter, but Too Small to Meter

The author is prudent enough to not advocate free as a messiah. He believes, in fact, in the idea of Freemium, in which the product is offered as free for most users and a small fraction will pay for a premium offer.

Anderson eats his dogfooding by releasing the book for free as a pdf while the physical is paid for. The audiobook can also be found in a free version and is very curious: the full version, which is the complete book, is free while the compact version is paid. Time is money and the compact version saves you time but not money.

You can read my review about The Witcher. I loved the game, mostly because the huge personality that the whole product. Characters with a unique spirit, non-conventional story, choices that cannot be placed in the simple black-white gradient, adult theme, and the complements go on… For those that agreed with me, great news! The Witcher 2 is all of that, bigger and better.

The polish developers Projeckt CD printed a hollywoodian tone to the game. The storytelling element (both in game and kinematics) is superb. You really care about the characters and their motivations. Some characters that in the first installment were not that relevant in the game (but are in the book series that the games are based on), like Zoltan and Triss, in the second game they are relevant and very likable.

Since Bioware basically imposed the good/evil dynamics, several games were created using the formula. But the Witcher universe is nothing like that. Like in the real world, people are moved by complex motives: religion, politics, economics and even the mundane takes place. that, allied with (spoiler alert) the possibility of multiple endings (in fact, more than 1/3 can be different, depending on your decisions), and you will fill quite tempted to play the game a second time, just to see how things play out if you take other choices.

Graphically the game is nothing but true beauty. The same can be said about the sound and music. And all of them are relevant -so there is no filler stuff- and very well done. Textures, models and visual effects are top-notch. Famous RPGs like Mass Effect, Dragon Age are not even close.

But it’s not perfect. The menus are slow, difficult to select, the game generates hundresds saved games automatically and the turorial… the tutorial … the Trial by Fire, as they call it, was a wrong decision. It seems you are facing a boos as the very first contact with the game. I could also talk about the difficulty, that in the first thrid of the game is really hard.

Have no doubt! The Witcher 2 is problably my favorite RPG game ever. I can go even further? Top 10 games ever. Simply that.