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"Heed my words, for here comes the age of the sword and the axe, the age of the wolfish storm.

Here comes the Time of the White Cold and White Light, the Time of Madness and Contempt, Tedd Deiradh, the Time of Ending.

And the world will die away slow, frozen in ice and covered with snow..."


Don't try to deny it; there's always been a part of you that wants to jack in your job at the office, don a linen shirt and some leather armour, strap swords across your back and go on a monster-slaying, womanising rampage, without shaving or indeed washing for weeks at a time. Unfortunately today's society frowns on such behaviour, so as a fairly good substitute I would recommend The Witcher.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; games with good stories are few and far between. It seems far more profitable to produce yet another mindless blasting game every six months than to actually take time and effort in making something decent. But to their credit, BioWare, CD Projekt and Atari have gone against the grain, and the result is stunning.

How do you make such a decent game? Well, The Witcher did get a bit of a leg-up from Polish fantasy writing legend (don't ask me how to pronounce it) Andrzej Sapkowski whose series of novels following the witcher Geralt are revered apparently on a level with Tolkien in Poland. So that was the story more or less sorted, once it had been adapted to make it playable. Then came the artists, who designed the game world around Sapkowski's writing, the result being stunningly realistic and photogenic surroundings with abundant plants, a day and night cycle and creatures and people to go with them. With such fantastic surroundings it would be a shame to have unrealistic characters and combat; so the next step was to create the movements of all beasts, people and sword fighting with the help of a full complement of actors and sword masters using motion capture. Put it all together with some excellent voice-acting and actually make the game which is powered by BioWare's Aurora Engine, and there you have it: over eighty hours of fantastic role-playing game.


- The sword of destiny has two edges. You are one. -

The basics of gameplay are very simple; you can either use the click-where-to-move style or the press-buttons-on-keyboard style. When diplomacy fails (i.e. 99% of the time) combat is done by clicking on the enemy - after selecting an appropriate weapon - and then Geralt does the rest. Violently. In order to survive on the

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