The Quixotic Engineer

Video game enthusiasts have had a deluge of great titles to choose from this fall. What started building momentum back in August with the release of Bioshock is coming to a head in November, with hotly anticipated titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect and Rock Band arriving within scant weeks of each other.

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Normally I try to resist the urge to make a post devoted entirely to linking to another article; adding the Google Reader widget was supposed help me develop discipline in that regard. However, this post about superstitions in MMORPGs from The Daedalus Project was just too excellent and funny to pass up.

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In keeping with my love of excellent short stories, particularly dystopian science fiction, I highly recommend Raccoona Sheldon’s Nebula Award-winning The Screwfly Solution. The title is a reference to the sterile insect technique used to eliminate the Screwfly worm in the USA, Mexico and parts of Centreal America. The story is a shocking one, dealing with themes of sexuality, violence and femicide, and is told in a great disjointed style through a combination of several narratives, letters and newspaper articles.

Read the story first (seriously, do it!), then consider the following: wouldn’t it be great to see a video game set in the middle of an end-of-the-world scenario (not after one)? One where you start out in the near future, in a big city living a normal life. You start to hear dangerous rumours, maybe a deadly manmade pandemic, a militant religious organization, or some other Margaret Atwood storyline. From there you could have branching paths: do you petition the government? create a militia? go into hiding out in the country? Perhaps there could even be an element of randomness, where sometimes the rumours really are just rumours and you end up a paranoid conspiracy theorist!

This idea would definitely need some polishing and refinement (and I may have drawn liberal amounts of inspiration from Indigo Prophecy), but properly executed I think it could be really interesting. Leave a comment if you have any ideas on how this game could be implemented (or just call me crazy! That works too).

For those who are perhaps not aware of the situation, for many years the Canadian dollar was worth 0.70 – 0.90 cents to the US Dollar. Recent events in both countries have pushed the exchange rate closer to 1.035, which is great news for consumers in theory. However, many US-made goods have yet to match their prices to this new parity, video games included.

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Great news for you Wii owners: Okami, one of the overlooked gems of the Playstation 2, is being ported to your system. One of my personal favorites, Okami is an adventure game not entirely unlike The Legend of Zelda in execution. However, what has made the game truly iconic are the unique graphics and the creative Celestial brush system.

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