The Quixotic Engineer

When I was a child, video games were a precious commodity. There was a wealth of great titles available for the SNES, but I only had a chance to play a handful of them. I cherished the ones I was fortunate to get my little hands on, and never tired of playing them over and over. There isn’t a SNES title in my collection that I haven’t beaten at least once, including some that I’ve revisited at least a half-dozen times.

Nowadays I find myself in the 18-30 unmarried male demographic, equipped with disposable income and the Internet hype machine. My free time isn’t what it used to be, but the game industry keeps chugging out more terrific games, culminating in last season’s veritable tsunami of AAA titles.

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Goichi “Suda51” Suda, CEO of Grasshopper, is a bit of a renegade game maker. His last game was Killer7, a strange on-rails shooter with a convoluted plot and extreme gore that became something of a cult classic. His latest offering, No More Heroes for the Wii, was released in Canada just this week. This of course was a week later than our neighbours down south, a week I spent reading some of my favorite bloggers have a nerdgasm or two over it. Needless to say I picked it up the day it arrived with great anticipation.

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Yesterday marked the end of CUSEC 2008, a three day software engineering conference for Canadian university students. While the conference has been going annually since 2002, this was my first year attending. I had initially planned to be quasi-live blogging the whole thing, but I hadn’t realized how busy the three days were going to be. Instead, here’s a quick recap of some of the terrific people I heard from at CUSEC.

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I don’t watch much television, but when I do like a show I follow it religiously. My favorite series of all time was Firefly, a peerless science fiction series that was tragically cancelled after 14 episodes. I plan to elaborate on my love for that particular show someday, but for now let’s just say that there’s been a hole in my sci-fi loving heart since 2002. My enjoyment of the new Dr. Who is a poor substitute, with its lack of an overarching narrative and generally poorly developed characters.

When my friend’s father, Dave, told me that he was enjoying the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, I was sceptical at first. Dave is a big fan of sci-fi television, but he also enjoys series such as Stargate and Babylon Five that I never really got into. I also felt that a show whose cast of characters were primarily military and government officials would be too dry; I prefer characters who are on the gray side of the law, such as Malcolm Reynolds and Han Solo.

However, last week on a whim I broke down and asked to borrow his Season 1 DVD set. It took a while to get going, but I’m now 4/5ths in and completely enthralled. Some of the characters, such as President Roslin, Colonel Tigh and Dr. Baltar, are interesting people with complex motivations. The show also does a good job of keeping enough hidden to allow for a perpetual sense of mystery. I’m already speculating as to which of the crew members are really Cylon sleeper agents.

It’s not Firefly, but it’ll do for now.