The Quixotic Engineer

Every Sunday in the summer, hundreds of people gather around the statue of Sir George-Étienne Cartier on Mount Royal. The assembly doesn’t have an official name, but it’s called the Tam-Tams by most. The focus of the event is the drum circle, a free-style jam where anyone can bring a hand-drum and start playing along; it’s not unusual to see over a hundred drummers at one time. The rest come to listen to the music, dance, play some hacky sack or frisbee and just enjoy the great outdoors.

Along with the Jazz Fest (which I wrote about earlier), the Tam-Tams are part of a complete summer experience in Montreal. The event has a great vibe, Mount Royal park is beautiful, and overall it’s quite possibly my favourite use of a Sunday. If you’re ever in the city, do yourself a favour and check it out.

• Tam-Tams in Montreal site
• Google Map of the park

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a problem writing essays with an assigned word length. I like to say as much as I can with as few words as possible, because to me good writing is concise and to the point. When I’m required to artificially lengthen my work, the result is always weak and diluted.

I think that this paradigm can be applied to all media. For instance, the film Strange Days had some interesting ideas, but as a two hour long feature film they were lost in a sea of pointless action and terrible drawn-out dialogue. Done right, it could have made a great 20 minute short film. Consider the last 80 hour RPG you played: could it have been an even better 50 hour RPG by removing a tedious dungeon crawl or two?

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When I first read about Shadow of Destiny, it immediately struck me as a very peculiar game. It has elements in common with Indigo Prophecy, in that it involves a murder mystery and is somewhat like an interactive film. What interested me enough to skulk out eBay for it, however, was definitely its unique premise; you play as Eike Kusch, a recently deceased man who is given the chance to go back in time and prevent his own mysterious murder.

After being stabbed in the street, Eike finds himself in a timeless void where a creature named Homonculus offers him another chance at life. Dodging fate, however, is a daunting task; it seems that the young man has found himself caught up in a sequence of events that has spanned centuries. At the start of each of the game’s eight chapters, fate catches up to Eike in a number of creative ways (which include being run over by a car, having his food poisoned and being pushed off a tall tower). Each murder that he manages to prevent gets him a little closer to the root of the problem.

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I was on vacation earlier this summer at a friend’s cottage near Parry Sound, Ontario. While in town one day, we walked over to Bearly Used Books, a terrific used book store where, along with about eight other books, I picked up a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I was vaguely familiar with the general plot, having seen parts of the televised miniseries years ago, and knowing that it was considered a classic among sci-fi fans I was eager to read it.

Needless to say I read it ravenously. Frank Herbert crafted the world of Dune with loving detail and a passion akin to Tolkien, with appendices, maps and a glossary at the end of the book. It was not a typical sci-fi world either; I found the idea of mentats, human supercomputers necessary since the ban of thinking machines, especially interesting.

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I was recently directed to new video series over at Gametrailers.com, a retrospective of the Final Fantasy series. While I’m all for nostalgia, I’m becoming a little jaded by it. I’m happy to see gamers acknowledge their roots, but frankly I’m tired of game companies looking to cash in by exploiting my childhood memories.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised at the quality of this retrospective. I expected a cheesy montage of gameplay footage, but instead found that the videos explored some interesting questions: How was Final Fantasy radically different to other games at the time? What innovations did it each sequel bring to the RPG genre? How were the early games unbalanced?

You may also want to check out their Metroid and Zelda series retrospectives, which are also good.

[Final Fantasy Retrospective – Part 1]