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Whats Your Story Canageek

This weeks Whats Your Story post covers everyones favourite Canadian geek! There are few who can match Canageeks enthusiasm and hes proven himself to be a valuable part of the community, despite falling outside the typical retro demographic and not having played all that many adventure games. Hes currently tearing his way up the CAP leaderboard, so theres no better time to find out who the real Canageek is...

My home country is… Canada

My age is… 24

The first adventure game I played was… Fatty Bears Birthday Surprise. I will be using all my points to force you to play it in 1993, just FYI. I don’t know how many times I beat it, but it was a lot. I probably have most of it memorized still.


My favourite adventure game is… Fatty Bear again, since I played it so many times. I still can remember a bunch of the puzzles, almost 20 years later. Beneath a Steel Sky is the *best* pure adventure game Ive played, and the Submachine games are the only ones I’ve beaten without using spoilers (Well, some of them. Others I needed a number of hints on.)

When Im not playing games I like to... read. I’m a voracious reader, fiction, non-fiction, I consume it all. I went through a period for a few years were I was always on my computer, but then I hurt my wrist and couldn’t use my computer. While my reading speed was a bit slower than it used to be, I realized I’d never stopped reading. I had just switched to reading news, technology articles and forums instead of fiction. I’ve moved back a bit to books, and am currently working on the Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The one TV show I never miss is… I dont watch much TV to be honest. Almost none live. Ive watched all of a few series, does that count? Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Cowboy Bebop are the ones I enjoyed the most. I watched most of Auction Hunters on TV, so I guess that would be close. Im also working my way through Mythbusters as we speak. My brother has gotten me addicted to the new Sherlock series by the BBC. It is amazing.


The thing I miss about old games is... um, Im thinking. Some of the genres are kinda weak now: I want a modern X-COM, dammit. Oh wait, that is coming out. I’d have to say, the first is that a lot of new games take too much inspiration from older games, and not enough from books, TV, real life and so on. Go to the Wasteland 2 forums and you see a lot of talk of inspiration from Fallout 1-3, Wasteland 1 and other RPGs, but not much going back to The Road, The Postman, Daybreak 2250 AD, Damnation Ally, etc. Older games I think, while no more original, were less incestuous in the things they stole from.

The best thing about modern games is... The plot. Compare the Mass Effect Series to any of the games on this blog (I dont actually know the plot of ME2, and the ending of ME3 sucked, but the rest of it? Amazing!). Other games: Compare Zelda I and II to say, Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword. Heck, as brute-forced, listen to them talk, as the story of Red Dead Redemption was, I’ve got to say it is still better than any game on and of the retro-gaming blogs I read (Currently: CRPG Addict, this one, Chrontendo, and The RPG Consoler). Older games just didn’t have the space to put in detailed plots, and they weren’t seen as a storytelling medium yet, except in Japan and a few rare exceptions (Portal, 1988).

Second is UI: Even a game with a poor UI like Skyrim beats the pants off say, Dragon Warrior or 90% of the games on the CRPG Addicts blog. X-COM vs UFO:Alien Invasion, the modern open source clone. X-COM is the better game, but UFO:AI has the far, far better interface. There were some games with good interfaces: Castle of Winds: A Question of Vengance had a really cool Windows 3.1 inspired subwindow interface, so you could arrange your inventory however you wanted, a feature lacking from today’s games. Still however, we are in the era of arcane keyboard commands, tiny windows, and looking up weapon stats in the manual.


I like my games in (a box, digital format)… I dont really have a preference for how I get my games. CDs are nice as I dont have to remember redownload passwords, and I am confident that I can always reinstall them. However, I hate games that are locked so that you to have the CD: I find I’m much less likely to play them if I have to get up and play them.

If I could see any band live it would be… Any band live? Gotta be Shinedown. They visited Toronto once, but were opening for Nickleback, so the tickets were wayyyy out of my price range.

My favourite movie is... The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone.


One interesting thing about me is… I have Aspergers syndrome, an Autism spectrum disorder that means I cant naturally read faces, body language or social cues. Ive had to learn social interactions in the same way you would a second language. Is that interesting enough? Oh, and I’m a chemist-in-training whom has worked at a nuclear research facility (though not with anything radioactive), and then at a lab on the west coast monitoring the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Currently I’m working in a lab making things glow under UV light. (No radiation involved this time either, just lots of chemicals).