Hi, my name is Jean-François. I’m Canadian and, as you can probably tell from my name, French is my first language, so please excuse any gallicisms that sneak in. I live in the province of Québec, right across the river from Ottawa.
My main interests and hobbies include history, politics, literature, videogames and boardgames, cooking and tennis.
I did two law degrees in university, but skipped the bar and did a masters in legal translation instead of becoming a lawyer. I then spent around five years as a translator for the federal government, working mostly on translating decisions from the various federal-level courts. Four years ago, I followed my interest in legislative drafting and joined the the federal Justice department, on the team that is responsible for reviewing all federal bills and proposed regulations. Half of the work is basically copy editing the French or English version (French in my case) and the other half is making sure that both versions are equivalent.
I found this community after reading a few of Tom’s reviews and coming to this forum to follow the comments threads. The one thing that struck me was Tom’s reaction to typos and factual errors. It makes me happy to see someone thank people for pointing out mistakes instead of making up excuses or dismissing them.
I joined the forums at the end of 2016, but have only started posting regularly in the last few months.
My favorite genres are strategy, tactics, rpgs and card-based games, but there are very few genres where I haven’t found at least one great game.
As for the games that “made me”, here are the main ones.
King’s quest 5 This game, along with the Québec-dubbed version of The Simpsons, is what helped me become bilingual, eventually leading me to my career in the translation field. My grasp of English was limited and my parents quickly tired of being pestered to translate every other sentence, so they bought me a French-English dictionary. Over a few months, that allowed me to play the game mostly on my own, with only the occasional help needed. Many puzzles were really unfair and I only finished it years later with the help of a walkthrough, but I loved the mix of various fantasy environments and the game had a huge effect on my language skills.
Red Baron This is THE game of my childhood. Just the manual was amazing. I say manual, but it was a history of the Great War and of the birth of aviation as well as a treatise on the physics of flight all in one. I threw out most of my game boxes and manuals years ago, but my beat-up Red Baron manual is one of the very few things I kept. I must have read it through dozens of time on my long school bus rides. Reading about Immelmann, von Richtofen, Guynemer, Bishop and all the other aces and the flying alongside or against them was a magical feeling. The whole character-progression system was amazing : getting medals and promotions, getting shot down and rotting in a p.o.w. camp, moving to different squadrons and eventually getting to customize your own plane. I still remember how proud I was when I reached 82 victories with one of my pilots.
Warlords This was the start of my love for turn-based strategy and tactics games. Even almost 30 years later, I still think of the map of Illuria with its 80 cities (and I’m not alone in that, I have found a fan-made version of that map for pretty much every fantasy strategy/wargame I have played since). I can remember the city, close to the Orcs of Kor starting location, that produced wolf-riders a turn faster than usual, the joy of flying around the map with a hero stack full of dragons and other flying units, the despair of having my best hero slain by a demon while exploring a ruin. I played a lot of Warlords 2 and even more of Warlords 3 DLR - both better games in every aspect - but I will always look back fondly on the first game.
Lords of the Realm The first empire-building game I played. I really liked the mix of castle building, province management and conquest. It’s also the first game I can remember that had different personalities for your AI opponents. The Knight was an annoying and aggressive enemy, so he was usually my first target, but he managed his lands like a drunken teenager, so whatever county you captured from him was useless for a long time. On the other hand, it really paid off to capture a province from the Bishop or the Countess. I liked the sequel well enough, but I felt it went too far in the RTS direction and simplified the management and castle-building aspects too much.