Category: External Sources

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Dead Space’: The Frightening, the Dauntless and the Meh

My weekly post on PopMatters is up. This week in horror month I wrote on Dead Space. It went up a day late, because I posted it in the back end a little later than usual and it was missed until late afternoon. And it was late because I was actually still playing Dead Space early on Tuesday morning. Friends on the weekend and the Monday Presidential Debate cut into my play time. Pretty much everything I have to say on the game is in that post. There really isn’t anything extra. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Horror is Knowledge: The Presentation of Fear in ‘Call of Cthulhu’

I’ve moved on the Lovecraft this week. Few horror games get you right off the bat. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth manages to do just that. I play these games on the lookout for something to talk about. Thankfully I only booted the game up for about a minute when the Warning symbol gave me the perfect jumping off point. I knew the game would screw with me with the visual and audio because that is what Lovecraft inspired video games do. I didn’t expect for the game to warn me about it ahead of time. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Haunting of ‘Dear Esther’

I finally get around to writing about Dear Esther, one game in a long list of my to write about backlog. It is a little difficult talking about a game so late that so many others have already discussed. But few seem to have written about the content of the game rather than if it is a video game or not. I figured I would write about it for October, because it is a ghost story. However, in trying to parse through the game’s meaning I felt stuck on what to say about it. So, I went and played it again. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Fear is Gone: Reconsidering the ‘Left 4 Dead’ Series

It’s October and so begins a month talking about horror games.  It seems only fitting. First up are the Left 4 Dead series. Always one to be oh so punctual, I was looking over the list of horror games or at least games with tangentially connected horror elements and for some reason couldn’t find an angle to write about any of them. I have three or four false starts hanging around in word documents. But in thinking about Left 4 Dead I reminisced on my changing attitude to the game over time. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Binary Domain’: A Shooter That Assumes You Are Intelligent

As with last week’s piece, I noticed that Binary Domain, one of the best games of the year so far, was also missing a review. Might as well correct that oversight as well. There is a lot in Binary Domain that one could focus on in individual pieces, but what all of them have in common is the subversion of the modern conception of the third person shooter. It takes away a lot of assumptions that games of this ilk take for granted that you don’t realize it takes for granted and then decides to focus on them. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Driver: San Francisco’: The Best Game of 2011 that No One Played

A while back I got bored and wanted to see how PopMatter’s best games of 2011 compared with the reviews of the games over the year. Then I wondered if there were any high rating games that didn’t make the list. Which led me to look up what PopMatters review of Driver: San Francisco. Turns out we hadn’t done one. I set out to correct that. Now I could wax lyrical about Driver: San Francisco for thousands of words and, in fact, I have. | more

Eric Swain External Sources, Recent Posts

Crit Dist Bit

Let it never be said that opening your mouth at the wrong moment doesn’t get you working on the weekend. I’m always happy to take the reins for TWIVGB and give Kris Ligman a break. Though the day of is usually not the best time to get started on the short list. This week for some reason had a ton of really long pieces. Only 2 or 3 of which made it in the final round up. Apparently fellow contributor Katie Williams thought the motif I used was adorable. | more

Eric Swain External Sources, Recent Posts

Drake’s Greed and Fortune

And I make it to the last of my Uncharted essays exploring the themes of each game via its title. I like it when a work’s theme can easily be summed up by the work. It’s nice in part, because that means there is some sort of cohesion to it. I’m sure that the titles were chosen in some part because they sounded badass in marketing or something, but they still manage to evoke the core of each game. Now I have written about Uncharted a long time ago and much of the content in that post and this one are very similar. | more

Eric Swain External Sources, Recent Posts

‘Among Thieves’: Honor or No Honor?

The next post in my mini-series on the Uncharted games is up at PopMatters. This time I look at the themes of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Like the previous post I use the title as a jumping off point to see the deeper meaning of the game is. In fact, Uncharted 2 was the game that clued me in to this possibility. While I figured Uncharted 1′s meaning and concept pretty quickly and Uncharted 3 was obviously pushing it to be about Drake the second game had me stumped. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

September 1st TWIVGB

Another last minute This Week in Video Game Blogging. Thankfully it was a rather light week, mostly likely because everyone was either at a convention or on their way back from one. Everything was pretty standard. We don’t always feature writing. In the past we’ve featured audio, video and pictures as criticism as well. We thought about including this one briefly before leaving it out, but I still want to commemorate it. Meet Gears of War: Hello Kitty: | more