Category: Recent Posts

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 Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Video Game Twists

(*Spoilers for Braid, Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Spec Ops: The Line*) A few weeks back on IGN, Michael Thompson wrote an article how spoilers and the fear of themselves spoiling the experiences games can give us are a problem. They no longer serve the audience because people become wrapped up in the minutia of detail rather than what any of those details mean. Thompson frames it as twist endings. There are different types of problems that his basic thesis covers, but I’ll run with it. | 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, Recent Posts

What is the Deception and Who is Drake?

After a hiccup last week and talking it over, I will be weekly at PopMatters from now on. So, continuing on from last time I’m talking Uncharted again. I’m going to be talking about the themes of each title in their own post and up this time is Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. I have to say that while my review on the game still stands, I do now appreciate what it was trying to do a little more after writing this. I never put much thought into what the game meant or the themes of it because so much of the craft was off in this installment. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Girlfriend Mode-gate

In an interview with Eurogamer, John Hemingway said a gaffe. In all of the commentators both condemning his words and the two I could find being idiots about the matter, no one seems to have called what he said what it is, a gaffe. A gaffe is usually a term referred for politicians, but I see no reason why it can’t be used in this case. For those who don’t know a gaffe is when a politician unintentionally tells the truth. In this case it is an offensive truth that perpetuates the status quo of women in gaming being second-class citizens. | more

Eric Swain External Sources, Recent Posts

The Implicit Promise and the Uncharted Series

Months ago, I wrote my first commercial review. We hadn’t done a review on Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and G. Christopher Williams, my editor there, asked if anyone would do it. I wanted to try my hand at a commercial review with a score and everything rather than the critique I’ve been doing pretty much my whole ‘career’ as a video game critic. It was interesting to say the least. Trying to boil everything about the game down into a coherent argument that described and affirmed an opinion into not only into something solid, but something digestible. | more

Eric Swain External Sources, Recent Posts

Political Correctness in Video Games

I was thinking about doing a line-by-line take down of this article from IGN a while back. Now I just don’t care. Part of that were the responses others wrote before I could get my act together. While they all have overlapping points, the four posts that I saw in response to this piece didn’t come at it from the same direction. Upon reading the first three I felt I could still add something because my particular angle when it comes to these sorts of posts hadn’t been thoroughly explored. | more

Eric Swain Recent Posts, Thoughts

Visual Expectations

I want to talk about this quote from a 2k executive. I’m not going to deconstruct everything wrong with it. RockPaperShotgun did a pretty good job of that already. I’ll also point to Destructoid for a slightly more irreverent take on it. Instead, I want to use it as a jumping off point to talk about a closely related and intertwined issue. Visuals are important to video games because they are a visual medium, but fidelity isn’t necessarily important. | more

Eric Swain Recent Posts, Thoughts

The RPG Lineage Chart

Way back at PAX East I got to talking with some people over dinner Saturday and one of the topics that came up was my Dragon Age II Lineage post I did the year before and the research that went into it. I described what I did and that I ended up making a chart. In looking through my collection of business cards from that weekend I believe it was Scott Macmillan that asked to see that chart if he could. Well, I found it recently after the recent home renovation in a pile of papers and roleplaying books. | more