Month: August 2012

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