Month: September 2012

Eric Swain Critical Responses

September ’12 Round Table Entry – Eschewing Realism

Last minute Eric as always. September’s BoRT topic, run now by Alan Williamson, theme is New Horizons. The blurb is as follows: 2K’s Chris Harmann recently said that achieving photorealism was the key to opening ‘new genres’ of games. Without discussing whether or not this is true (it isn’t), what genres or subjects have games left uncovered, and what should they be focusing on? Alternatively, if photorealism isn’t the limiting factor on the diversification and evolution of gaming experiences, what is? | more

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‘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

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‘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

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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

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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

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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

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‘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

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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