Year: 2012

Eric Swain Critical Responses

October ’12 Round Table Entry – Thinking on Horror

It’s the end of the month and that means it’s time for BoRT. Being October, this month’s topic suitably fits the season, Fear and Loathing in Game Spaces: “Since their inception, games have explored that most primal of human emotions: fear. Whether it’s shambling zombies, ghosts, relentless killers or arachnophobia, we’ve never been short of scares. Some can’t stand horror games, while others thrive on them. Are games uniquely suited to instil fear in the player, beyond a film or a Stephen King novel? | more

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 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

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 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