Month: January 2013

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Deponia’ is no ‘Monkey Island’

For a game I didn’t think much of, I sure am writing a lot about it. Maybe it’s because failures are just easier to latch onto things to talk about. I don’t like to keep harping on a poor game, but I keep coming up with interesting comparisons to better games. In this case, at the time, I couldn’t help but think the creators had lifted the underwater puzzled from The Secret of Monkey Island wholesale and dropped it into Deponia. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Scavenging the Protagonists of ‘Deponia’ and ‘Primordia’

My first PopMatters article of the year is up. After a weeklong hiatus or as I called it my “fuck off” week after the excruciating process of Critical-Distance’s end of year projects. If any genre could say to have made a comeback in recent years, it’s the adventure game. The Walking Dead, Machinerium, Gemini Rui, Resonance, Primorida, Analog: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and so on. (Though to be real it never went away it just lost the limelight. | more

Eric Swain Game Issues

TGC 2012 Game of the Year

January 12, 2013 | Filed under: Game Issues, Recent Posts and tagged with: End of Year, Game of the Year I wanted to get this done earlier. In fact, I like having my game of the year post before the end of the actual year. For the last two years that meant taking time out of New Years Eve celebrations for typing it up. That didn’t happen this year because of my next point. I have played more games last year from that year than I have ever done so before. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

PopMatter’s Top Games of 2012

I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in PopMatter’s game of the year list. Their second one to date. I was also invited onto the Moving Pixels podcast to talk even more about the best games of the year. I don’t have any long diatribe about the nature of the list this year. Though I understand the time constraints, it is a little disheartening to see a year like 2011 (one of the weakest on record) get a top 20 and 2012 (probably going to hailed as one of the strongest) only get a top 10. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance 2012 End of Year Extravaganza

For the third year in a row, I decided not to enjoy my winter break with video games, but drive myself to exhaustion doing the Critical Distance end of year projects. Episode 11 of the CDC Podcast – The Talking Dead and the 2012 This Year In Video Game Blogging round up. Both did not go as smoothly as planned. The CDC podcast this time around was longer than any I’ve done before. Even by cutting the cast down to only 4 people (Myself, Kris, Alan and Ian) it still ended up longer than last year. | more