Month: February 2013

Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Plan’ and Expressionism

This column wasn’t the one I had planned to write this week. In fact, I hadn’t played the game until this past weekend. I wanted to get the outstanding reviews out of the way, so I focused all my energy on playing them. I played The Path last. I try to write a review of a game in the mind of all the criticism I’ve thrown at other game reviewers over the past few years and hoe to do it better. What would be the point if I didn’t take that into consideration? | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

‘What do you think will be the best game of the year?’

February 20, 2013 | Filed under: Recent Posts, Thoughts and tagged with: Guess Seemingly every year at the beginning of the year everyone asks themselves and each other what games are they most looking forward to and what they think will be the best. Often one question presupposes the other in the asking. 2013 is no different. Though after the landmark year that was 2012, I think that the question is fundamentally different than it was in previous years. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Original First Person Walker: ‘Dear Esther’

The easiest way to write a weekly column, especially when given the guidelines “whatever you want,” I have found is to introduce some sort of constraint to focus oneself. This month (or thereabouts) I decided to look at a new genre that organically seemed to have come out of nowhere, the FPW (First Person Walker). I wrote about Dear Esther before on what I think it is saying, this week I look at how it is saying what it is saying. Generally, not always, but generally a game delivers its meaning through its interactive elements. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Hotline Miami Moving Pixels Podcast

I made another appearance on the Moving Pixels Podcast on the subject of Hotline Miami. I think we cover the game pretty well in our discussion and I can’t think of anything I’d want to add on top of that. I will say that my audio in particular is horrible. I have no idea what the hell happened there, but thankfully I have since fixed my headphones in the meanwhile and figured out what settings were causing problems in the background. Why some of these settings were checked off, I will never know why. | more