Month: September 2013

Eric Swain External Sources

Syria’s Endgame in ‘Endgame: Syria’

With all the recent refocusing of the news on the Syrian civil war right now I figured now might be a good time to actual play Endgame: Syria, a newsgame app that I downloaded months ago and left sitting idle on my tablet and write about it for PopMatters. This is one of those games Apple refused certification because it dealt with real world issues and where they said the creator should have written a book instead. That logic is maddening, but more importantly it is unhelpful. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Kentucky Route Zero: A Game of Mines, Maps and Madness

And so, we continue our unofficial, accidental series on indie games in this week’s episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast with Kentucky Route Zero. It was noted in the preshow talk that apparently the recordings have gotten quite longer since I started appearing on the show. That continues here with almost two hours of talk. So, note the length just in case. As for the sound quality on my end, this is becoming a real pain, I tried a new set up for this episode that managed to get the mic right in front of my face the whole time. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

This is the Story of a Crusader King

I seem to be finally writing on a bunch of games lately that I’ve played but hadn’t written anything about. This week I quickly typed up some thoughts on Crusader Kings II for PopMatters. One of the biggest problems I’ve had with the game is how to accurately describe it to others. Part of it is that the most interesting aspect, the part of the game that got me interested enough to buy and play it, is something that is buried behind intimidating UI and seemingly lack of cause and effect. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Inheriting Work in ‘Rogue Legacy’

After a few weeks off the podcast is back with Rogue Legacy. I have to apologize. Starting with the last podcast I started experimenting to try and get my audio sounding better. Changing mic, changing audio settings, changing recording locations. Whichever one I did for this podcast didn’t work too well. You can understand me, but there is a noticeable difference in sound quality between myself and my fellow podcasters. Luckily that should all be fixed now. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews For July/August

September 3, 2013 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Combo Crew, Face Noir, Hotline Miami, PopMatters, Review, Scurvy Scallywags, The Night of the Rabbit, The Walking Dead: 400 Days I have a large backlog of review copies I have to get through. August was the first month I got nearly every game I requested. Usually I got one, maybe two. And then I got more review copies offered through my PR contacts that I seem to have now. | more