Year: 2013

Eric Swain External Sources

Cinematic Time and Space in ‘Thirty Flights of Loving’

This is a week late and a good example of why you should have your posts written out ahead of time. I like Thirty Flights of Loving as a mental experiment more than I like it as a game. As a game there just isn’t enough for me to grab on to in the manner, we often attach ourselves to the experience of play. But I find it fascinating to pick apart and autopsy the various elements and what they do in relation to one another. It’s like having a huge story telling game experience distilled to the point where it’s pure. | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

Game Changer of the Next Generation

So, the PS4 announcement was a thing and amid the hype, the backlash to the hype and the reasoned deconstruction of what was revealed I keep seeing the same things focused on. The PS4 is showing more of the same, the PS4 has a share button that could do things, the PS4 has or hasn’t set itself up as a new generation system. I’m not going to argue or dispute any of that. Though I will give a general shame on you to those spreading their bile. | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

GoFundMe for PAX East

PAX East is coming up soon and like last year I have managed to secure a Press Pass for the event. I’ve gone twice in the past three since PAX East started and have always had a good time. I’ve gotten to meet some wonderful people that I’ve only ever talked to on twitter before. This year however, despite having a pass and have arranged a place to stay for the weekend I don’t have the money to actually get up there. | more

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

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