Year: 2014

Eric Swain External Sources

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2014 – Post-Mortem

December 30, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Critical Distance, End of Year, TYIVGB This is my fifth This Year In Video Game Blogging feature. That means I have been a part of Critical Distance for over 5 years. That still hasn’t quite sunk in. I wrote up the methodology for how the TYIVGB feature gets done at the beginning of the month, but I figured I’d still do a post-mortem talking about how it actually went down. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews for October/November/December

These are the last few reviews I published at PopMatters for 2014. I do feel I’m getting better at the practice. I really did want to like Gods Will Be Watching. Of course, what person doesn’t want to play a game they won't like. It’s more than that, though. I have a penchant for gravitating towards works of a philosophical bent. Early on we get that the game is about making hard choices in impossible situations and the sacrifices that have to be made. I soldiered through to the end. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Actually, It’s About…2014

Released today was our annual end of year wrap-up podcast. This year I brought up regular Kris Ligman, semi-regular Alan Williamson and newbie to the podcast Lana Polansky. This year sucked. I think pretty much everyone can agree on that. However, because every year we all end up feeling miserable we decided to avoid directly talking about the biggest story of the year and in doing so found the year was a much nicer time that we had all forgotten. I like that year. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Considering the Two Seasons of ‘The Walking Dead’ Video Game

My last PopMatters column of the year and I look back to compare Season One and Season Two of The Walking Dead. Everything seemed to be working in The Walking Dead‘s favor coming into Season Two. Everything I was hearing made it sound like we were in for interesting possibilities. Clementine as the main character seemed like a really good move and the integration of the 400 Days cast was expanding it into a wider world. And yet, it wasn’t bad, just lesser. | more

Eric Swain Game Essays

Following Fogg: Adapting ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ into ’80 Days’

Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a Victorian era adventure novel following the exploits of Phileas Fogg and his valet Jean Passepartout in their attempt to win a wager. Done as a series of episodic exploits that take place in various countries along the route, it’s easy how one could adapt the book’s structure into a video game. However, a novel written in the 1870s is not something that will work as a video game in the 2010s. Not the least of which is the book’s very imperialistic vibe. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Five of the Best Mobile Games of 2014

Given how huge they have become, mobile games don’t get enough space in the critical spheres devoted to them. I decided to rectify that a bit and take a short glance at 5 games I played this year. Most of the good stuff comes out on iOS as opposed to Android. There are a bunch of technical reasons for that having to do with the non-standard implementation of Android’s open platform that sounds legitimate to my uninformed self. However, I don’t have an iOS device. I have an Android phone and tablet. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TYIVGB Methodology

December 9, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Critical Distance, TYIVGB We have posted our methodology on how I do the This Year In Video Game Blogging feature over at Critical Distance. The last few years I have always done a ‘how I did it’ post here and after the fact. Transparency has always been a bit of a problem for us. Not because we aren’t transparent, but because no one ever seems to pay attention when we’re announcing how we do things. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Moving Pixels Podcast Steps Over ‘The Line’

Two years after its release, we get around to discussing Spec Ops: The Line on the podcast. I hadn’t played it before we decided to finally do Spec Ops. I owned it and I knew, as a critic, it would be important to play, but there was always something keeping me from doing so. I hadn’t read Brendan’s book on it either. So in a very short amount of time, I both played the game and read Killing is Harmless in preparation of the podcast. | more