February 17, 2014 Eric Swain Game Issues

The Parable of The Runner

February 17, 2014 | Filed under: Game Issues, Recent Posts and tagged with: Critical Distance, Mirror's Edge, Preservation A few weeks back I was having a digital couch chat with Mark Filipowich. Eventually we got on to the topic of criticism preservation. We talk about how things are disappearing from the web and how depressing the 404s on the Old Games Writing Twitter account are. I begin to tell him a story. I was checking up on some old posts from 2009 or so about Mirror’s Edge. | more

February 12, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Stanley Parable’: Mapping Choice to Spatial Movement

This week I wrote about the meaning behind The Stanley Parable as a first-person walker. We all know The Stanley Parable is about choice in video games. The game is nice enough to tell us this fact over and over. But the game takes the form of a first-person walker, a genre by its nature is a minimalization of some aspect of a video game. Previously, I only had examples that were minimalizations of genres. But when you look at The Stanley Parable it isn’t a reduced version of a genre but trend many different types of games incorporate – choices. | more

February 6, 2014 Eric Swain Thoughts

Weekend Digital Couch Chats

I’ve posted this on twitter a few times over the last couple of weeks, but in interest of explaining it better I’m going to put it into long form. I’m increasingly annoyed at twitter’s ultimate design of output. It’s not good for a lot of things and over time people have expanded its usage, but it's reaching the point where its causing more problem on both a surface level as well as to the underpinning of debate, discussion and even the simple act of talking. | more

February 5, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

’9.03m’: A First Person Walker Critique

A day late, but I wrote a critique of a game I bet you’ve never heard of – 9.03m – and its stature in the first person walker genre. While I may or may not have come up with the term first person walker (and I’m more than a little disturbed I remember reading something that apparently doesn’t exist) I have apparently made it a field of study, for lack of a better way of putting it. Last year, I did a short series of posts on the few examples of the minimalist genre that existed. | more

February 3, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

All the Terror of Hide-and-Seek

The is the episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast I’ve been wanting to have for a long time now; it’s on Knock Knock. I reviewed the game back in November of last year and gave it a pretty favorable review, focusing on its atmosphere and its general creepy tone. But I didn’t understand the game. In parts that was a good thing, making the horror even more effective, but in other ways it was frustrating. I don’t talk a lot in this podcast as I unfortunately found that I had missed quite a bit of content relating to the actual story of the game. | more

January 31, 2014 Eric Swain Game Issues

TGC 2013 Game of the Year

January 31, 2014 | Filed under: Game Issues, Recent Posts and tagged with: End of Year, Game of the Year A running theme in my life is that I’m always behind, always late, which is why you are getting my list for my 2013 games of the year at the end of January of 2014. I wanted to give myself more time to actually play some games because my December is usually concerned with other matters. I got some played, but nowhere near as many as I would have liked. | more

January 30, 2014 Eric Swain Game Issues

Top 13 Most Talked About Games of 2013

January 30, 2014 | Filed under: Game Issues, Recent Posts and tagged with: End of Year In the run up to Critical Distance’s annual end of year podcast I was under instruction to shrink it by whatever means necessary. No one was in the mood for another 7-9 hours recording session and as the date came closer, I was in no mood to edit one. I cut down the events list by merging items and collectively we knocked off most of the inconsequential stuff. | more

January 28, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

The Denouement of “Dead Man’s Switch”

And with this post so ends what I’ve nicknamed fluff month. I have an easier time writing with guidelines to work with. Often, I come up with theme months for myself, this time was just easy to parse content off the top of my head. December takes quite the toll on me. At first it was supposed to only be a week off, but then there was catch up and adjustment. As for the piece itself, I like Shadowrun Returns. I like the system and the campaign it comes with. | more

January 21, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

A Change of Pace in Episodic Gaming

Yeah, apparently one post wasn’t enough to exercise this idea out of my head, so I wrote a little bit more on how The West Wing as a Telltale game could work. Specifically, on something broadcast television shows do in between their important direction altering plot-based episodes. Some weeks the episode is an easy watching piece of relative fluff where nothing much happens that would effect the overall plot of the show. A problem of the week episode as it were, but with less stakes. | more

January 20, 2014 Eric Swain External Sources

All That Remains of ‘The Walking Dead’

With a new season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead we bring together the Moving Pixels crew to compare notes on the podcast. Unfortunately, what transpires is a podcast where we all ended up making the same decisions and so did most other players. The discussion of the game seems a lot more ill focused and scattershot, because the episode itself feels that way. Though as usual the actual discussion turned out much better than I remember. Funny thing, I couldn’t stand the two-channel mix of the podcast. | more