Year: 2014

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance End of Year Podcast 2013

And we finish the Critical Distance end of year stuff late this year with episode 14 of the CDC Podcast because I was lazy and there wasn’t anything about 2013 that seemed to inspire anybody. I had a lot less to edit and did a far more slapdash job of it this time and it is a much shorter show. And yet, it difficult to care about this particular year. As long as it was and I got complaints from both panel and listeners, at least 2012 was fun. The more I think about 2013 the less I think is worthy of remembrance. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Considering the Direction of the Telltale Style Adventure Game

My latest post on PopMatters came from a need to exercise the idea out of me. Nick and I got to talking about a lot of things after the podcast recording this weekend and this was the last topic before calling it a night. I went to twitter and put it out there. Compared to my usual response and retweet traffic this was huge with people. Of course, despite writing and publishing a basic pitch concept for Telltale’s The West Wing, I keep thinking about how to implement it. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TWIVGB January 12th

Yes, I did that last round up of the year and the first one of the next. Thanks to a scheduling snafu I volunteered to do it at the last minute. Which contributed to its lateness. I had to plow through 2-3 weeks' worth of suggestions, a lot of which I hadn’t read. I was behind on my reading as it was time of decompression after TYIVGB for me. As is often the case for us who have done this for a long time we play with how the round up comes out. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Tabletop Sessions of ‘Shadowrun Returns’

And I’m on schedule with my first post of the year on PopMatters. I decided to ease myself in with some easy writing about a game that has been consuming my time as of late, Shadowrun Returns. I bring up comparisons to Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age: Origins with how it feels with its presentation of the game as an RPG system. It’s difficult to point out concrete elements in this area. All three games look and act very similar to one another and yet they feel like very different games with different purposes. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Moving Pixels Podcast: Our Best Games of 2013

Our first podcast of the year at PopMatters is up and it’s us looking at last year’s games. Chris, Nick and I rundown our top 5 games of the year or rather we start off by doing that, but near the end it sort of goes off the rails and we end up talking about a few more. Only two games appeared on more than one list and one appeared on all three lists. We also get to talk about some honorable mentions. Then, and I forgot about this, we wrap up by discussing the very concept of Game of the Year awards. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TYIVGB 2013: An Examination of Methodology and the Nature of Curation

January 6, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Critical Distance, TYIVGB This is the fourth annual This Year In Video Game Blogging and I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of such an endeavor. I have a few things to say about this end of year roundup and a few things about Critical Distance as a whole. They are divided into sections. Normally, I wouldn’t go to such extreme and just do a quick linking post with an interesting anecdote or two about its creation, but I feel there is more that needs to be said. | more