Month: April 2015

Eric Swain External Sources

The Ghost of ‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’

This time on the Moving Pixels Podcast we are looking at last year’s AAA 3D adventure game, Murdered: Soul Suspect. I think we had a pretty good discussion on the game. We cover a lot of ground, mostly non plot related, if you’re worried about us spoiling the mystery. Instead, we spent our time focused on the context surrounding the main plot. We look at the tone, the genre mash up, the investigative design, the quality of the writing, character functions and a nice sized chunk of a discussion at the end of the asylum, one really problematic element I didn’t notice the framing of the first time through. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – The History of Everyday Games

This month I was joined on the Critical Distance Confab by Zoya Street. For those of you who might not know, he is the author of both Dreamcast Worlds and Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics as well as the editor-in-chief of the free e-zine Memory Insufficient. Interesting thing I noticed while editing this month’s interview: every single person I’ve interviewed so far has, at some point, apologized for rambling. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Cat Lady’ and the Terror of Loneliness

This time we podcasted about The Cat Lady, an indie adventure game from 2012 about suicide, death and living. This is not a game that gets a whole lot of talk about it. It not hard to see why. It came out during a year exploding with great indies of … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Moving Pixels Podcast: 'The Cat Lady' and the Terror of Loneliness » PopMatters "While I'm gone, think of a vegetable." | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Itch.io Spotlight Beginnings

A while back I tried to organize myself better and get to writing at least some criticism on a weekly basis. I tried a few things, the better of my ideas was a series called Indie Games Spotlight. Here I’d take a small game and write something about it. You … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Itch.io Spotlight: Sunset Spirit Steel by Kitty Horrorshow Itchio Spotlight: The Last Night by Tim & Adrien Soret Itchio Spotlight: Tuesday/404 Not Found Itch. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Slaughtering a Sacred Cow, Revisiting ‘Grim Fandango’

I’m back to writing criticism in my weekly PopMatters’ posts, starting with an evaluation of Grim Fandango. I’d like to take this chance to expand upon one point that I didn’t really explore properly in the piece: why Grim Fandango gained the title as “greatest adventure game of all time” in the first place. I do mention that resonance and evaluation of the game was elevated over time thanks to the all the attention and praised heaped on it by its fans. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews for January/February/March

A new year, a new slate of games to review. A bit of a theme going on here. 2015 starts off with 4 new episodic games and my attempts to review every single episode of each one. All of Telltale games, so far, are licensed games. It’s difficult not to frame their game in the light of the licensed property. I may have gone a bit too far with my Tales from the Borderlands review, but I really do not like the main Borderlands games and Tales by comparison, I am enjoying so much. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

A New Critical Distance Confab Undertaking

April 1, 2015 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Critical Distance, Podcast Everyone has had that thought, “why has no one written about this game?” It’s a different game(s) for every person, but pretty much everyone has had that thought. Sometimes, after finishing a game I go looking for criticism, only to come up empty. An idea came to me during last year’s end of year podcast. | more