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Eric Swain External Sources

The Moving Pixels Podcast Kills Nazis Again, in ‘Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus’

This month, we decided to follow up on our catch up of the new Wolfenstein series with last year’s follow up, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. WordPress didn’t save what I wrote here when I clicked published. It’s gone. I don’t remember what I said and I’m too angry to even attempt to recreate it. You can find the podcast on PopMatters, SoundCloud, iTunes or through the podcast’s RSS feed. “You take freedom away from the American people, you’re playing with fire. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Moving Pixels Podcast: The Best Games of 2017

The first podcast of the new year. Nick and I count down our Top 7 favorite games of 2017. Why Top 7? Because there were only two of us and that got us as close to 15 games that we’d normally do with 3 people doing a Top 5. The big news is at the end of the episode we announced that we are moving away from a biweekly format to a monthly one. The fact of the matter is that this podcast is essentially a hobby and it was taking up a lot of time for most of us. | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

2007: Ten Years Later

Back in 2014, Tony Zhou, of Every Frame A Painting fame, wrote a blog post about the best films of 2004. It wasn’t stating what they were, but rather a survey of what the critics said they were, a glance at the box office and then comparing the two against what films stood the test of time a decade hence. He went on to use that data to explain why certain films lasted and why they did over certain other films in the same year. I took inspiration from the first part of that effort. | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

Laptop Fluff 2.0

January 9, 2018 | Filed under: Recent Posts, Thoughts and tagged with: Fluff, laptop, RSS A bunch of years ago, I bought a new laptop, one with an actual dedicated graphics card and modern processor. Sufficed to say that as time moved on, it was not as hot or useful as it was when I got it. It wasn’t just that games nowadays require more power in pretty much everything — processor, graphics card, RAM — and year even indie games were causing my computer to chug at times, but really the problem was that thanks to the ongoing updates, my internet browser were causing constant slowdowns and crashes. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2017 – Post-Mortem

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2017. I have done so many of these post-mortems it’s getting to the point I feel like I may just be repeating myself. Yet, at the same time, I can’t help but look back at the project this year and think of how far I’ve come over the past 8 years. Eight years. Damn. A lot has changed over that time. I was still in college when I started doing this. In 2010, I had an idea. Critical Distance does roundups for the best criticism featured during the week. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Wonder Woman: A Mess of a Movie

It’s not games related, but I need to make myself write something. I watched Wonder Woman the other day. It’s the first movie in the DCEU I’ve seen and I found myself asking, “how low were everyone’s expectations if this was the good one?” It’s not a terrible movie, but it’s not one that I’d call good either. I spent most of the run time alternating between annoyed, disappointed and bored. Overall, I give it a resounding meh. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Moving Pixels Podcast Kills Nazis with ‘Wolfenstein: The New Order’

This week we decide to go back to the 2014 Nazi killing game, Wolfenstein: The New Order. ‘This game is better than it has any right to be.’ That has been my quick and dirty mantra about this game whenever anyone asks. Several years later I feel it still holds true. I’m of two minds about a lot of the facets in this this game. Because so many of its statements about ideology and Nazism work, then don’t work, but then work again in this endless cycle. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 16 – Milkmaids and Vikings

This is the last minisode of the year for the Critical Distance Confab. Thank you to Angelina Bonilla, Red Angel, for sticking around after her interview to do this extra 15 minutes of recording. I’ll admit, I’m a little iffy about how well we hyped up these two games. Red Angel was trying not to spoil anything and thereby leave the mystery intact to be discovered. I was trying to explain another game where its greatness comes from the building of many details compounding on one another and is not easily reduced to pithy statements. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Moving Pixels Podcast Visits ‘Tacoma’

This week on the Moving Pixels Podcast we go to space to talk AI and workplace drama in Tacoma. This is an interesting one for us, because Gone Home at one point was our longest podcast. There was a lot to dig into and a lot of contextual stuff to talk about. So, one does kind of have some expectations going into Fullbirght’s follow up game. We don’t get as long a conversation out of it as we don’t go into as much detail about the specifics. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Red Angel

I wrap up this series of interviews with video producers and essayists by checking out relative newbie and indie game specialist, Angelina Bonilla, better known as Red Angel. (Also, a lot easier to say apparently.) We had a long fruitful conversation in which Red Angel was able to display her enthusiasm and passion as she explained her own work. And yes, as cliche as it is, we did talk about her being a woman in this field. Together the two of us could only think of three women doing this type of work. | more