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Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – The Founderhead

September 22, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts This is the last of the archived interviews I did so many years ago and left languishing on my hard drive. In it I talk with Critical Distance’s founder and original TWIVGB head Ben Abraham. It was only after I recorded all three interviews — long after — that I ... (This post is lost beyond this point.) | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Little Money, Little Games

What to do when waiting for releases? Why look towards the free, arty games of course. In this podcast we look at Serena, Glitchhikers and A Dark Room. Serena is a game that was a free point-and-click adventure game on Steam, so of course I tried it. I didn’t think it was very good, but had some interesting formal elements that I figured could add to the genre as a whole. I still do, but since then I’ve played Jurassic Park: The Game which does some similar things, only much better. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Transitioning to ‘Transistor’

This week’s podcast we delved into Supergiant Games’ more complicated follow up to Bastion, Transistor. Transistor isn’t a game that got nearly the discussion it deserved. It’s a difficult game to parse and requires a lot of effort on the part of the player to tease out its meaning. Much of the plot and conflict is obscured early on and only slowly reveals itself over the course of making your way through the crumbling city, add on a deep combat system that yields its secrets only to experimentation and not pre-planning and the larger themes and craftsmanship of the narrative can end up taking a backseat. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews for June/July/August

The summer months are slow and that apparently makes me slow. Anyway, here are the reviews I actually managed to finish writing. When in doubt and bored with the game, make the review interesting. Daedelic Entertainment and I have a running thing with their published adventure games. I keep reviewing them and, so far, with a single exception they keep disappointing me. 1954: Alcatraz is no exception to the pattern. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Nearly Happily Ever After

So, after the whole game is out, we finally got around to releasing our discussion on episode 4 of The Wolf Among Us. It’s strange to go back and listen to it given that I now know how it all turns out. The Wolf Among Us has turned out to be a rather polarizing game and there’s a lot of reasons why. Episode 4 itself feels like a plot necessary segment of the story to get the last few things in place and a few threads wrapped up, but it does feel like it’s the game spinning its wheels a bit. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – A Critic By His Window

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first ever encounter with the wider world of video game criticism was through a post by L.B. Jefferies. That post led me to the Brainygamer, Mitch Krpata and the rest is history. In those early days, the scene was a small one. Small enough that ‘Mapping the Brainysphere‘ didn’t seem like an ironic or ludicrous title for a post. I didn’t quite realize it at the time of trying to reorient the CDC podcast along with the then new direction of the site what I was doing in my choice of guests. | more

Eric Swain Game Essays

Minor Moments: Quest for Infamy

Sometimes there are moments in games that stick in my mind but aren’t big enough or otherwise important enough to warrant inclusion as a part of a larger discussion. Sometimes there isn’t room in a piece to include mentioning it or there is no simple way to crowbar it in while talking about the game. But they still stick in my mind and I think are somewhat worth mentioning. This is an occasional series to just that. (*Spoilers for Quest for Infamy*) There are two moments I want to mention in Quest for Infamy. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Dictators and Dead Guys

Continuing on with our episodic Telltale series we talk about The Walking Dead season 2 episode 3 on PopMatter’s Moving Pixels podcast. Last night we just recorded the podcast episode on The Walking Dead episode 4, so listening to this, its kind of surprising to hear some of the comments we made and our opinion on how the season was progressing. Due to the publishing schedule these tend to get recorded far in advance and we quite remember what we’ve said previously. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Quest for Infamy’: A Second Opinion

There was a bit of a mixup over at PopMatters. I was offered a review copy of Quest for Infamy through one of my own PR contacts and once I got some outstanding work out of the way I accepted. I received the code mere hours before fellow contributor Nick Dinicola’s review of the game went up. This is the third time this has happened to me. But I heavily disagreed with Nick’s assessment so it was decided I would do a second opinion post for my weekly column. I did not expect this to be as long as it was. | more

Eric Swain Game Issues

Hypothetical Moral Behaviors

Last week I concluded a series of posts on moral choice in games, the first three posts looking at the idea of making specific choices at specific moments and the last about the choices we make that result in our constant play behavior throughout. I identified two ways behavior acts as a moral attribute. Either the behavior reflects a moral being in the player character or it allows the player to choose a path based on a play style that reflects a moral standing on an issue, usually violence. | more