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Eric Swain External Sources

The Games of IndieCade

March 11, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: IndieCade East, Moving Pixels, PopMatters What was originally one single post, my editor decided would be a good idea to split into three. It turned out to be a very good idea and not just because it gave me two extra weeks of breathing room. Talking about 13 games no one has ever heard of before and probably won’t again for quite a while may have been a bit much. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews for Janruary/February

The doldrums of the early months of the year have allowed for some catch up to games I didn’t have time for. Both for my own personal enjoyment and as for reviews. In fact, all but one of the games I reviewed were from the very end of last year that the 3 reviews a week schedule wouldn’t allow for. Ok, that’s not entirely honest. I was swamped and couldn’t play them until PopMatters went on break. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Paths and Parables

This podcast on The Stanley Parable was recorded back in January, that’s how far ahead we are. I really love this game and was really excited to finally get to talk in depth about it. There’s something about its brand of wackiness and intellectual masturbation that fits my personal brand of criticism and thinking. It’s also a title that doesn’t get much exploration beyond surface level discussion even when it comes to the game’s meaning. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

At Play at IndieCade East

I went to IndieCade East last weekend and wrote up my general overview/feeling on the event for this week’s PopMatter’s post. In the opening I bring up my three-part Primer on PAX East from last year and note the major difference in overall tone and feel. That and the fact that IndieCade didn’t give me panic attacks halfway through. I went back and read my Primer on PAX East after I finished writing and, in comparison, I come off fairly harsh in my assessment of the convention in this week’s post that I did in my primer. | more

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

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

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

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

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

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