Tag: Critical Distance

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Review Comes For The Arcade

This has to be the fastest turnaround for a podcast from recording to publishing I’ve ever done. Two days. I didn’t really want the podcast to come out this week. I knew it was going to get lost in the shuffle. Even pushing back, a day didn’t help much with all the focus centered on E3. Still, in continuing the interview series of publications we arrive at Zolani Stewart’s The Arcade Review. Mostly the interview centers on the style and philosophy behind the magazine and what it is trying to accomplish. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 03 – B-grade Games

This month’s minisode comes a few days early because the last day of the month is a Sunday and it’s going to be rather jam packed with content anyway. I would like to thank Aevee Bee for agreeing to come on the show on such short notice. It was a really good fit. See, as I have mentioned before, I haven’t a whole lot of rules on how the minisodes operate. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll implement them when problems arise. So far, the rules as they are, are the games must have little to no criticism and no repeats. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Five out of Ten or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Journey to Na Pali

This is the first double header podcast for the Critical Distance Confab in quite a while. This month I was joined by Alan Williamson to talk about two of his publishing projects. In each part, he was joined by his collaborator, Lindsey Joyce concerning Five out of Ten magazine and Kaitlin Tremblay regarding their co-authored book Escape to Na Pali: Journey to the Unreal. Both Side A and Side B as I’ve dubbed them can be found here. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 2 – Interactive Fiction and Object Toys

Another month, our second minisode on the Critical Distance Confab. I really like this series. I like getting to just chat about games and this is a good outlet for trying to foster conversation. Win/win. As a result, I have been really excited for the past two weeks as I waited for the release date to finally come. The minisodes are still a work in progress. During the recording of this episode Zoya, while talking about CHYRZA, mentioned a piece I had just written about another of Kitty Horrorshow’s. | 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

A New Critical Distance Confab Undertaking

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. While as a curatorial site we mostly focus on criticism for our weekly roundups, but we have been branching out as of late. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Books Fight Boss

This was meant to go up in February. In general, we want the podcasts to go up on the 15th, in the middle of the month. But the 15th was a Sunday and TWIVGB schedule takes precedence. Then I has one of the busiest months when it comes to outings and it turned out to be one of the toughest editing jobs yet.1 So it’s late. I had a good talk with BossFightBook’s founder and editor Gabe Durham about his little publishing house. Continuing the theme of interviewing people having to do with video game books. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – On ‘Killing is Harmless’

Things are still getting hammered out with regard to the direction we want the podcast to go. In the meantime, I interviewed Brendan Keogh about his book that headed a whole wave of video game criticism books, Killing is Harmless. Don’t have much to say at the moment. The interview quite nicely speaks for itself and plans for future possibilities are still being worked out. Now that I’m back from my road trip the RSS feed has been updated so it should be on iTunes now. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2014 – Post-Mortem

This is my fifth This Year In Video Game Blogging feature. That means I have been a part of Critical Distance for over 5 years. That still hasn’t quite sunk in. I wrote up the methodology for how the TYIVGB feature gets done at the beginning of the month, but I figured I’d still do a post-mortem talking about how it actually went down. I had so much to say when I was silently trudging through the entire list of things to read and consider. Now I find myself somewhat silent now that it is out. | more