Tag: Moving Pixels

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 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

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’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

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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

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The Denouement of “Dead Man’s Switch”

And with this post so ends what I’ve nicknamed fluff month. I have an easier time writing with guidelines to work with. Often, I come up with theme months for myself, this time was just easy to parse content off the top of my head. December takes quite the toll on me. At first it was supposed to only be a week off, but then there was catch up and adjustment. As for the piece itself, I like Shadowrun Returns. I like the system and the campaign it comes with. | more

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A Change of Pace in Episodic Gaming

Yeah, apparently one post wasn’t enough to exercise this idea out of my head, so I wrote a little bit more on how The West Wing as a Telltale game could work. Specifically, on something broadcast television shows do in between their important direction altering plot-based episodes. Some weeks the episode is an easy watching piece of relative fluff where nothing much happens that would effect the overall plot of the show. A problem of the week episode as it were, but with less stakes. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

All That Remains of ‘The Walking Dead’

With a new season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead we bring together the Moving Pixels crew to compare notes on the podcast. Unfortunately, what transpires is a podcast where we all ended up making the same decisions and so did most other players. The discussion of the game seems a lot more ill focused and scattershot, because the episode itself feels that way. Though as usual the actual discussion turned out much better than I remember. Funny thing, I couldn’t stand the two-channel mix of the podcast. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Considering the Direction of the Telltale Style Adventure Game

My latest post on PopMatters came from a need to exercise the idea out of me. Nick and I got to talking about a lot of things after the podcast recording this weekend and this was the last topic before calling it a night. I went to twitter and put it out there. Compared to my usual response and retweet traffic this was huge with people. Of course, despite writing and publishing a basic pitch concept for Telltale’s The West Wing, I keep thinking about how to implement it. | more

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The Tabletop Sessions of ‘Shadowrun Returns’

And I’m on schedule with my first post of the year on PopMatters. I decided to ease myself in with some easy writing about a game that has been consuming my time as of late, Shadowrun Returns. I bring up comparisons to Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age: Origins with how it feels with its presentation of the game as an RPG system. It’s difficult to point out concrete elements in this area. All three games look and act very similar to one another and yet they feel like very different games with different purposes. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Moving Pixels Podcast: Our Best Games of 2013

Our first podcast of the year at PopMatters is up and it’s us looking at last year’s games. Chris, Nick and I rundown our top 5 games of the year or rather we start off by doing that, but near the end it sort of goes off the rails and we end up talking about a few more. Only two games appeared on more than one list and one appeared on all three lists. We also get to talk about some honorable mentions. Then, and I forgot about this, we wrap up by discussing the very concept of Game of the Year awards. | more