Tag: Moving Pixels

Eric Swain External Sources

’400 Days’ of Moral Quandries, Hungry Zombies, and Terrible Humans

I was on another episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast. It’s a lot of fun to be on a podcast you know you don’t have to edit afterwords. This time I actually got to be on an episode where we talked about The Walking Dead. I missed last year’s series of podcasts. I really liked The Walking Dead DLC 400 Days. I think it might be one of my favorite episodes of the whole series. Part of that I think has been my recent interest in short stories. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

An Adventure Spun From the Shards of a World: Revisiting ‘Loom’

There’s nothing quite like finishing a great game and then when you go to look for criticism of it, absolutely nothing comes up. In those cases, there’s really nothing else you can do, but fill the void and write your own. I played Loom several months ago and I finished it in a single evening. The only writing I could find on Loom was four reviews from the early 90s that were mentioned. I couldn’t even find the text. It’s rather disheartening, because I think Loom might deserve more praise than many of Lucas Arts other revered adventure games. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

An Exercise in Extinction

Isn’t it always the way. Get an extra week to rewrite a post and only hours after it was submitted do you think of the perfect paragraph to help make the point. Such is the case with my latest essay now up on PopMatters. For as much material as The Last of Us presents a critic, I find the only things I can sink my teeth into are esoteric details and concepts that have little to nothing to do with the main narrative. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

There’s a Little Killer Podcast in All of Us

I was on the Moving Pixels Podcast again. This time to talk about an older game, namely Suda 51′s magnum opus: Killer 7. It’s a weird game and a difficult one. I had a really busy week and didn’t get around to playing it until the day of the podcast and despite many hours could only get through the first two full levels. I am going to finish it, because it’s just one of those games that demands to be played. On a side note, if anyone can identify why my audio is so horrible on these podcasts, I’d be very appreciative. | more

Eric Swain Uncategorized

‘The Last of Us’ is Emotionally Manipulative

Last week, The Last of Us Moving Pixels podcast was published. I was on it and the lone dissenter as we worked are way through examining the game. I found that I was able to properly explain my position on the game and I’m pretty sure I sound like I’m simply babbling. I knew that much from the recording session. So, I decided to spend my next column doing just that, explain myself and where I feel The Last of Us fell short. I spent a long time crafting that post and editing it. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Porpentine of the Twine

And my last post looking into Interactive Fiction is done. Every time I come up with some sort of theme it ends up getting so off track for one reason or another. In this case it was playing all these twine games for this post and the last one and then having to digest them all. I purposefully left Porpentine’s work out of my twine overview in the previous post for several compounding reasons. She is an author that is prolific enough, her work ranges from fairly interesting to oh my god the depth is crushing me and she has had a pretty big spotlight on her for quite a while. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Many Forks in the Road of Twine

After skipping two weeks I’m back to continue this look at Interactive Fiction at PopMatters. Lesson learned: never dive into an entire subculture and expect to be finished in a week. The fact of the matter is there are tons of twine games on the internet and more being dumped into cyberspace every day. There is a lot of creativity and lot of junk being spewed out. The fact that there is so much being dumped on the net and no central hub or curatorial site to point at the noteworthy ones is a bit difficult for the so-called movement. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction Road

My second post looking into Interactive Fiction is up on PopMatters. This time I look at two works that move away from the text adventure lineage and start pushing what can be done with text and a parser. This paragraph got cut from the posted version – probably rightly so – but it shows my intent behind the post just the same: I don’t have really anything sort of introduction beyond that. I’m not going to compare or contrast them. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

A Look Down the Interactive Fiction Road

Finally, I’m back to talking about games. For the first week of May I decided to critique two modern text adventures and look at the interesting things they do. Instead of jumping into the next big thing or tackling my backlog of AAA titles, and boy I have a lot to get through on that front, I wanted to go off the beaten path. I wanted to look into the weird, the experimental, the lambasted and the old. I wanted to look at the stuff that doesn’t get critiqued. | more