Tag: PopMatters

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Unrest’: A Tug of War Between Player Knowledge and Character Knowledge

I played and reviewed Unrest, one of the cut paragraphs from that review turned into this post about the dramatic irony Unrest creates in the space between player knowledge and character knowledge. This is an extremely simplified version of the original post. For reasons I’m not going to get into this was post was supposed to be a short replacement piece for this week. However, during the actual writing of it I ended up realizing it was turning into another lengthy monstrosity. | more

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Choose Your Own Clementine

Finally, after months post-release we get around to concluding our podcast series on The Walking Dead Season 2. It has been interesting to see the reception of Season 2 over Season 1. I feel that it’s a little more than the fact in 2012 The Walking Dead was new and fresh to people and in 2014 it wasn’t. As we say in our wrap up Season 2 is a little bit of a mess, one way or another. It struggled to connect to its audience the same way the first season seemed to do almost instantly. | more

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A House Dividing

Despite a bit of a scheduling hiccup, our talk on episode 4 of The Walking Dead Season 2 is out. Instead of discussing the episode itself, I want to touch on something that happened concerning this episode elsewhere. About two days after recording this episode, IGN held a sit down with two of Telltale’s designers. During that talk the subject of Sarah’s death came up. It was made light of as well as the rash way a player has to behave in order for Sarah to save herself. | more

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Ghouls, Ghosts and Gaming

As has become a staple of the Moving Pixels podcast, we try to do something special for Halloween week by checking out horror games. This time we looked to two free indie games. Both are first person walker games set at night in a mostly open style creepy outdoor environment. However, the two games seemed to be illustrative of how to do it right and how to do it wrong. Haunted Memories is an episodic game on Steam that never seemed to move passed its first episode and is pretty terrible on all counts. | more

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‘Spec Ops: The Line’ Denies the Player the Pleasure of Play

All of us at PopMatters finally got around to playing Spec Ops: The Line several weeks ago and I just got around to writing about it now. Coming to a game late with an eye towards writing criticism about it is a daunting task. There is always that knowledge that someone, somewhere must have already said anything you’d think was interesting. There is that fear that you have nothing new, insightful or otherwise useful to add to the conversation. More than usual, I mean. | more

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Hardboiled Hijinks

The summer doldrums ticked away and so we went back to talk about an indie game from 2013: Gunpoint. As we found there was little to grab onto with regards of our usual in-depth discussion about craft and theme, but we still managed to find things to say about style and tone. Overall, I think Gunpoint is a fine game. Not an exceptional game, not one I’d leap up and down and say you have to play it right now, but a fine enough game that leaves a pleasant feeling after having played it. | more

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My Downward Spiral with ‘Watch Dogs’

I’m finally back to writing my weekly posts on PopMatters, coming back with one that had been holding me back almost since I stopped writing. This was originally supposed to be a review of Watch Dogs. I had gotten a copy from Ubisoft for that purpose. But the game was taking so long to play. Every time I sat down the play, I wanted to literally do anything else. While playing the game, I wanted to stop. There would be days or weeks in between play session as I got over my aversion to it. | more

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Fairy Tales of Politics, Fairy Tales of Justice

And with this podcast, we finish up our in-depth discussion on Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us. It’s been a long journey. Our first podcast on the game came out almost a year ago. It’s been a long road for what is just a few in game days of investigation. Our … (This post is lost beyond this point.) "When we suffer, we do it in silence. And the world likes it that way. We just fade, like we never existed." | more

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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

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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