Tag: PopMatters

Eric Swain Thoughts

A Podcast Data Entry Project

I missed this week’s and last week’s post on PopMatters because I got a little too caught up in trying to finish another self-inflicted project. For a while now the Moving Pixels podcast RSS feed has been borked thanks to what I suspect was an internal update to the backend. Part of that means that the podcast episodes no longer appear on iTunes. iTunes reads it off of the feed and if the feed says there are no episodes on it then it displays no episodes. | more

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‘Brothers’, A Tale of Rubbing Your Belly, While Patting Your Head

This week’s episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast is on Brother: A Tale of Two Sons. Brothers is a game that made it into my personal top 5 last year on the back of it utilizing the medium to do something different and far more focused than most video games can claim. I’ve written a base explanation of how it uses the camera to great effect by doing something different where other video games wouldn’t even think about it and go with the standard. | more

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The Games of IndieCade

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. Part 1 remained the same from the original text up until the cut off, but the real treat was having to come up with new material for the introductions of part 2 and part 3. | more

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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

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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

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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

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‘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