Tag: PopMatters

Eric Swain External Sources

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

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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

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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

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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

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Reviews For November/December

In this time of reflection and end of year lists, I’m going to take a moment to reflect instead on the games I wrote reviews for in the past two months. I’m doing it early because PopMatters is on hiatus until the new year and the rest of the reviews I have lined up will go up then. What is there left to say about the PSN downloadable title Rain? No, seriously what is there left to say. I was struggling to fill out the word count on this one. On a purely aesthetics level, the game is a wonder to look at. | more

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The Indifference of ‘Kentucky Route Zero’ to the Platonic Ideal of Video Games

My last post of the year went up on PopMatters today. This is one of those posts that started from a kernal of an idea and in the process of writing it sort of blossomed out as I was writing. I wanted to end the year on a post of Kentucky Route Zero and was trying to figure out a way to approach it. The game just does things so differently than any other game I’ve ever played and not in obvious ways either. Its differences are subtle and spawn from a more fundamental place. | more

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Baiting the Hook

Didn’t realize my PopMatters post went up today until I saw someone else recommending it to Critical Distance. I wanted to write something about Rain after I finished my review of it. It’s not a game many or really anybody talked about and for some reason I felt like somebody should. But I didn’t have anything to say. It’s visually evocative and nicely constructed in places, but there isn’t much else to say. In a way this is my attempt at purging the game from my mind. | more

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Beyond the Point-and-Click Adventure

We finally get around to talking about David Cages latest piece, Beyond: Two Souls, on the Moving Pixels podcast. I’m going to admit right off the bat that I perhaps harp on the problems brought up by the anachronic storytelling of Beyond a bit too much in our discussion, but there are just so many issues that keep popping up because of it. I liked Beyond, but I wanted to like it even more than I did. The pieces where there for a great whole, but they were arranged poorly and execution matters more than the ideas at play. | more

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‘Memoria’: Stories and Truth

For my Thanksgiving week column, I decided to go back and write about Memoria. I don’t feel like I’ve done the game justice here. I really liked it and I really would like others to share in my joy. Daedalic Entertainment’s output and I have not really gotten along. For all the praise they seem to get all I see are mediocre to downright awful point and click adventure games. Given the size of their output I can only assume they have multiple teams and that Memoria was made by a different team than Deponia, A New Beginning and The Night of the Rabbit. | more