Tag: PopMatters

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Proteus’ and the Simple Act of Being

I’ve finally finished up my series on the First Person Walkers of 2012. Ending on the last of the three that I played and the one I honestly had the hardest time writing about: Proteus. I don’t know if it’s the fact I don’t play that many open world games and thus don’t have the proper critical vocabulary to discuss them or what. I like Proteus. It’s restful. I end up closing my eyes and just lightly rest in my chair. Not really napping, just resting. I don’t know how the piece came out. | more

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The Podcast That Burns At 100 Billion Degrees

I appeared on another episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast to discuss the indie game Little Inferno. I don’t know what to really think of the game and spend most of my time trying to parse it out in real time with my fellow podcasters. It’s another game I’m very happy that it exists and I enjoyed my time with it, but I don’t know what to ultimately say about it in any final word sort of way. It feels like a lot of half-finished ideas and sentiments put together centering on the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace. | more

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Cinematic Time and Space in ‘Thirty Flights of Loving’

This is a week late and a good example of why you should have your posts written out ahead of time. I like Thirty Flights of Loving as a mental experiment more than I like it as a game. As a game there just isn’t enough for me to grab on to in the manner, we often attach ourselves to the experience of play. But I find it fascinating to pick apart and autopsy the various elements and what they do in relation to one another. It’s like having a huge story telling game experience distilled to the point where it’s pure. | more

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‘The Plan’ and Expressionism

This column wasn’t the one I had planned to write this week. In fact, I hadn’t played the game until this past weekend. I wanted to get the outstanding reviews out of the way, so I focused all my energy on playing them. I played The Path last. I try to write a review of a game in the mind of all the criticism I’ve thrown at other game reviewers over the past few years and hoe to do it better. What would be the point if I didn’t take that into consideration? | more

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The Original First Person Walker: ‘Dear Esther’

The easiest way to write a weekly column, especially when given the guidelines “whatever you want,” I have found is to introduce some sort of constraint to focus oneself. This month (or thereabouts) I decided to look at a new genre that organically seemed to have come out of nowhere, the FPW (First Person Walker). I wrote about Dear Esther before on what I think it is saying, this week I look at how it is saying what it is saying. Generally, not always, but generally a game delivers its meaning through its interactive elements. | more

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Hotline Miami Moving Pixels Podcast

I made another appearance on the Moving Pixels Podcast on the subject of Hotline Miami. I think we cover the game pretty well in our discussion and I can’t think of anything I’d want to add on top of that. I will say that my audio in particular is horrible. I have no idea what the hell happened there, but thankfully I have since fixed my headphones in the meanwhile and figured out what settings were causing problems in the background. Why some of these settings were checked off, I will never know why. | more

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‘Deponia’ is no ‘Monkey Island’

For a game I didn’t think much of, I sure am writing a lot about it. Maybe it’s because failures are just easier to latch onto things to talk about. I don’t like to keep harping on a poor game, but I keep coming up with interesting comparisons to better games. In this case, at the time, I couldn’t help but think the creators had lifted the underwater puzzled from The Secret of Monkey Island wholesale and dropped it into Deponia. | more

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Scavenging the Protagonists of ‘Deponia’ and ‘Primordia’

My first PopMatters article of the year is up. After a weeklong hiatus or as I called it my “fuck off” week after the excruciating process of Critical-Distance’s end of year projects. If any genre could say to have made a comeback in recent years, it’s the adventure game. The Walking Dead, Machinerium, Gemini Rui, Resonance, Primorida, Analog: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and so on. (Though to be real it never went away it just lost the limelight. | more

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PopMatter’s Top Games of 2012

I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in PopMatter’s game of the year list. Their second one to date. I was also invited onto the Moving Pixels podcast to talk even more about the best games of the year. I don’t have any long diatribe about the nature of the list this year. Though I understand the time constraints, it is a little disheartening to see a year like 2011 (one of the weakest on record) get a top 20 and 2012 (probably going to hailed as one of the strongest) only get a top 10. | more

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A Commentary on ‘Primordia’

I’m a little late on this. Last week my column for PopMatters went up, though I had been told we wouldn’t be restarting until the new year. Ah well. The previous week my review for Primordia went up and I wanted to write even more about the game. It’s fortuitous that I chose to write about the commentary and what that signifies to me as a player, because my review got me an interview with the writer/designer of the game. I had a wonderful chat with him and it made me notice a really awesome trend as of late. | more