Tag: Review

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews For May/June

July 7, 2013 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Cognition, PopMatters, Review, Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, The Room, The Showdown Effect, Thomas Was Alone I did a number of reviews for PopMatters in the months of May and June. There are a few more waiting in the wings to be published. In published chronological order: I really like this review. I didn’t think much of The Showdown Effect, but I didn’t dislike it either. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

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

Eric Swain External Sources

A Tale of Two Reviews

I’ve written two reviews in the past week for PopMatters. One on Jonas Kyratzes’ The Sea Will Claim Everything and the other on Borderlands 2. I could make a grand connecting statement like this being the true-blue indie verses the AAA goliath, but really, they’re just two games I played that I noticed reviews hadn’t been written for yet. Though I won't deny there were a lot of opposites in both my opinion and writing the reviews. I’m not going to compare them. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Binary Domain’: A Shooter That Assumes You Are Intelligent

As with last week’s piece, I noticed that Binary Domain, one of the best games of the year so far, was also missing a review. Might as well correct that oversight as well. There is a lot in Binary Domain that one could focus on in individual pieces, but what all of them have in common is the subversion of the modern conception of the third person shooter. It takes away a lot of assumptions that games of this ilk take for granted that you don’t realize it takes for granted and then decides to focus on them. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Driver: San Francisco’: The Best Game of 2011 that No One Played

A while back I got bored and wanted to see how PopMatter’s best games of 2011 compared with the reviews of the games over the year. Then I wondered if there were any high rating games that didn’t make the list. Which led me to look up what PopMatters review of Driver: San Francisco. Turns out we hadn’t done one. I set out to correct that. Now I could wax lyrical about Driver: San Francisco for thousands of words and, in fact, I have. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Game Frame – A Book Review

Game Frame by Aaron Dignan is a book about gamification. It’s about how you as a person can insert gamification into your ordinary activities to help you get through them. The author is a co-founder in a digital strategy firm for big companies and this is his foray into the next big bandwagon. Gamification in it’s most basic form is a stupid idea where in most cases people will add points or badges to something and think that is all that is needed to up the engagement with people. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Reality is Broken – A Book Review

I knew I was going to review this book so in preparation I kept away from all of McGonigal’s talks, interviews, and presentations as much as possible before reading it. I caught her appearance on the Colbert Report, but it was hard to make any prejudgments from that short interview. So I am coming into this review as clean as I possibly could and allowing McGonigal’s book to speak for itself. Having read it, I asked on twitter, rhetorically, how do you review this book. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter – A Book Review

I haven't done video game reviews on this site. I also don't intend to. I have only done video game critiques or criticism. The name in the top banner should be enough of a clue. So it is interesting that the first review I do for a blog about video games is really about a book. faster full movie high quality part I finished Tom Bissell's Extra Lives over a week ago, before E3 started. I wanted to finish those posts on inFamous before I got around to writing on the book. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

The Noby Noby Boy Review Analysis

Let me reiterate the opportunity. Two reviews, using the same game, within 4 days of each other, using the same scoring method and same scoring scale gave two vastly different scores. The scores are not always alike, in fact, they very, very rarely are, but the difference is usually like a 7.6 to an 8.1. The scores are close if not even closer. The meanings are usually between really good to borderline great or whatever the specific scores might be for a game. But from 'Passable' to 'Outstanding' is a very different matter. | more