Eric Layman

You have to appreciate IO Interactive’s commitment to creating an experience. The Hitman series has always been known for its myriad of ways in which to carry out Agent 47’s contracts, but the degree to which IO Interactive sells his world through apparent happenstance and raw ingenuity is thoroughly underappreciated. This is never more apparent than it has been through my time with Hitman: ...[Read More]

What a difference a couple of year makes. Resident Evil 5 was critically annihilated for featuring a cooperative system that was, for all intents and purposes, miserable if you weren’t playing with another human being. Sheva was an OK character, and mechanically speaking playing through Resident Evil 5 with a friend was basically roided-up Resident Evil 4 with co-op., but a solo experience w...[Read More]

Queasy Games’ Everyday Shooter is one of my favorite games of all time. The sequence when the first level opens and the infectious guitar riff begins is digital Prozac. It lifts me out of whatever funk I was in and opens the door to wonder and imagination, and it’s almost impossible for anyone not to crack a smile for the duration of the first level. It also didn’t hurt that Ever...[Read More]

PaPo & Yo was one of the better surprises of E3 2011. The game’s puzzle/platforming mechanics, which involved escorting a monster through a grimy favela, were well and good, but more interesting was the context behind the gameplay. The boy, Quico, and his frog addicted best friend, Monster were all a metaphor for the relationship Vander Caballero had with an alcoholic father, and their ...[Read More]

I was fortunate enough to take part in a roundtable interview with Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba and Kojima Productions’ Yuji Korekado. An on the spot translation was provided by Kojima Productions’ Sean Eyestone. Being a roundtable, the questions asked by the other two writers are marked with an asterisk. Additionally, the raw audio file of this interview can be found in the last twen...[Read More]

Here’s a snippet of a writer’s life at E3: you make appointments to cover a publisher’s game(s) for the duration of the show’s operating hours, and then you retire to your hotel room (or whatever) and spend the rest of the evening writing about every game you were supposed to see and play that day. We barely get any time to freely pursue the show floor and see all the weird and o...[Read More]

I never thought Dante would be cool. The last decade of Devil May Cry created a character wrought with unfashionable swagger, not unlike a guy who read a book about how to project confidence and wound up looking overly pious and arrogant at every instance. Ninja Theory’s interpretation of Dante knocked a few years off his age and up’d his rebellious nature by somehow making him even mo...[Read More]

I was a bit wary of Star Wars 1313. The Star Wars universe, or at least the mainline segments of it that I have experienced, have never fully embraced a mature brand, and that’s all I was hearing about the game’s mission. “The first mature title in the Star Wars universe,” was the assumed mantra, and hearing it echoed at the beginning of our demo didn’t exactly set the stage well. I understand tha...[Read More]

“Player creativity.” “Author of your own experience.” “Play the way you want.” Buzzwords and phrases like the above are kicked tossed out like candy. Games are hyped into the stratosphere by passing off the illusion of choice through a couple minor variations in approach or gameplay. It’s rare that any game obeys its hype, and even more atypical when choic...[Read More]

Don’t say the folks at Crytek aren’t ones to accept criticism. The original Crysis was lauded for its sandbox approach to first person shooter game design. It was much closer to Far Cry 2 than your typical directed FPS, but the sequel, Crysis 2, ditched that approach for a more linear experience. Plenty of choice still went in to your approach to its combat scenarios, but it was often ...[Read More]

Discovery is an aspect of games that seems to have been focus-grouped into oblivion. On the E3 show floor it’s nearly impossible to find a demo that doesn’t have instructions blasted all over the kiosk or boundless in-game prompts, both of which are fiendishly determined to sabotage any semblance of intuition or exploration. Exposition fits the paradigm for those particular games, but ...[Read More]

Dyad created a tractor beam to my brain. With about an hour before my next meeting, I found myself wandering aimlessly through Sony’s booth just looking to see what caught my eye. Tucked away in a corner with a couple other PlayStation Network games, an infectious onslaught of lights and colors appeared to be either an interactive kaleidoscope or a psychotropic illicit substance simulator &#...[Read More]