Eric Layman

Alan Wake has identity issues. An interpretation of that statement for the game itself or it’s titular protagonist is valid, but in this argument if favors the former. For every legitimate step forward it took toward selling its fiction, there was another step back that reminded me I was on the couch playing a videogame. Such a disconnect isn’t necessarily bad thing, but it did sort of...[Read More]

Much like our Fable 3 session with Peter Molyneux, our time with Gears of War 3 wasn’t spent playing or watching a demo reel, but rather talking with members of Epic Games. Rod Strickland was happy to answer an onslaught of questions from an assortment of different outlets. A question I had been dying to ask revolved around Gear’s narrative, or, to put it blatantly, whether the team was interested...[Read More]

While LittleBigPlanet 2’s revamped creating tools will undoubtedly be the star of the show, there was still a lot to love with the prepackaged content on the floor. The level on display turned out to be the perfect showcase for one of the hotter mechanics, the grappling hook. Fired with a shoulder button (not unlike the paintball gun), the grappling hook stuck to any surface almost instantaneously...[Read More]

My time with Fable 3 wasn’t along the lines of a traditional show floor demo. Though I had yet to play the game, I took advantage of an opportunity to sit down with lead designer Peter Molyneux for a nice chat over a few of Fable 3’s finer details. This will by no means be an all inclusive preview, but I think it will shed some light on some of the game’s underlying features. In our group of three...[Read More]

Heavy Rain might have been last on the list of games I expected to demo at E3 2010, but the allure of added Move support couldn’t be denied. Random thoughts in the character’s head were detached from buttons and replaced by pointer controls, and actions bolted to analog sticks or sixaxis waggle were transferred to pure motion control. The point of all of this (or at least the one Sony kept trying ...[Read More]

Sorcery excluded, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a Move demo. While I hadn’t seen it up close, the buzz on the tech failed to excite me. It seemed like a wiimote with added fidelity and presented in the glorious high definition. In other words, the handful of Move demo’s I had seen didn’t seem too interested in bringing anything new to the table. It was content to reproduce what we d...[Read More]

After the ending of the original, it seemed a sequel was inevitable. Q-Games first official sequel (rather than an extended Encore) is finally here in the form of PixelJunk Shooter 2. After being swallowed into the belly of the beast a slight change has undertaken the aesthetic. The same general style remains, but now reflects a more organic, rather than earthly, atmosphere. That’s not the only ch...[Read More]

David Jaffe fooled us all. EatSleepPlay was working on a new Twisted Metal, and Jaffe was indeed at the show. There’s no conceivable way I could be disappointed by his misdirection, as the end result was something we all wanted anyway; a true Twisted Metal sequel with parts of the original Singletrac crew at the helm. If it was ever going to come back, these were the guys who needed to do it. Twis...[Read More]

You know how Assassin’s Creed II and Mass Effect 2 added so much content they essentially rendered their prequels little more than basic design concepts? From a gameplay standpoint, Valve has somehow executed the same model with Portal 2. The five six mechanics I saw in a canned demo insured a fantastically different experience that, while keeping portals essential to the overall. First up was the...[Read More]

I went into Bulletstorm hyped to get my hands on People Can Fly’s second offering, but I was quickly brought down by the video that preempted our play time. Bulletstorm’s score based mechanics demand immediate explanation to fully enjoy the game, but it was presented in a way that made me feel like I was thirteen years old. A woman’s voice pandering to adolescent male with groan-inducing puns (the...[Read More]

Dead Space 2’s closed door live demo might receive the award for loudest thing on the show floor. I’m not exactly sure how they packed that much sound into a tiny room, but I felt like it was about to blow me out of the mock Church of Unitology pews and make me pee in my pants with in a terrified stupor. Anyway the demo opened with a mask-less Isaac Clark in the aforementioned Church of Unitology....[Read More]