The E3 directory is useful, but not perfectly accurate. I have a meeting with RealTime Worlds and the directory leads me to Scottish Development International, where several nice people with Scottish brogues confer among themselves and eventually point me to the Xbox 360 booth in the another hall.

Once I get through Microsoft registration (presumably next year I can just give them my gamertag) I'm lead into a presentation room and on the screen all Hell is breaking loose. Bodies are flying, cars are exploding into pieces, and the streets are filled with thugs, unfazed by the carnage around them, unloading round after round of small arms fire. In the middle of this is a burly man dressed in a dark blue body suit, calmly shooting and throwing grenades, orchestrating carnage like an incredibly violent symphony conductor. The game is called Crackdown.

The graphics look stylish, with a bright, hard-lined style reminiscent of the comics in Heavy Metal magazine. They call it the "graphic novel look." The game is instantly recognizible as one of the many illegitimate children of Grand Theft Auto III: You run freely around a large city, dispensing mayhem at will and picking up missions when you get tired of free-form destruction. In this case, you're the good guy working for "The Agency," and mowing down innocents is discouraged but certainly an option.

Much of the presentation is focused on explaining that the game is even more open-ended than its predecessors. You can go anywhere on the three available islands, take missions in any order, and all without load screens. I'm told you can even go straight to the end mission and theoretically win the game without playing any of the parts in-between, although it would require someone with the gaming skills of Kevin Flynn.

The other gimmick is that the character has skill ranks. The more you blow things up, the better you get at blowing things up. If you lift and throw things enough, you can eventually toss around cars. This is reflected in the game, with the explosions becoming massive, your muscles becoming even more bulging, and so forth. In the nicest effect in the demo, when your driving skill is maxxed out, special Agency cars morph into cooler forms when you get into them, with a plain old regular semi cab turning into a futuristic hyper-truck before your very eyes.

There's going to be no shortage of sandbox games in this next generation. It's way too early to pick winners, but Heavy Metal artwork and morphing hyper-trucks aren't a bad place to start.