Just arrived at the top of The Roosevelt Hotel where Sony has kicked off their Gamer's Day. This time around the company has decided to cut to the chase and just let us dive in to the rooms full of games they have present for hands-on.

So far I've seen consoles set up for Buzz! PS3, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, MotorStorm 2: Pacific Rift, Resistance 2 and SOCOM: Confrontation. PSN titles on hand are Linger-In Shadows, PixelJunk Eden and Siren: Blood Curse and Playstation Portable titles playable are BUZZ! PSP, Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee and Secret Agent Clank.

Stay tuned for hands-on impressions of all of these games from myself and McWhertor throughout the day.

Lets get to what everyone is thinking first: No the Wii version of Samba de Amigo shown this week did not have Maraca-shaped Wii remotes. But that doesn't mean they aren't coming.

In fact a rep told us that they are looking into a "Maraca sleeve" for the remote and even spoken with some manufacturers about it.

In the game, for those of you not familiar, you take on one of several colorful characters dancing and playing the maracas to music. The rhythm game is played by shaking the remote and nunchuk in time to the music while making sure they are in one of three positions: above your head, at your waist or held pointing down.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider is meant to be a re-examination of the world of Golden Axe, the game's developers told the press at Sega's Gamers Day earlier this week.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's going to be a look into the world minus the trio of characters that made the game so great. Instead, gamers will be forced to play as amazon warrior Tyris Flare. Neither the barbarian nor the dwarf will be playable in the single-player only game, though both will appear as non-playable characters as the story unfolds.

It looks like the development team went to great pains to try and turn the once side-scrolling, button-masher into a 3D action title without losing the feel of the original title. A lot of the same creatures, bad guys and feel of the game seems to be present. The art style is a bit generic, but no more so than the original Golden Axe was.

While former Clover devs showed off three games at last night's Platinum/Sega announcement, it was Madworld that hands-down stole the show. The stark, black, white and blood title has gamers playing through a third-person maze of carnage, trying to rack up points for an off-screen audience through over-the-top dismemberment.

Director Shigenori Nishikawa took up the white Wii remote and nunchuk at last night's event to play through a short portion of the game for the audience.

Black, white and blood: It's a formula that Sega of America head honcho Simon Jeffery hopes will help the company have its best year ever, continuing it's four year drive from struggling to stay in the top twenty of publishers to pushing into the number five spot.

Madworld, a blood bath of a highly-stylized action title for the Wii that's so over the top it's almost comical, is just one of four games that newly minted dev studio Platinum Games will be publishing through Sega.

PlatinumGames was formed by by the key members of Capcom's Clover Studio, which made such titles as Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand.

The lead developers and studio head took to the stage last night at Sega's San Francisco gathering to talk briefly about three of the games they will be publishing through Sega as part of a new partnership.

Denis Dyack kept things short and sweet at yesterday's Xbox 360 Spring Showcase event. He wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to play through some co-op on Too Human.

The game is releasing on August 19 in North America, but the once four-player co-op has been trimmed to two because, after play-testing it for awhile, he realized that there was too much going on with that many players.

Later, Dyack told me that the engine still supports four player co-op, but that things were getting too confusing on screen once you factored in the four players, their special attacks and spider-bots plus the army of creatures that would spawn to deal with them.

None of the game's maps are randomized, he told me, but the creatures that spawn in them are. The game will take a player about 15 hours to get to level 30 and 50 to 60 hours to get to level 50.

"I don't know how long it would take to see everything, I don't even know if that's possible," he said. "Too Human may look like an action game, but don't be fooled—it's actually a very, very deep role-playing title."

After finishing up playing a bit of Too Human coop yesterday, I noticed a demo station of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness sitting all by itself, tucked away next to the Ninja Gaiden II stations.

Since the game wasn't getting official demos, I decided to take our 30 minute break between games to sit down with the Penny Arcade game and take it for a test drive.

The game starts off by letting you customize your character's look and clothing. The selection isn't as robust as I would have liked to see (no luxuriously long hair guys? I'm hurt) but there's still more than enough to make the character feel like one of your own.

It sounds like Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise was designed to deal with one big issue the original title had.

"It looked like a kids game, but was quite difficult to play," said a Rare developer walking us through the game. "We kept the basic principal, you're in a garden and trying to attract animals to it."

But the team's done a lot to simplify the game and make it more accessible to a wider audience. Chief among the changes is a co-op mode that lets you play in the garden with friend. They've also added a fun mode which gives gamers the ability to buy just about anything in the game, removes the bad guys and turns the garden into an instant gratification sandbox.

The always charming Peter Molyneux took some time during yesterday's Xbox 360 Spring Showcase to walk folks through Fable 2. Specifically he was showing off the game's entire introduction, talking up the free roaming in the game a bit more and showing a little bit of fighting customization.

"We're going to be talking about Fable 2 today of course, next time I meet you we will be talking about our next new project, but today it's about Fable 2," he said. "It's going to be full of bugs and you're going to write some pretty horrible things about it, but it's about time that I show you what the game will feel like from the beginning."

It has been ten years and two console generations since the team of Banjo and Kazooie stormed the Nintendo 64 to rave reviews and not much has changed, at least not much for platformers, or so say Rare.

"We felt the platform genre hasn't really evolved much," said one of the developers showing off Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts to the press yesterday. "Up until recently things really haven't evolved much."

The team decided they wanted to tweak the formula, adding "fun physics" to the franchise and making it more about vehicles than traditional platforming. The change seems to be turning the franchise into what appears to be a sort of platformer on wheels that is centered more around challenges than a linear storyline.

I say appears to be because we were only shown a small part of one level of one of the game's five worlds. In it Banjo and Kazooie have to complete a short challenge for one of the game's characters. The challenge can be completed on foot, but it's not really meant to be. To complete it quickly you have to use a vehicle. It's the customization of these vehicles that seem to be the heart of the game.

Today at Microsoft's Spring Event Cliff Bleszinski walked members of the press through the entire second level of Gears of War 2. Actually he played through the level, live, as we watched in rapt attention.

Gears of War 2 takes place six months after the first Gears ends, he said. It is fall and the last stand for humanity as the Locust Horde work to collapse the last major city on Sera. To fight back Marcus Fenix and his squad are asked to deliver a "grind lift" to a nearby lost city and ride it into the Locust underground home cities.

Level two starts off with Fenix and company boarding a giant combat truck and riding it as it makes it way to a nearby city. Dizzy, a conscript driver, maneuvers the vehicle as Fenix and the other members of Delta squad work to defend it. The platform the squad stands on is large enough to still make good use of the game's trademark cover system.

The level also showed off some of the other large vehicles found in the game, like helicopters and tanks.

When Electronic Arts takes over a bar, they don't just throw up a bunch of gaming kiosks and a couple of Communist slogan-themed logos, they also come up with their very own list of game-themed drinks.

Here's the breakdown:

Battlefield: Bad Company: Herradura silver tequila, cointreau and fresh squeezed lime served on the rocks.

Battlefield: Heroes: Hendrick's gin, fresh rasberry, cucumber, shaken and strained, served up with a splash of kumquat dry soda.

Left 4 Dead: Fresh muddled lime wedges, mango puree, cachaca, shaken and poured over rocks.

Warhammer Online: Oronoco rum, freshly squeezed lime, simple syrup and muddled cucumbers, shaken hard poured over ice.

Dead Space: Maker's Mark, carpano antica sweet vermouth, disaronno amaretto, served up with a cherry.

Rock Band: Drink like a rockstar, Skyy citrus, fresh lemon and lime, served sparkling in a tall glass.

Skate It: Jameson, fresh lemon, ginger beer, a touch of blood orange bitters and pomegranate.

Mass Effect: Fresh basil, Lotus vodka and fresh lime juice served straight up.

Before the whole shebang took off last night and Electronic Arts kicked off their Spring Break Games Day, I managed to sneak my way onto a computer loaded up with Battlefield Heroes to check out a bit of gameplay and mess around with the game's interesting customization settings.

DICE's free-to-play upcoming shooter features Team Fortress 2-like graphics and a definite Battlefield Lite feel, but what really captured my interest was the game's use of customization.

Standing on the tiny white stage set up in front of the back bar of Supperclub last night, a drink sloshing nearly out of its glass in one hand, Skate It executive producer Scott Blackwood promised not to use the phrase "built from the ground up" while explaining his game.

Boo me off the stage, he insisted, if I do... and then he proceeded to use the phrase.

"If it's not built from the ground up, is it a port? Not really."

Blackwood explained that before Black Box started their work on the Wii and DS versions of Skate, they had to figure out if the controls would work.

"It we couldn't get that great flick it feel, we weren't going to do it," he said.

Later on, while trying out the Wii version of the game for myself, I was told the team spent three to four months working on getting those controls right and for the most part, it felt like they succeeded.

At first blush Battleforge appears to be an amalgamation of Magic the Gather and Warcraft, a PC game that combines the strategy and pacing of a well put together real-time strategy game with the collectible nature and infrastructure-free feel of a trading card game.

During last night's EA event Richard Leinfellner, executive producer of the game and video president of developer Phenomic, walked the press through a quick co-op battle.

While Battleforge has single player and versus modes, it appears that it's really, at its heart, a cooperative game, supporting up to 12 players.

To play, players first build a deck from the cards they've collected by working through the campaign, which rewards gamers with new cards, trading online or buying booster packs.

Once the deck has been built, players use these cards to summon their armies, there are no production buildings or resource management, instead you fight to capture territories, which gives you the ability to summon larger and larger creatures.