Along with the cartoony yet curiously compelling Clone Wars and the innovative Fracture that is hovering at the very edge of my interest, LucasArts presented one more game at E3 2008, and this one is truly going to be epic. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a game I have been secretly drooling over since it was first announced, from both a technical perspective as well as the story standpoint. Sure, die hard Star Wars fans complain about continuity, but what else is Vader going to do during the gap between movies? Kick back and eat some Hot Pockets? Sure, but that only takes like five to ten minutes.

Between the LucasArts presentation of the game and my brief hands-on, I walked away feeling confident that this could not only be one of the most exciting Star Wars video games of all time, it could very well provide moments more epic than anything we saw in the three prequel films.

It seems almost pointless to write hands-on impressions of a game several of you have already gotten your hands on, by I assure you my hands are professional trained to receive impressions still harboring the faint traces of a spiral notebook I fell asleep on in 1989. Those are lasting impressions right there. Either way, I got a chance to test my Soul Calibur IV mettle against some of the Namco Bandai folk at E3 last week, and boy did I ever fail to kick complete ass. Word to the wise: don't button mash against employees of the company creating the game. They are wise to such tricks. Could I alter my strategy and beat them at their own game?

Not only do you get to use a bat symbol to target bad guys and items anywhere on the screen for your batarang, but when you get to play as the Joker, that's right, play as the Joker, you can use a handbuzzer on enemies that delivers so much juice it shakes the mini-figs to pieces.

I shouldn't have to go on from there, but I will.

LEGO Batman: The Videogame looks like it will be delivering the sort of over-the-top addictive LEGO fun of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, but with even more memorable and equipment-laden playable characters than both games combined.

"Over the decades there have been lots of stories about Batman, this is a distillation," said Traveller's Tale's Jonathan Smith. "It is our original telling of Gotham City in chaos."

Killing A Dead Space Boss

Dead Space was one of those titles that sort of snuck up on me, very appropriate for a survival horror game.

Before taking up a controller for any length of time, I was sort of impressed with its look, but I hadn't yet been introduced to some of the game's interesting gameplay designs. Things like strategic dismemberment and the lack of a HUD and the true zero gravity sections of the game. All three combine to make Dead Space both more immersive and otherworldly.

In Dead Space you will play as Issac Clarke, a space engineer responding to a distress call from a "Planet Cracker." In the game's reality, these giant spaceships tear apart dead planets to extract ore. In the case of this particular ship, the planet they were raping wasn't so dead. Soon after boarding the ship, and realizing that most everyone onboard is dead, Clarke is separated from the rest of his team.

On the last day of E3 last week before coming home and getting violently ill I had a chance to sit down with 30 minutes of Bethesda's Fallout 3. Technically it was supposed to be more like 20 minutes, as they were running behind and I had an appointment coming up, but Fallout 3 is one of those games where 30 minutes passes in the blink of an eye and then Bethesda's Pete Hines has to pry the controller out of your hands. I think I spotted a crowbar behind their booth, just in case.

I got to wander around the shattered landscape, poking at rubble, shooting at people, and trying on clothes. I got my first hands-on taste of the VaultTech Assisted Targeting system, which allows you to pause the action, choose where your bullets are heading on your target's body, and then plays through in slow motion - and there is nothing sweeter than a slow-motion exploding head. It was all very exciting, but as I took a moment to gaze about the room I realized that the most exciting thing about Fallout 3 is what everyone else was doing.

The best thing about going to E3 are the little surprises - games you either didn't know about or hadn't paid attention to that simply knock you off your feet. Blue Omega Games' Damnation is just that sort of game. Due to be published by Codemasters for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, Damnation combines third-person shooting with acrobatics in a unique steampunk setting to create a game that has amazing potential, both online and off.

Fist Pumping Through Major Minor's Majestic March

On its surface Major Minor's Majestic March is very simplistic, but then again so was Parappa the Rapper. And that's an apt comparison. Both games were created by Masaya Matsuura and both feature bright cartoon characters drawn with bold, clean lines.

Instead of tapping out a rhythm on a controller, as players did with Parappa, Major Minor's Majestic March has players setting their own tempo as the Drum Major of a marching band. That may not sound like a big difference but what it means is that it takes the control away from the game and allows gamers to dictate how they want to play. The key to the game isn't rhythm as much as it is consistency.

To play the game you hold the remote facing you and then pump it up and down in your hand as if you were holding a baton. The faster you pump it the faster your band moves and the faster the music plays. As you march along predetermined routes special power-ups and negative items pop-up on the screen. To grab them you have to swipe your controller left or right as you pass the items. You also pass a number of would-be band mates who can be tagged into your band.

Resident Evil 5. An eagerly awaited game awash in a sea of racial controversy that seems silly when every morning for the past week I woke up, look out the window, and was greeted by a 200 foot tall advertisement for Tropic Thunder featuring Robert Downey Jr. with his face painted black. I think the gaming public has pretty much moved on at this point, which is nice, because I don't want my hands-on impressions of Capcom's E3 demo for the game sullied by conflict.

The demo starts off with my character (Chris) holed up in a shack with Rosario Dawson.

Before speaking to Castlevania's Daddy Koji Igarashi earlier today, I got a chance to step into the shoes of the series prettiest little thing, Maria. Okay, their prettiest little female thing, though I did get a chance to beat up Alucard, the franchises prettiest little male son of Dracula.

As Iga said, Castlevania Judgment is not your standard 3D fighting game. You move in full 3D, almost as if you were playing in a room in one of the various attempts at bringing the platformer to into the 3D arena. There are objects to smash (and in Dracula's case, possess), power ups to be gained, and spectacular special moves to master, but at its core the gameplay is a very simple, pick-up-and-play affair.

Late last month I got a chance to sit down with Will Wright and a few other game writers to check out the full Spore. Having spent a week or so creating meatspace Fruit Fuckers, Spiders and a TickleMeKotaku, I was already pretty versed on the game's Creature Creator.

The full Spore, as we've talked about in detail before, is broken down into five phases which allow you to take a single-cell organism and run it all the way up the evolutionary ladder to a space-exploring civilization.

My concern, after watching the Spore demonstration in Leipzig last year, was that the game wouldn't live up to the spectacular creation tools that are so integral to Spore. I worried that it may be more of a series of toys strung together than a full-blown game.

My time with the game managed to ease some of those concerns.

Ultimate Band is Disney Interactive's answer to those people who want to have the music band game experience without the need for all of those expensive, room-filling peripherals that are required for titles like Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour.

This band game light is both peripheral and original music free, using only cover bands so the developers would be allowed to tweak the music to better fit the game. Those tweaks include the ability to have the lead singer be either a man or a woman, no matter who originally sang it.

The Disney folks told me that they did a number of focus tests during their development of the game. In them they asked potential gamers which of nine versions of the game they would want to play. The options ranged from a peripheral-heavy version of the game with original music, to the game they ended up producing. All of the tests showed, they told me, that gamers wanted a game that didn't require peripherals.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway Hands-On

It feels like Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is Ubisoft’s attempt at bringing a more, dare I say it, casual gamer into the historically hardcore flight sim fanbase.

But despite having modes for missile-lock and bomb drops that are akin to flying with training wheels, the game seems to still provide the technical controls that have always drawn fans of arcade flight sims to air combat games.

Dead Space: Hands-On Impressions

EA Redwood Shores was on hand at last week's EA Label gathering to show off a bit of Dead Space, the deep-space thriller that, until last week, left me feeling rather cold... and not in a good way.

Leading up to last week's event all of the stuff I saw about the game made me feel like it was another shooter, albeit one set in space, but one that didn't seem to offer anything new or interesting to the formula of scary shooters.

But after spending ten minutes or so watching a demonstration and then a few minutes controlling a hapless space engineer, I've got a taste for the game.

EA Buys Korean Mobile RPG Dev

In an effort to grown their mobile business in Korea's massive gaming market, Electonic Arts is purchasing the assets of Hands-On Mobile Korea and turning it into EA Mobile Korea.

The Korean mobile developer and publisher is best known for their mobile role-playing game Heroes Lore.

“This acquisition is a major milestone in growing our mobile business in Asia,” said Barry Cottle, Senior Vice President and General Manager EA Mobile. “Hands-On Mobile Korea brings us a great leadership team, proven studio talent, and outstanding carrier and OEM handset manufacturer relationships.”

While mobile gaming and it's plethora of platforms continues to fail to substantially tap it's mammoth market, it must be heartening for that industry to see a company as large as EA show such interest.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood Hands-On

My first chance to play around with Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood left me more than a little impressed.

While we didn't get a walk through of the game's storyline, we were given a chance to mess around with a chunk of the game.

The DS title shows the action of the game on the bottom, touch screen, while the top screen is taken up by a large colorful map of the section of the world you are currently exploring.

The game has you playing a team of Sonic characters, selected among 11 playable in the game.

SIXAXIS Brings Nothing to GTA IV (But Frustration And Burning Helicopter Chassis)

The SIXAXIS motion controls in Rockstar Games' sublime opus Grand Theft Auto IV feels like a last minute appendage, and not a particularly useful one. It's like the game's third nipple, you know it's there, and maybe you can't resist a fiddle, but no good will come of it.

When Mike told me that he didn't like the SIXAXIS controls for the game, and wasn't even able to complete the tutorial, I chalked it up to some innate hatred of the PS3's motion controls on his part. In fact he did admit that he doesn't really like the PS3 games that use SIXAXIS motion sensing, but there are several that I quite like (Warhawk comes to mind), so I decided to give it a whirl.

After playing through GTA4 on the Xbox 360, I swapped seats with Mike and settled down to get to the bottom of his SIXAXIS hatred. A few minutes into the tutorial I figured out what the problem was. The special SIXAXIS controls for this particular game suck, they're absolutely abysmal.

I suppose with some time I could master using the bike, in fact it wasn't that hard, and maybe one day I would fly the helicopter, but that's not the point, the point is there's no benefit using the motion sensing in Grand Theft Auto IV.

The in-game tutorial for the controller, which is an annoyingly permanent option on your in-game cell phone, walks you through the four ways you use the special controller in the game. Here's the break down and my thoughts:

The FedEx guy just dropped Mario Kart Wii off at my house. I think my son is going to faint when he comes home. The timing is perfect. It gives me something to play with him until Grand Theft Auto arrives and I disappear from his life for several weeks.

"Mommy, is Daddy dead?"

Good times, good times. Hit the jump for plenty of pictures of the wheel. SEXY!