"In fairness to them, you don't turn around an oil tanker in a day," said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

A few titles stood out to me - I'm intrigued to see how Deadly Creatures turns out, as I like the creepy-crawly concept, and I thought Lock's Quest was an unexpected surprise, looking like more of a hardcore title aimed at fans of Japanese-style RTS games. And De Blob put me just enough in mind of Katamari Damacy to pique my interest.

In case you missed it yesterday, check out my posts from the press event:
Hands On With De Blob
Impressions: Lock's Quest
Impressions: Viva Pinata - Pocket Paradise
Impressions: Drawn To Life - SpongeBob Edition
Impressions: Wall-E
Impressions: Deadly Creatures

What do you think, guys? See anything you like?

THQ's Rainbow Studios, known for the Cars game and the MX vs. ATV series, developed Deadly Creatures as a "labor of love," according to the rep, since the studio's based in Arizona, where its team was inspired by the desert crawlies native to the warm region.

As such, in Deadly Creatures, you can play the action-adventure game either as a venomous scorpion or fabulously gross tarantula, and the different strengths and weaknesses of each animal mean that navigating the game's areas and defeating its bosses, which include a rattlesnake, a gila monster and a horned lizard, among others.

After watching the rep demo it for me, here's what stood out:

First of all, if the title didn't clue you in, you play as - and against - dangerous creatures.The tarantula's animation was spot-on and cringe-inducing, as spooky as a real big, hairy spider can be. The tarantula, it was shown to me, is more agile than the scorpion, who can climb walls, leap gaps, and wrap hostile creatures in its webbing. I didn't get to see the scorpion, but the rep told me that the scorpion is more of a "tank" character, able to do damage with his venomous stinger and burrow underground.

Your creature of choice navigates the level in its own unique way, gradually opening more areas of the forbidding landscape as it defeats bosses and accomplishes objectives - gameplay blends action with problem-solving and exploration. The rep told me that gameplay would gradually expose a backstory leading up to the creature's confrontation with its ultimate predator (drumroll), mankind.

Getting up close and personal with the more dangerous aspects of Mother Nature by controlling fiends we normally find repellent is a really cool idea - I was actually reminded of how much I loved to play as the hive-devouring spider in Sim Ant back when I was young.

The graphics look good, too, in full 3D with a 360-degree camera, letting you see all the creepy crevices, gross bugs and spider leg hairs you can stomach. The rep told me that Deadly Creatures is aimed at Wii users who have been waiting for something a little more mature to play than the usual brightly-colored fare, and this sure looks like a fun choice - especially if you're as vaguely sadistic as I am and love watching things eat each other on National Geographic.

Unlike most of the games I saw today, Wall-E's coming out this month, so we'll know for ourselves soon enough, but I still thought I'd share my impressions of the title, along with some screens of the Wii version.

The rep who demonstrated Wall-E for me on the Wii said that, not being a "gamer" per se, she'd struggled often with Wii controls, and that playing Wall-E was the first time she'd found them accessible.

Makes sense, as like much of THQ's audience, this game is geared at a wider audience and intended primarily to be appealing to kids. It's simple mission-based gameplay and doesn't look too challenging or complex, but it definitely appears to be solid. For what it's worth, the self-proclaimed "non-gamer" rep seemed to play it with ease, so unless she was totally lying to me, its level of complexity is appropriate for young people and families.

Each stage has a different theme, like item collecting, driving, or puzzle-solving, and in some of the stages, Wall-E's robot love interest Eve helps him jump. I couldn't see all of the levels, because the later ones are spoilers for the upcoming film, whose story the game parallels. I know that I won't be able to resist going to check out Wall-E when it hits the theaters, hopefully with a young family member like my little cousin, who would really get a kick out of it. While it's probably not the kind of game I'd play on my own, it looks like it'd be genuine fun to play with her.

A rep demoed the DS title for me, and explained the gameplay is similar to the original Drawn to Life - this time, obviously, with a big SpongeBob cartoon theme. It's actually based, she said, on an episode of the TV series where Spongebob accidentally scribbles himself an enemy, "DoodleBob," a drawing come to life.

Like I said, I never played Drawn to Life, but I heard at length from lots of friends and readers that the platforming was nothing to get excited about, so I asked whether they'd taken that feedback and cleaned it up this time.

Apparently not so much - the rep explained that Drawn to Life is actually targeted at kids, not older gamers, so we'd be mistaken to expect particularly complex, high-level gameplay. The appeal, she said, lies in how customizable the world is, giving the player the opportunity to draw and customize not only the player character, but gameplay elements like buildings, background elements and platforms in an MSPaint-like pixel-based stylus interface.

In the SpongeBob edition of Drawn to Life, players can pick either the titular sponge, his friend Patrick the starfish, or surly Squidward as a companion for gameplay, and each one lends a certain ability - SpongeBob provides a shield, and Patrick and Squidward have different special attacks.

The game looks rich with trademark Nickelodeon style, and one thing I'd think would make it really appealing to kids is that there are modes that teach them how to draw the key characters, so if they want to draw themselves a SpongeBob character and play as him, they can, but maybe not so much there for an audience our age unless you really love SpongeBob and don't mind simplicity.

Judging by what I saw, THQ's aiming to take what fans of the original Viva Pinata liked best and put it front-and-center, while also making it portable and by tying it in to the TV series in the hopes of opening frilly neon pinata guts and raining candy down on a whole new audience of fans.

So how's it look?

Really exciting, actually. The rep who demoed it for me explained that the real-time strategy-esque elements of the original VP were not so much at home on the console - she'd been a fan of the game, but found herself wishing she could point-and-click to manage things more efficiently.

The stylus controls, she said, provide a more direct access to the interface, and you can zoom in on individual pinatas with just a tap and view various stat screens on them with the buttons. Providing tutorials on all the controls are Fergie, Paulie, Franklin and Hudson from the TV series, and there are full-motion video clips pulled straight from the show (which I confess to occasionally viewing on Saturday mornings. Okay, I almost always watch it. Shut up.)

The game has two modes, also - the traditional mode plus a free-play, sandbox-style mode where money's no object, if you just want to mess around. The thing I found most interesting is that you can ship your pinatas and items even among your own saved games, of which you can have up to three. So if a Sour enters your garden, the rep said, you can box it up and ship it to a different garden of yours. You can also trade among your friends, and some of the pinatas to collect can only be unlocked through trades (think Pokemon).

So it looks like all of the necessities are there for traditional Viva Pinata fans, and new ones may be attracted to the series for the first time by the DS's huge install base, the relationship to the TV show, and the different modes for more accessible play.

As we've told you in the past, you play as a pretty cute blob. Squishy blobs are in right now - just think of Independent Games Festival buzz-generators World of Goo and Goo!, to name just a couple. In fact, as Crecente reported last year, De Blob is actually the result of a student project from the 2006 Independent Games Festival.

As such, it retains both the simplicity and attractively colorful, offbeat vibe we often associate with promising indies. What are you a blob of? Color, it looks like, a heroic little splat plunked down in Chroma City, an adorable world that's had all of the hues sapped out of it by the evil I.N.K.T. Corporation.

It's super cute and quirky, but how does it play? Details and screens after the jump.

My tendency was actually to be a bit leery of THQ's Wii-heavy strategy. As I've mentioned before, I've got a little bit of "waggle fatigue," and you may recall I was not pleased with Battle of the Bands, where I felt the motion controls seemed a little bit frustrating and redundant.

De Blob, however, controls very simply and tightly judging by the few minutes I had with it - the way you roll your blob around with the nunchuk's thumbstick works particularly well, and put me distinctly in mind of Katamari Damacy. In fact, a lot of De Blob's gameplay seems to take a Katamari cue, from the camera control to the fashion of rolling over Chroma City's poor trapped citizens to set them free.

As Flynn explained, you hold the Z button to lock onto objects you can smash, and swing the Wii Remote down to jump on them. When you hit a paint can, your blob takes on the color you splash through, and colors can blend - if you're red and hit a blue can, for example, you become purple.

And as you roll through Chroma City, you paint it with the colors and patterns you're currently hanging onto, and you earn higher scores for a broad color palette and pattern diversity. The more paint you soak up, the heavier and less agile your blob becomes, and if you roll through two colors that don't blend well, like purple and green, you turn brown. Roll through water to rinse off and become colorless again, taking off some of that weight.

Your blob has to avoid stumbling into ominous-looking black rivers of ink, though - if you get inked, you'll spread depressing blacks and grays all over your colorful handiwork, killing trees and even obliterating your cheerful Chroma City citizens. You can wash off the ink by rinsing in water if you get there in time, though, and an optional onscreen map can point you in the general direction of the nearest water source.

The game features some platforming elements, and you swing the Wii Remote upward to jump, higher if you want more air. Flynn had said he noticed some issues with this - while I've never found motion controls to be ideal for platforming, I found it at least workable here, even if getting the timing and size of the movement just right might take some practice through playtime.

Just rolling the blob around and painting with color is surprisingly engrossing, especially because of the outstanding sound effects and music. The THQ rep told me that the entire soundtrack was done by an Australian local band who plays jazz music, and all of the game's tunes are sprightly and clever. My favorite part was how the music changes depending on what color you are, with the accompanying sound seeming to go with the hue.

Katamari Damacy succeeded through surprising aesthetics and simple gameplay, and it looks possible for De Blob to do the same - my one uncertainty about it is that it's still not clear to me exactly how much structure there is to the missions, or how you obtain the satisfaction of completing a single objective. That's not necessarily a problem - it might still be simple fun as an open-world, color-saturated free-for-all, but personally, I thrive on the joy rush of beating the clock and accomplishing something.

The first thing that caught my eye when it was shown to me was its old-school vibe: traditional-looking 2D sprites and animation plus anime aesthetic, a little bit of a surprise from a publisher who seems to have hitched its star on family-friendly titles with broader appeal.

So what's cool about Lock's Quest? Hit the jump for impressions and screenshots.

Lock's Quest's gameplay is part resource management and building, and part tower defense. The player's tasked with defending an objective on the world map, while little helmeted folk march forward to siege. The dual screen works well here, with your basic stats on the top half alongside a small map that shows where the enemies are approaching from and how many there are.

The game's primary resources are "source" and "scrap," and it costs both to build various types of defensive equipment, like protective walls, traps and turrets that you set up in realtime, to hold off the marching onslaught. More source and better scrap equals better defensive options, and you earn more with each victory you rack up. Your spiky-haired young hero can also leave the ramparts himself and go hand-to-hand against enemies on the field using various attacks, while the structures you built do their job behind him.

The player's individual attacks are played simply enough, while tapping numbers 1, 2 or 3 that appear at the bottom of the touch screen in the order indicated. When you're not attacking, you can continue to expand your ramparts depending on the resources you have saved up.

Your turrets, retaining walls and such take damage from the enemies, and you'll have to repair them continually as the battle wages on - it's cheaper in terms of scrap and source to repair an existing item than it is to forge and place a new one. The battles become more complex as the game goes on, building up to the kind of always-on, continuously hectic action that gives the genre its appeal.

The building mode isn't the only way to defend an objective, though - Lock's Quest also has a battle mode, where you fire your cannon at soldiers as they walk toward your wall from left to right in 2D. Similarly to how you can upgrade your turrets and defensive items in building mode, you can eventually earn upgrades and options for your cannon, and you can also buy little troops to help keep the enemies at bay. This mode is a little bit less interesting to watch, but the idea of having multiple modes in which to defend your towers is appealing.

A big plus for Lock's Quest as an RTS is the idea that you get to actually control the hero, as opposed to distantly managing your battlefield. Personally, I liked the idea of having a more direct sense of control, and to control a person instead of simply faceless objects. Interestingly, the game allows you to directly visit the villages involved in the ongoing narrative thread, talk with people in town and get tips or information on the storyline or the next stage of gameplay. This fashion of "personalizing" the strategy genre is what I liked best about Lock's Quest

Overall, it looks like it could turn out to be an ideal blend of nostalgic throwback and pleasing innovation - and in plain terms, it just looks fun! I don't even like real-time strategy games, and I found it promising. Let's keep an eye on this one.