More Day Two

I thought getting in to see the Wii was going to take all day, so I had time to peruse more wares from the show floor.

I witnessed a demo for "John Woo's Stranglehold," starring Chow Yun-Fat, master of the double-fisted gun technique. It's a giant Hong Kong action shootout that unleashes all of Woo's directing trademarks: slow motion, lots of bullets and the hero doing things for the sake of cool. You can slide across tables, run up bannisters and swing on hanging lights. One sequence features Chow gliding down a bannister and diving onto a roll cart, shooting thugs as he trucks across a room. The game takes a page out of the "Black" playbook, as practically everything in the virtual background was destroyed at the
end of the shootout.

Also went to the Ubisoft booth to see "Splinter Cell: Double Agent," in which Sam Fisher goes undercover to infiltrate a terror group. to earn their trust, he's asked to make some chilling decisions, such as whether or not to kill a captured chopper pilot. The game also takes a step outside, taking Sam away from the confined spaces he's used to. One mission puts him in Africa during a civil war. Also new to the franchise are underwater swimming sequences.

Invested some time into "Lost Planet." It didn't grab me at first glance, but it plays pretty well. You can find the demo on Xbox Live
and see for yourself. The game focuses on extreme temperature conditions -- you start off the demo on a frozen landscape reminiscent of Hoth. I spent a lot of time blasting bug creatures large and small into pieces. Good times.

I'll return in a few hours with some more stuff from today.