The Force Unleashed II opens with Lord Vader informing Starkiller that he's a failed clone. When will LucasArts stop ripping off the Spider-Man clone saga?

I am being facetious, of course. No one would consciously rip off the Clone Saga. It just sounds a little similar.

Spoiler alert, which is more than we got!

At the end of The Force Unleashed, Vader's apprentice sacrificed himself to save something from something. I'm a little unclear on the particulars, but it still counts as a spoiler.

So how is he alive now?

The Force Unleashed II opens on the rainy planet of Kamino, proud manufacturers of the original clone army. Vader informs his apprentice that he's done his job well, but he is no longer needed. He leaves the room after ordering eight Stormtroopers to kill him.

You may have seen the trailer. It's completely silly. One could argue Vader meant for him to escape. One could also argue that Starkiller should have figured that out, being an intelligent young force of nature.

Our demo opens with that trailer, showing just how much of a badass Galen (Starkiller's real name) can be, before turning it over to the player to try and live up.

We quickly shifted to a new sort of gameplay for the series: the controlled free fall, seen above. Galen leaps out of a window and plummets down the side of a tower, smashing through platforms, avoiding Tie Fighters, taking out Stormtroopers, and generally moving in a downward direction, very fast.

Until he smashes through a window and lands, of course.

He winds up in glass corridor, water coursing down the glass in spectacular fashion, at least until a fighter ship start shooting through it. Galen charges down the corridor, avoiding gunfire, while Stormtroopers die in droves, as they should.

Once through the corridor he faces the ship out in the open, crumpling it like a tin can with the power of his mind.

As he wanders out into the pouring rain, his outfit gets soaked. I love little touches like that. Like the first game, The Force Unleashed 2 is filled with amazing physics. Cloth gets wet, glass shatters naturally, and Stormtroopers die as one would expect.

Then comes a new enemy, the Imperial Riot Trooper, filling the role of annoying enemy that always blocks. Starkiller must use force powers to get past their defenses, weaving them together with blows from his new dual lightsaber setup. The combat has been revamped completely to suit the new weapons. Interesting.

More Stormtroopers show up to die, and Galen makes use of the new Force Power, Mind Trick. At low power, it'll make enemies turn on each other, or leap into environmental hazards. At higher levels, it'll explode their minds.

"These are not the droids you are loo...oops."

Force powers are also used to solve environmental puzzles. Grabbing a passing Tie Fighter (the new targeting system looks extremely easy), Galen crumples it into a ball and tosses it at a nearby tower. The tower falls, opening up a new path. convenient!

The last big battle in the demo is against a large Carbonite War Droid, which comes equipped with a carbonite freeze cannon and a large shield. Kiting it about the stage results in a mass of frozen Stormtroopers. Galen force pulls the shield away, beats the living hell out of the droid, and then finishes it by slicing off the nozzle of its weapon, freezing it solid.

Spotting Vader's Tie Fighter Advanced, Galen has finally too many Stormtroopers. A button activates force rage, enhancing the power of his abilities a great amount for a short period of time. Now his force push tosses enemies off the platforms, and his saber swings take off heads and arms.

Echoing the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Vader watches the Millennium Falcon leave Hoth, Vader watches his own ship leave Kamino. Turning, looking back thoughtfully, and moving on.

It's a fitting beginning to The Force Unleashed's version of Empire.

Let's just hope Ben Riley doesn't show up.

As the E3 of four years ago wrapped up there was a famously large stampede.

The last day of that show, the show when Nintendo gave attendees a chance to get their hands on the Wii and its motion gaming, the second the doors opened people ran through the halls, past competitors, past other games to get their final chance to check out the Wii before the console went on sale.

This year's E3, the E3 when Nintendo unveiled their 3D portable gaming console, people seemed just as excited to run through the floor to get into what became a mammoth Nintendo line.

How mammoth? Well there were two of them, one of the Zelda and the other for the 3DS. Both were huge, but only the 3DS one was so big that it almost wound its way right back out of the show floor and into the parking lot.

Last I heard, the 3DS line wait was up to four hours. Impressive!

Microsoft's Kinect may not be able to detect seated gamers, but it can make some educated about the age of gamers who are standing and put that information to good use.

Playing around with upcoming Xbox 360 Kinect game Joy Ride I asked the developers about playing the game with friends and children. They told me that the game can tell, based on the skeletal anatomy of a gamer, if they are children and then automatically adjust the difficulty.

What if, I asked, someone tried kneeling to cheat?

That won't work, I was told, because Kinect would notice that the player was missing the knee joints.

What if the player were a little person, or perhaps just really short.

That, could cause a misdetect, giving the shorter gamer the competitive edge in a race.

Curious. But I'm sure it's a feature you can turn off. Neat that the developers are playing around with ways to use this technology. I'm sure that's going to result in a flood of new ideas, some good, some bad.

Steven Spielberg checking out the Nintendo booth. Photo from Nintendo America's twitter feed.

dreamGear used their new Sesame Street DS cases as impromptu press kits during E3. I swear I didn't buy an Elmo case. You guys believe me, right?

Last year, Sony ruined Christmas in North America by delaying the adorable augmented-reality EyePet in order to make it ready for the PlayStation Move. Was it worth the wait? Producer Nicolas Doucet explains how Move changed the game.

When Nicolas Doucet and his team began working on EyePet, a game that uses the PlayStation 3 EyeToy camera to project a virtual pet into your living room, the PlayStation Move wasn't a going concern. In fact, it wasn't until late in the game's development cycle that Sony revealed their motion controller at E3 last year, leaving Doucet with a difficult decision.

Should the game be delayed to work with Move, or was the tech they had installed good enough?

The answer became much easier after the EyePet's European launch in October of last year revealed a strong flaw in the game.

In order to spawn virtual objects for your pet to play with, Sony included a flat card that players would hold up to the camera, spawning items like toys, hair dryers, and other fun tools to use on your pet.

This worked great when the flat side of the card was facing the camera.

"The problem was that children didn't understand the need to keep the card facing the camera," Doucet explained, waving the Move controller he was using to show me the game off-screen. "As they turned, so did the card, making the objects disappear."

The Move, on the other hand, has a uniform shape no matter how you point it at the camera. Furthermore, it can even be detected when it's behind your back. Doucet moved the controller behind him to demonstrate, and the game still detected a slightly fainter blue circle of light.

This immediately brought to mind thoughts of playing with my cats, pretending to throw their toys but hiding them behind my back instead. Somehow they always figure it out. Perhaps the EyePet can too.

This was my first session with the EyePet, incidentally, which is strange, considering my penchant for the ridiculously cute. He's everything I thought he would be. I predict you'll see videos of me playing with it endlessly when it launches later this year, bundled with the Move.

And if you look closely in the background, you'll be able to see my neglected cats wasting away to nothing, weakly mewling for attention. Maybe PETA will send them food.

As for EyePet, Doucet seems confident they made the right decision in North America. The Move controller is a small but significant difference that could be the key to the EyePet's North American success.

Seriously. These life sized Halo Reach statues are too realistic to tempt me to climb over the barrier. As snapped by Stephen Totilo at the L.A. Convention Center.

Let's cut to the chase: You're gonna want to see Red Faction: Armageddon's magna-gun in action.

Sure, you're also gonna want to see the game's LEO suit, which provides that tasty, stompy ass-kicking brute force you've come to expect from mechas. But, when it was unveiled about midway through a 10-minute eyes-only demo of the game, the magna gun turned a visually impressive but conventional shooter into something I now want to get my hands on.

The magna gun, despite its name, works on more than just ferrous foes. You aim it at one object, then another, then it connects the dots - in a very violent way. Clearing out a mutant-bug infestation in subterranean Mars, our demonstrator demolished a two story structure in far less time than it would take with the LEO (or so I assume. More on LEO in a minute). He flung wedges of jersey wall into it, slammed it with hunks of an adjacent structure and then, when the bugs came, splattered them on it. Combine that with the game's destructible environments and you can see why this is a compelling weapon.

The only thing I did not see was two foes slamming into each other, so I don't know if that's an available stunt. In the big walls colliding example, it wasn't clear to me what object was the flinger and the flingee, or whether the first object always gets pulled. I was too busy doing hell-yeah fist pumps.

Combined with the trusty Nano Forge, which can reconstruct destroyed features (such as the jersey wall) from thin air, you can have a near-unlimited supply of ammo for big jobs. How good is this gun? Another very well known developer later told me he had the idea for his game a few years ago, but it was scrapped because it was too expensive and complex. So THQ's not messing around here.

Regarding the Nano Forge, it returns of course, but with its focus on reconstruction Darius can do some unconventional things, like seal himself inside a large container to recover from damage and plan his next move.

As for the LEO suit, we were given a brief showcase of its power after the magna gun. Darius Mason, whom I haven't even introduced as the game's protagonist yet, climbed inside when even bigger bugs jumped his convoy and demolished a gas tanker. The LEO wasn't impervious but it took a lot of heat, packed a strong energy weapon and a finishing melee stomp.

The rest of what we saw spoke of a shooter with some thought behind it. In the story, Darius is the grandson of Alec Mason and Samanya from Red Faction: Guerrilla. The humans have gone underground on Mars with the surface uninhabitable thanks to the failure of terraforming. Darius is said to be blamed for this infestation our demonstrator started clearing out, so we can expect some lone wolf narratives with a focus on redemption. The subterranean society is said to have taken 11 years to built and just a few days to overrun and annihilate. So we're not talking primitive caves and cramped environments, but very tall caverns with a blue hue and the glow of lava sources. Your perspective is in third person, zooming in when you're focusing on smaller enemies (like the bugs) a nice gamer assist.

Lots of shooter sequels get a shoulder shrug, especially if you're picking up midway through its continuity. In Red Faction: Armageddon, THQ's added some necessary new gameplay dynamics to keep folks interested and possibly recruit more to the cause.

Despite an unstable frame rate and horrendous loading times, PC role-playing game The Witcher sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. The Witcher 2 runs at 60 frames-per-second and has no loading times whatsoever.

The Witcher was one of my favorite games of 2007. Based on a series of short stories and novels by Poland's premier fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher delivered a gorgeous PC role-playing experience, rich in depth and complexity, with compelling characters, stunning graphics, and countless little touches that brought the struggles of ghost-haired killer Geralt to life.

So when my impressions (we didn't do reviews back then) of the game called out loading in the headline, you knew it was a major issue.

CD Projekt Red senior producer Tomasz Gop Says it's not an issue any longer. "Once you're in the game, you will never see loading times," he explains, guiding Geralt and companions off a boat into the forest. The white-haired swordsman looks more dashing than ever in the game's new engine, as does the lovely sorceress Triss and dour non-human hunter Vernon Rache.

The trio stumbles upon an elf, a long-time enemy of Rache's, so while the two trade insults, Tomasz shows off the game's new dialog system. Geralt and Triss whisper to each other as the tension builds. A series of dialog choices lead to Triss casting a lightning bolt at the tree the elf is sitting on. Elves pour out of the trees, surrounding the party. It's a trap!

Arrows fly towards the party, and Triss casts a spell that transforms them all into butterflies, crumpling to the ground with the strain. Vernon picks hoists her over his shoulder, leaving Geralt to face off against the encroaching elves using the game's new combat system.

The slightly clunky, timing-based system of the original game is gone, replaced with a more action-oriented affair that Gop controls with a wired Xbox 360 controller. Instead of different stances for hard and light attacks, Geralt now strings them together, fluidly performing combos, slipping the odd bit of magic into his deadly dance, and every once in awhile delivering a stunning finishing blow, mowing elves down left and right. It's almost mesmerizing to watch.

Hardcore gamers will be pleased with the system, but what of the more casual RPG players? "There is an easy mode for casual players that will let them effortlessly take down enemies, in order to experience the story without much struggle," Gop explains.

The action moves to a small village, where Geralt and his party stumble upon some old friends awaiting the hangman's noose in the town square. As the party approaches, they recognize the 'colorful' bard Dandelion. According to the executioner, he's about to be killed for 'debauchery.' That figures.

Here comes the dialog tree again. Geralt can choose to straight up attack the guards around the gallows, or take a more devious route, as Gop does, inciting the locals towards unrest.

"Debauchery is one of my favorite pastimes," shouts one villager, while another, a prostitute by trade, alerts the assembled citizens that the head guard's "balls are rotted."

Yes, the adult situations are still fully intact.

But don't expect collectible cards featuring naked pictures of Geralt's conquests this time around. Acting on criticisms that the system objectified women, the romance in The Witcher 2 is another tool to help deliver a richer, deeper story, rather than a tacked on pseudo mini-game.

As Gop struggled to find the right word to describe the way romance was being handled in the game, I offered up 'emotionally engaging,' which seemed to fit the bill nicely.

With the action-based combat, branching dialogue choices, and emotional engagement, it almost sounds like The Witcher 2 is going to be a dragon Age clone.

But the major differences are there. The entire world, for instance, is accessible at all times. You can travel anywhere, with no loading times, any time you want. Inside buildings, on top of buildings, or deep into the swamp to face off against the giant octopus/bull monster that Geralt faced at the end of our demo.

Showing off the game's combat again, Gop had Geralt setting stun traps, rolling out of the way at the last minute as huge tentacles came crashing down. Triggering the traps, they remained rooted in place while Geralt took out their weak points. Once three were down, he rushed in, tricking the monster into smashing the pillar supporting a broken stone bridge above its head. The structure collapsed, trapping the creature, and with a few final blows the Witcher stood triumphant.

It's almost a completely different game. The load times are gone, the frame rate is crisp, and the action is more fluid than ever. But the first game's wit and charm are firmly intact, making The Witcher 2 the perfect example of a sequel done right.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is due out in the first quarter of 2011.

"Chocolate Rain" YouTube sensation Tay Zonday hangs with Sony Online Entertainment's John Smedley at their booth!