Getting right into it, here is the summary of Day Two.

The first thing on our agenda was Batman Arkham City. They were offering 20 minutes of hands on time with the game and a 15 minute exclusive demo in two separate lines. Because we were separated when the doors opened, Riyad went to the hands on line and I went to the demo line. I will let Riyad talk about the hands on time and I will have a much more in depth article about the game later on but the demo was very, very cool. They said nothing of an embargo on reporting what happened in the demo, although no audio or video recording was allowed so I am going to go ahead and say that Catwoman is a playable character in the game. The exact amount of time spent as the character or how it figures into the overall story was not revealed but she looks really fun to play and is different than Batman without completely overhauling the feel of the game. The graphics looked really tight and the city is kind of amazing. I am waiting with baited breath for this one.

After being asked by a hot scantily clad girl to take her picture with MMA star Chuck Liddell, Riyad and I met back up to go check out Need for Speed the Run. Riyad took video while talking to an EA rep while I played the game. It handled really well and driving was fun with really sharp graphics and a lot of cool things going on around you. The game is very story driven and there are some out of the car moments and driver centric content that allows the player to connect more emotionally that your average racing game. I am not a big fan of driving games but this one felt pretty good.

Next up we went to the Turtle Beach booth for a private demo of their new PS3 and Xbox 360 cans. The headsets are wireless with Dolby 5.1 or 7.1 surround and offer presets as well as features to amplify or drop out particular sound elements. The headsets are nice and we played them with Crysis 2 on both the PS3 and 360. It was plenty loud with multi-directional sounds but honestly, for me, I doubt I could justify spending $250 on that sort of headset. This isn’t a statement on the quality and auidophiles that need that level of sound performance would probably do well to give them a look but frankly it isn’t really for me. Also I noticed there was enough sound bleed that if you have a significant other laying next to you then you might have some problems. On a side note, and in deference to Turtle Beach, I feel like I should give a shout out to the Steel Series Spectrum 5XB headset that we previewed last year. We haven’t gotten a hold of a pair for review but with a lower price point and higher performance,  the preview set I tried at last year’s E3 is an attractive alternative.

Next we checked out Driver San Francisco. I have never been super keen on this series and my interest level in this iteration was pretty low but for what we saw today, this one might be pretty decent. Riyad played and I video taped so I we will have some more in-depth stuff to say about this later. At one point Riyad was driving a tanker truck and that seemed pretty cool.

After that we popped into Trackmania 2 which had caught Riyad’s eye at the Ubisoft conference. I took video while he talked to the rep from the developer (who operate out of Paris and have 15 people on their team). The game looks pretty fantastic for how small the team is and he seemed to be having a lot of fun with it. The design aspects of it are pretty interesting as you can have a pretty unlimited field of content for a fairly low entry investment. Pretty cool stuff. More on that later. I shot some video of Ghost Recon Online as well but didn’t get any hands on time.

Next up we went to our appointment at Activision. The first thing we checked out was Call of Duty Elite. This isn’t a game but rather a pretty extensive resource for all of your Call of Duty experiences. The service is free to play for the most part and stretches across all Call of Duty platforms to allow for team and Clan integration in one hub which you can access through smartphone apps as well as on the consoles. If you are into Call of Duty this seems like a pretty badass social application. Next up here was Prototype 2. This was a pre-Alpha build of the game but you would never be able to tell that from what they showed. Maybe it was how enormously cool the guys were who worked on it and were running the demo or the comfy leather recliners we got to sit in but the game looked super polished and smooth for something so early. The release date is sometime in 2011 so they have a lot of time to work on it and they are very clearly off to a great start. I never played the first game but seeing what they had at E3 makes me want to go back and play it before this one comes out.

At this point Riyad and I separated for a bit while he went to a couple of meetings and I went to check out the West hall.  I did a circuit of the hall since we hadn’t been in there yet and got the lay of the land for Nintendo and Sony’s areas as well as Bethesda and Capcom. It seems like, aside from those, there were less interesting things going on over there this time than there were last time. With that said, I am a huge Capcom fan and as such found myself glued to their content for quite a while.

Before checking out any games, I went by the Video Game History Museum booth. It was pretty rad and had a bunch of old school consoles as well as a grip of arcade machines and a band playing 8 bit music on guitars and a flute.

I started with Dragon’s Dogma. I don’t know a lot about this game and I didn’t manage to talk to a rep about it but I played for a bit and it seemed alright. It was fairly standard for the sword and sorcery sort of action RPG  and nothing about it really stood out for me. Apparently it will have some huge enemies and boss fights so that might be worth checking out but there was nothing in the demo that really dazzled me.

Next up I played Street Fighter X Tekken. As regular readers should know I am a pretty big Street Fighter fan so I was very excited to play but also nervous since I played against another person and I would have felt like an asshole if I lost. I didn’t lose. I am not entirely sure what I was doing as there is a tag team element and I accidentally chose Kazuya as a second character but I know Street Fighter and that got me through the match. Apparently there is DLC for Super Street Fighter IV available soon as well as a DLC version of Street Fighter III: Third Strike coming out so I am in Street Fighter heaven at the moment. Videos to come soon. I also watched a bit of Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City and it looks badass. I really hope to get some hands on time with it tomorrow.

After that I wandered over to the Sony area and hopped on to Starhawk, a property I knew nothing about but there was an open space so I gave it a shot. I am not sure what the overall game entails but we were playing a pretty big multiplayer game of capture the flag with a bunch of RTS elements like building things to improve our chances and allow players to get into mechs and various flying things. Honestly I have no idea what the hell was going on but the game was fun with intuitive controls and great targeting. That you respawn by dropping in via drop pod and you can land on top of enemies and kill them is an awesome addition to the game and keeps you safe from spawn camping. For a game I was completely ignorant of two seconds before sitting down I was pretty impressed and I want to find out more about it.

Post Starhawk I reconnected with Riyad and we went over to the Bethesda booth to see about Skyrim. No luck on that one today but we were ushered into the Rage and Prey 2 area. Rage looked pretty but I am still not really feeling it much. I know its pedigree and I am sure it is solid but I am just not that interested. Prey 2 on the other hand looked very, very nice and appears to be a big improvement over the last game and the last game wasn’t bad. This one sees the protagonist kidnapped, taken to an alien world and then wake up years later as a bounty hunter. You have to figure out what the fuck while turning in bounties in an open alien city world. It looks really great and I am excited to get to play it whenever it comes out in 2012.

Our last hurrah for the day was a visit to the Square Enix booth. Our appointment was at 5:30 but we got there at 5 to see if we could start a bit early. We could and it was a good thing we did. We saw Final Fantasy XIII-2 first and it looks very pretty. I haven’t played a Final Fantasy game since 10 so I am not really connected to the game play and all that but it was very pretty. We were told a lot of things about it and have some video so more on that later. The next thing we saw was Dungeon Siege III which both of us were excited about and neither of us were really impressed by. The visual fidelity was not too great and Riyad had some control difficulties. I thought it was alright for what it was but there wasn’t anything there to get really excited about. We then moved on to talk to one of the guys for Deus Ex Human Evolution. We didn’t get hands on time but we got to ask a lot of questions and it all sounds pretty tight. We have the full audio of that so I will write a longer piece on it later and hopefully tomorrow we can get hands on time as well.

Last but not least was Dead Island. Like just about everyone else I have been salivating over this game since that awesome and creepy as hell trailer came out a few months ago. Getting hands on with the thing makes me that much more excited for September 6th. We asked a lot of questions and I will have a more robust article on that in the coming days as well but for now the game is absolutely gorgeous and absolutely brutal. Beating zombies to death with an oar while on the beach is fantastic and the whole thing felt like Left 4 Dead mixed with Dead Rising. I can’t wait to play it.

So that was the day today. We have one more day of E3 mayhem tomorrow and then it is back home to write more about the mayhem of E3. We’ve seen some great stuff so far and titles are starting to emerge as the best of E3. We will make sure to have those itemized in an article when it is all over too.