You know the problem with E3? You have to wait months before you find out if a game that looked great in July is going to kick ass or blow goats when it finally arrives in November. And it it sucks, you feel deflated. If only you could read, right here and right now, which games are really worth eagerly anticipating and which you should just start fitting for cement shoes right now. Wouldn't that make the world a better place?

Well congratulations Johnny, because now you can! After years of exposure to inhuman levels of liquor, cigarette smoke, and E3 cafeteria food, we've actually developed the ability to see into the future. Here, for the very first time, are the exclusive first reviews for all of the games you're most excited about this very E3.

We'll be updating these every day, so please check back often. They're guaranteed to be 100% accurate.*

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts - Xbox 360
Eric Bratcher
What's the best way to revive a classic platforming franchise? We're critics and not market analysts, but it really can't be to replace 90% of the platforming with dumbed-down, build-you-own-contraption vehicular action. We'll admit assembling your own rig out of all sorts of wings, engines, and guns - lots of guns - could be cool. But the construction screen isn't as simple as it should be and we spent way too much time collecting acorns instead of blowing things up. Plus, why the hell doesn't Kazooie have more to do?
Score: 5

Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway - 360, PS3, PC
Stephen Pierce
Squad based shooters aren’t really my thing, and being a obsessive COD4 player the controls take a while to get used to. Having only the GR enforced ten minutes make things doubly tough. That said… I have a couple of teams, I have a rifle, that seems to take an age to reload, and I have a bunch of Nazi’s railing fire from the top of a small mound. I ignore my team and go COD on their ass, running at them antique rifle spitting. I get nailed in about four seconds. A couple more tries and I’m using my teams, directing them quickly with the left trigger to move forward and lay down fire on the mound. My team are surprisingly effective and kill the goons, letting me move forward and engage more guys outside a gas station. Using my squad I quickly level the station and am rewarded with the expected pyrotechnic display and ear hammering bang. My super-quick takeaway?  The game looked solid enough but in all honestly nothing you haven’t seen before – old fashioned guns, bombed out cityscapes, hoards of Nazi’s to murderize. The gun I used felt a bit clunky and pushing the right stick in to target felt awkward. The screen goes fully red to when you are exposed, I thought I was being hit, but evidently not. That seemed confusing to me too.
Score: 7



Fable 2 - 360
George Walter
This is the first time Fable 2 has been demoed in co-op and it had been explained to us earlier by Peter Molyneux that dropping in to a friend's single player game can be done through Live without the need to enter a lobby. You just walk over a purple orb and bang, you've made yourself an interference in your buddy's game.

It's a kind of pointless exercise playing Fable 2 with someone else's character as that's part of the unique appeal of the game – you create your own hero, male or female and build them up with the abilities that appeal to you. Imagine our disappointment then when we were given a generic male character with melee skills to play with. When we get the choice we'll be playing as a saucy and buxom seductress.

Anyway, it turns out you can't bring your own dog with you when you play co-op. Irritating because the idea of having a dog was one of the biggest selling points as far as we're concerned. The demo is short – we just wandered round a tiny region of Albion and hacked up some enemies with swords and guns. The guy that was playing co-op showed off the magic spells but we preferred the brutal efficiency of the blade. All so-so to be totally honest,

The highlight of the demo came when the dog found some treasure (he does that a lot) and it contained a rubber ball. Our companion then managed to throw the ball over an insurmountable pile of rocks causing the hapless hound to run around in circles panting, incapable of getting to his new (and now lost) ball. Hilarious.
Score: 8

Far Cry 2 - 360, PS3, PC
Charlie Barratt
We'll miss original protagonist Jack Carver and his mutant superpowers, as well as the first game's lush tropical setting, but the majority of Far Cry 2's differences are definite improvements. New features like weather, fire, disease, wild animals and day/night cycles behave realistically, as well as seriously affect gameplay. And since you can choose your own hero, your own allies and your own priority for tackling missions within miles of open-world African savannah, the shooter should have a ton of replay value. Too bad the weapons, characters and story don't inspire... anything.
Score: 8

Gears of War 2 - Xbox 360
Charlie Barratt
This sequel doesn't just stick with the successes of the first game - it supersizes them. The enemies are scarier, with Locust armies swarming the screen, some of them skyscraper-sized. The world is grittier, with entire cities in danger of utter destruction. The multiplayer is crazier, with never ending modes like Horde. Most importantly, the gore is, well, gorier. Who can say no to bloody chainsaw duels, rotting meat shields and torque bow decapitations? Bigger, better and more badass indeed.
Score: 10

Killzone 2 - PS3
Eric Bratcher
Finally, a PS3 game worthy of the "Killzone" name! Just be glad the name isn't "Resistance" or "Gears of War", because then this would totally fall short. It's boring, from the all-gray graphics to the level design (hey, another warehouse!) to the set pieces, which involve such exciting things as blowing up a small bridge or opening a very large door with a hand crank. Yes, it's chaotic like a real war zone, but being a poor man's Call of Duty just isn't going to cut it.
Score: 6

LittleBigPlanet - PS3
Eric Bratcher
We're typically skeptical of the whole "Players, you can make your own game!" thing because it sounds way to much like the developers saying "Screw it. We're tired. You finish this. We're going to go get drunk." However, LittleBigPlanet is the exception. It's incredibly cute, the visuals with make you marvel over the mundane - we caught ourselves saying idiotic things like "it looks just like real cardboard!" and it's shockingly quick and easy to create almost anything you desire, then play through it with four players at a time. And there should be a ton of user-created content to keep you going.
Score: 10

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix - PC, 360, DS
Eric Bratcher
Why bother reading this? The first Puzzle Quest was stupidly fantastic, and this is basically the same thing, only set in generic space land instead of generic fantasy land and with a hexagonal grid replacing the piles of round gems in the first game. Even with tweaks, this is still just Bejeweled with a storyline, but you're going to lose hours and hours of sleep to it again.
Score: 9

Resistance 2 - PS3
Stephen Pierce
We’re in a wooded place. There are things that look like lumber mills. There are wooden shacks. We’re online. We’re team deathmatching. The first thing I notice is the sheer size of the place. After respawning it seems to take quite a bit of running to find the fight again. I say running, but it’s more like walking fast. Point is, it takes a while. But once you’re neck deep in bullets, grenades and other pain inducers it’s suitably hyper-frantic. Looking left/right up/down is rapid and the gun I have (a chunky space machine gun of some sort) is aggressive in its roar, and the sheer rate it coughs out lead. Very satisfying. Enemies take a middling amount of damage before keeling over. More than COD4, less it seemed than Halo 3 – a pretty good balance. I play a kind of Domination type game where you have to hold the opposing teams’ base, represented by a pylon thing beaming light into the sky. Wading into the opposition gunning while constantly hitting X to jump around is an effective technique. I also see bubble shields (reminiscent of Halo) and I earn an invisibility perk quickly too. It’s very easy to pick up and while the targeting and sense of actually hitting something or someone is not as refined as COD4, it moves at a fair pace and seems at first play to be an improvement over the first game.
Score: 8



Wii Music - Wii
George Walter
In their E3 08 press conference Nintendo crowed incessantly about their success in carving a new market in games - namely girls, mums and grannies. This was hammered home to us even more by the fact the person having Wii Music demoed to them before us was an elderly woman.  Why she was at E3 is beyond us.

Once the man from Nintendo had explained to her which way round to hold the Wii-mote she seemed to delight in waggling the white peripherals around in vague time to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It's at this point we realised Wii Music is not a videogame in the traditional sense. It is Nintendo's take on Rock Band and Guitar Hero, in which they give people the ability to feel like musicians without the inconvenience of having any skill *whatsoever*.

So you choose your song (in our case Traditional folk song Yankee Doodle) and then select which instrument you are going to *pretend* to play in the song. That's the most thinking you have to do in the entire game experience. After the song counts you in, the idea is to mime the playing of your instrument in time with the beat – the game hits the notes for you.  Button combinations on the Wii-mote and nunchuk allow for trills and solos. It's the gaming equivalent of playing along with the demonstration song on a Casio keyboard.
Score: 5

* Probably not. The reviews contained here are not official reviews, obviously. Those will have to wait until the games are actually finished. These are merely conceptual placeholders generated for your amusement. But we wouldn't be shocked if we were close on most of these.