The deadpan detective has never been so dogged! With his partner's brain missing (physically), Sam loses his cool and goes on the warpath in the third episode of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, out on on PC, Mac and PSN on June 22.

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With a new development team at the helm and an emphasis on fluid action, Metal Gear Solid: Rising is being positioned as a new standard in the long-running franchise. Mineshi Kimura, the game's director for Kojima Productions, told journalists at a Rising roundtable discussion during E3 that the game would be a counterpart to Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid legacy, with possible future installments going "back and forth" between Rising and more traditional Metal Gear games.

"But for Rising, we're gonna position it where people might know Metal Gear Solid, but they were reluctant to buy it," Kimura said. "[They might say],'Stealth is not my style,' or they didn't have the hardware because they only had a 360. We would like to target this audience where it's kind of potential Metal Gear Solid users and again, as I said earlier, the story will be based between MGS2 and MGS4." He added that players who were not familiar with the franchise's Byzantine plot would still be able to become involved and have fun with the game's "Zan-Datsu" cutting concept.

"'Zan' means to cut, and 'Datsu' means to take," explained creative producer Shigenobu Matsuyama. "We probably would offer a more wide range of play style so that you can aim where you want to cut and how deep you want to cut in order to achieve what you want to take. So, the play style will be quite in more depth than just cutting and killing."

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I admit to being a bit let down not to have the opportunity to play Child of Eden, Tetsuya Mizuguchi's spiritual successor to Rez, at Ubisoft's E3 booth. However, watching Tetsuya Mizuguchi play the game for a small group was still a rare and wonderful experience. And for a Kinect game, it doesn't seem that I missed out on as much for having a "hands-off" demo, because even the person playing it was hands-off.

Mizuguchi walked us through two of the rail shooter's levels, called "Archives." The concept for the game (which it doesn't need at all -- "you shoot pretty stuff" is more than enough) is that you're eliminating viruses from visual representations of emotional memories within the AI "Project Lumi" -- Lumi just happens to be the same name of the virtual idol at the front of Mizuguchi's Genki Rockets band. Your shots "purify" everything they hit, while also, of course, emitting drumbeat noises and other musical sounds, provided, of course, by Genki Rockets.

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MLB.TV typically requires a subscription plan to get access to live and pre-recorded games throughout the entire league; however, the service will be available for free this weekend, according to an e-mail sent to PSN members. To take advantage of the trial, you'll have to download the free app from the PlayStation Store.

That sounds like a slam dunk to us.

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Fire Hose Games' Slam Bolt Scrappers may not have the easiest to remember name, but its gameplay is something you won't soon forget. The PSN-exclusive action-puzzler drops in "early 2011" and is already looking like an incredibly polished experience.

Combining several genres into something fresh, SBS tasks up to four players with beating up flying goblin-esque things that turn into Tetris blocks when defeated and then using their jetpack-wearing construction worker avatar to create a tower. Making squares of 4 (2x2), 9 (3x3), 16 (4x4), etc. will turn that section of the tower into a weapon, blasting the other team's tower, or creating a shield. Building the tower is incredibly intuitive to anyone that's played Tetris or Rampart.

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Holding your breath for new Heavy Rain DLC? Well, stop. Game Informer has learned that the "Heavy Rain Chronicles" have been put on indefinite hold, with creator Quantic Dream saying they were urged by Sony to redirect their focus on an upcoming Move patch for the game. It's not been canceled completely, mind, but it's not looking good.

No one's chalking the holdup to low interest, but one would imagine that if the first chunk of DLC -- which was free to those who purchased the game new, but on sale to those who didn't -- was moving like thickly-accented hotcakes, we'd already be playing the second episode.

There really isn't a lot to write about Sonic the Hedgehog 4. It's everything Sega promised it would be: just Sonic without all the cruft. I got to play through the game's Splash Hill Zone, and it's pure, unadulterated Sonic the Hedgehog 2, with a new coat of paint and a handful of new features. And there's no Tails, of course (not in Episode One at least).

There are a few new wrinkles. Sonic has his homing attack from Sonic Adventure, for example. As with most of the 2D Sonic titles, there are also a few interesting locomotion mechanics sprinkled throughout the levels: vines to swing on, ziplines and, of course, the beloved corkscrews and loops.

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In the first half of our video interview with John Koller, we talked about PSP, Sony's expectations for the PSP Go, and a new marketing direction for the portal. In the second half of our video interview with Sony's John Koller, we chat about some of E3's key surprises, including PlayStation Plus and Steamworks. What can we expect from Sony's new partnership with Valve? How did it come together? Furthermore, what kind of services will PlayStation Plus offer? These questions and more in part two, viewable after the break.

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Fair warning for those who have yet to complete the first Force Unleashed title, I'm about to ruin the ending for you.

The major question I had walking into my demo of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 was: Is it possible to feel an emotional attachment to a character we've already said goodbye to? In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, players will be asked to do just that. Although the game's lead character Starkiller -- or Galen Marek, according to Star Wars novels -- sacrificed himself during the true ending of the previous title, the character returns as the playable character in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2.

During my E3 2010 hands-off preview of the upcoming sequel to the "fastest selling" Star Wars title of all time, executive producer Haden Blackman walked us through the game's opening, which follows a mentally-torn Starkiller as he attempts to escape from his former mentor, Darth Vader.

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We're still a good long way away from the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so keep in mind that it's hard to say if what I saw inside Square-Enix is truly representative of what we'll get when the game finally releases. But the small sliver of combat and social puzzle solving I saw looked extremely promising for series stalwarts and newcomers alike.

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