At this year's E3 press conference, Electronic Arts showed off twelve new games. Some of them were for pre-teen girls and a bunch of them were sports games that kind of blurred together for me, so I can't verify the final count. I can, however, say that the two prime directives for the press conference were 1) stuff for girls, and 2) stuff for boys (i.e. lots of blood and titillation).

Up first was a trailer for God of War that mistakenly had a title card at the end that read Dante's Inferno. I'm not sure what that was all about, but it was nice of EA to advertise a Sony game.

Then came a fusillade of games for girls, such as Little Pet Shop Online and Charm Girls Club with speed hair teasing, demo'ed by a gaggle of reluctant looking pre-adolescent teen girls who, I hope, had their eyes shielded from the rest of the press conference.

Need for Speed: Shift looks like Forza meets Burnout. Lots of achievements and badges and level-up announcements slamming into the gameplay with screen-shaking force. This one is going to have a tough time finding an identity, so the Need for Speed branding is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Dragon Age: Origins was shown to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, with copious bodily fluids on display. Mainly splashes of blood and viscera, but also flecks of monster spittle. The glimpse of erotica implied additional bodily fluids, but let's not go there, shall we? Dragon Age: Origins is totally edgy, by the way. Totally. At least Mass Effect 2 was allowed to retain some dignity during its presentation.

The next six or seven games are kind of a blur for me, so I'm just going to repeat the words I heard. You're on your own in terms of the punctuation: EA Sports Fight Night Round 4 dynamic blood dynamic sweat EA Sports MMA tattoo EA Sports NCAA Football 10 Team Builder Madden NFL 10 Online Franchise EA Sports Active Wii buxom blonde in tight shirt EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis Wii famous sports guy sneaking up like Kojima.

Pandemic's Tom French, who obviously served as the model for Matthias' (Peter Stormare's character) hairstyle in Mercenaries 2, showed off a little of Saboteur, an open-world action/stealth game set in Nazi-occupied Paris. "And, yes, you can absolutely climb the Eiffel Tower," he reassured us. The graphics use a stylized black-and-white palette that colorizes as you liberate the region. It's like de Blob, but with Nazis. Also, Saboteur is definitely intended to be sexxy, as you can tell by the occurrences of breasts and buttocks during the demo.

Tim Schafer rolled out of bed to present Brutal Legend, which he described as a game he made so he could meet all the people he wanted to meet when he was 14-years-old. He then showed a funny skit with Jack Black, along with lots of gameplay snippets. It's hard to believe this game's fate was ever in question. But EA is firmly behind it now, and they're obviously paying for some primo talent in the form of various heavy metal luminaries, even if some of them can probably be got cheap. Seriously, how much do you have to shell out to get Lita Ford to do a voiceover session?

Then there were some screenshots from Crysis 2. Just screenshots. There aren't yet any computers poweful enough to run actual gameplay yet.

Finally, a couple of MMOs from the publisher who's name isn't synonymous with MMOs. Real Time World's APB intends to drop a hundred players into a fully stocked city of Grand Theft Auto 4 proportions. The players square off as criminals vs. enforcers. The cinematic demo implied they could all be in the same place at the same time. I seriously doubt they'll be able to pull that off given how good the game looks, but here's hoping.

Star Wars Old Republic.was introduced with a mercifully brief cosplay parade. The big announcement was that it's going to have a lot of voiceovers. "The first ever fully voiced massively multiplayer game" and "one of the largest voiceover projects in the history of games and maybe in all areas of entertainment" were the two claims made by the founders at Bioware, where the game is being developed. Then came an epic cinematic of stuff (see above) that will never be able to actually happen in the game.