It was essentially the E3 demo, for us folks who were not able to make it out to LA last month. And the environments were drop dead gorgeous, along with all the objects and living things (especially the dragons).

Well, as I mentioned already, I'm fairly unfamiliar with the previous games, so it's not surprising that some of things I had assumed to be brand new were in fact not. Though also in my defense, the Bethesda rep I spoke with basically acted like the third person camera was a new thing.

Though my confusion regarding the skills has been fixed! Thanks for clarifying things (had so much ground to cover and so little time to properly write notes that, again, a few things got fudged... not that it's much of an excuse or anything).

Again, I guess you missed my primary complaint about the device: it's designed first and foremost to offer a PlayStation experience on a phone... hence they stylized buttons and the like, and there's hardly any software that's specifically designed for such a point.

50 exclusive titles for the device? Umm, I checked the Xperia Play "store" or whatever it's called and saw maybe 25 at most titles, almost all of them iPhone ports.

I buy into the idea of "the controller as an extension for apps" idea. Too bad, from the games that I did try out, the implementation was sloppy, inconsistent, and not readily apparent, if at all.

I'm also very familiar with Crash, and again, my point is this: you design a piece of hardware that specifically address the biggest criticism of the previous iteration of the hardware. i.e. the PSP's lone analogue interface input, which is a nub that also sucks, and you only have one game that doesn't even use it. That's beyond silly.

And I know what you're going to say next: why would anyone be considered with dedicated video game hardware that's many years old. Well to that I must ask: who the hell else is the target audience of the phone? Who the hell else should care about an old PSone game that's around 15 years old? Again, like I said, total lack of focus.

Again, I think I made it pretty clear from the beginning that I was mostly concerned with the game playing aspects of the device, not the phone as a whole. I am the resident game reviewer around here, after-all.

The screen's brightness was a serious issue, sorry. I'll take your word for it that it's better than most Android's; the only other handset of that nature in which I've had any considerable degree of experience was pal's Samsung Galaxy, which has a horrible display. Still, it needs to be viewed by its own merits and I found the image to be too dark and the contrast too high. Did I ever once compare it to the iPhone 4's Retinal display. Nope. I btw have a comparatively shitty 3GS, and guess what? Stuff still looks better on that.

As for the audio, I actually didn't make mention of how crappy the output was with certain games. With Asphalt 6, there was crackling issues and other assorted nonsense that I chose not to mention because I felt maybe it was something that could be resolved with a firmware update, and was just one many complaints I didn't need to dwell upon since I had so much ground to cover.

Hawt.

I have only two words: bomb Williamsburg.