What's new for E3? E3 presented the first time we've been able to see the game in person. If you saw the gameplay demo from Sony's press conference this morning, or the demo on our 1UP@E3 in-booth video special, that was the same chunk of the game that we saw -- you start by performing a few stealth kills, then take to the rooftops, then glide using a Leonardo da Vinci-designed flying contraption, and then take out your main target and escape by jumping into the ocean.

What's our take? The main complaint about the first Assassin's Creed was its lack of mission variety, and that's the kind of thing that's hard to judge in a 10-minute E3 demo. But we have no complaints about what we saw -- it looked fantastic and had enough new to keep it from feeling just like the first game.

When we say it looked fantastic, we mean: When the demo begins, you're just sitting on a bench watching a festival in the background, and it's visually one of the most impressive scenes we've ever seen in a game, with people dancing and milling about in colorful costumes as you inch your way through the crowds.

And when we say it had enough new, we mean: The flight controls seem easy to use -- the developers intentionally made them dummy-proof by tweaking the demo so people wouldn't slam into walls at the show, but the system of looking for fires on the ground to figure out where to go fits in with the rest of the game perfectly and doesn't feel like the map that it is.