You may notice a few notable titles missing in this year's coverage. Anything LucasArts, well, gets skipped because they couldn't quite give me a consistent answer as to if and when their adventures were being shown at E3 this year, and as I result, I missed out on a demo of the action/adventure Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels. Syberia II and Longest Journey II are also both in the works long-term, but I don't have any news to report on that front.

A few other non-adventures that I found noteworthy, which I'm sure will also be reported to death on many other sites, in no particular order:

• Fable -- Peter Molyneaux's XBox RPG, which will give the player tremendous freedom to develop their character. The short demo showed an almost Sims-like potential, such as finding a spouse for your character and then watching him/her get slapped (literally) when you stay away from home too long.
• Halo II -- Yes, a straight shooter, but with a tremendous technological "wow" factor. I found it hard to believe that such epic scenes could look so good on a console (XBox).
• Thief III and Deus Ex II -- Sneakier first-person shooters (or perhaps just plain first-person sneakers, in Thief's case) with very good use of lighting and physics.

Of course, one should always keep in mind that not everything that looks good at E3 will play well once it's released. Adventure games are particularly tricky, because they depend so much on story and puzzles. Some adventures recently have been just shy of excellence for little things like murky graphics, puzzles without enough in-game clues, or awkward voice and dialogue -- and there's always a chance that the same will happen to some of these upcoming titles as well.

But if these games see adequate polishing and testing before they're released, and even if a few of these titles end up flopping completely, this still should be a good year to come for adventures.