Schappert introduced Tony Hawk, who wanted to tell us all a bit about Tony Hawk Ride, and show off the finished design for the skateboard peripheral. Much as it was hard to tell from that distance, the board is apparently a little smaller than a real one, but with the amount of sensors packed into it, it can detect your hands and feet so it can work out when you're trying to do grabs, and even figure out when you've put a foot to one side to “push” yourself along.

Ride is a “new type of social-physical gaming on Xbox 360,” according to Hawk, which pretty much won Buzzword Bullshit Bingo for me. There's going to be a lot of online play, it seems, but without much more in the way of details, it was time for a rather underwhelming trailer. This was largely comprised of real-life footage with very little in the way of in-game action, focusing more on actual pro-skaters whooping and hollering as they played Ride, along with talking-heads sections about how amazing it is and how true to life and how it's the first game they could really, really get into. The cynic in me reckons this is the Tony Hawk series trying to reclaim credibility from Skate, but we'll have to wait until we can get our hands-on (or feet-on?) with the kit to find out for real. Either way, the trailer showed off a lot of what the board was capable of, and it was certainly impressive.

The room darkened once more, and this time, Modern Warfare 2 appeared. Without meaning offense to Mr. Hawk, I suspect that this is the one most journos in the room had been waiting for. The trailer went back to show off the death of Zakhaev, as well as war-torn streets in what looked like Africa, complete with running and screaming civilians. It was all hugely cinematic, but the sounds were annoyingly difficult to make out. From the gist of it, it seems as though someone's stepped up to fill the void left by Zakhaev, and this is causing all sorts of problems. We saw people bound and gagged and strapped to explosives, big explosions, an exploding base that the player character was airlifted out of by rope, and – excitingly – drivable snowmobiles.

Jason West and Vince Zampella took to the stage, and smartly decided to skip the preamble and just show off the game. That's the sort of thing I can respect when it comes to a title like this. The in-game footage opened with a mission called Cliffhanger, set on the second day, and giving the player control of a newbie with the unfortunate nickname of Roach. Call of Duty 4's SAS player character, “Soap” MacTavish, has survived the events of the first game and since become Captain, and acts as an NPC guide to the mission, which itself opened on a snowy mountain in Kazakhstan. After sidling  carefully along a precarious icy cliffside, Soap and Roach climb the mountain, with the left and right triggers appearing to control the ice picks. After one jump, Roach nearly falls to his death but is saved by MacTavish, and the level shifts a bit further forward “in the interests of time.”

Now, the pair are in an enemy camp, with a gun that looks suspiciously similar to those from Aliens, with a sensor attachment of some sort. What it's detecting – be it heat or motion – is uncertain, but using it, the two take out a lot of enemies very quietly. Well, I say quietly; the gun was loud, but nobody seemed to hear it, most likely because of the howling snowstorm. This bit seemed a lot like the One Shot, One Kill mission of CoD4, with a bit of emphasis on taking enemies out in pairs to prevent an alarm being raised. This is mostly likely one of the sections we've previously heard about, with the possibility of doing it both stealthily and all guns blazing.

Following the detonation of a fueling station, though, all hell breaks looks, and after a few very close encounters – including sliding down a hillside and gunning down some troops riding snowmobiles that negotiate the hill a lot easier - Soap and Roach hop onto snowmobiles of their own. This section, too, was genuinely impressive, with high speeds and plenty of tree dodging, with the automatic pistol sidearm getting some judicious use in removing enemies from their own vehicles. After a big, big jump, the screen fades to the Modern Warfare 2 logo.

So why was this a big show-off at the Microsoft event, when it's due out on other platforms? DLC, of course. The 360 will be getting two timed-exclusive map packs after the game launches.

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