With the demise of the May Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has become increasingly important to developers and publishers seeking to show off their wares. We caught up some folks from Crytek and Electronic Arts during a Sunday downtime visit to the Gun Store, ahead of a nonstop schedule of game demos during the work week. As the rest of the group unloaded round after round from various weapons on the store's gun range, we asked Crytek president Cevat Yerli, can you do this in Germany? "Impossible," he replied. With his home country, in the wake of a school shooting rampage, considering a ban on the creation of violent games--a development that has Yerli thinking about packing up shop and moving his company elsewhere--his answer wasn't surprising.

The group concluded its time on the shooting range with the Serbu Super Shorty pump-action shotgun, so we asked Yerli's opinion of the exceedingly loud weapon. "Best weapon I've ever fired," he said with a smile. As we all waited for a car to take us back to the Strip, we tried to squeeze the Crytek brigade for a release date for their highly anticipated first-person shooter, Crysis. Alas, they wouldn't give up the goods, retreating to the standard answer of ambitious high-end PC game developers: when it's done. "It's got to be perfect," one Crytek-er told us. "This is our Ferrari." We'll have more on the current state of Crysis later this week after our sit-down demo with Yerli and his team.