Back in California, THQ kicked off their proper Editor's Day with a (tightly-controlled) visit to Pixar Studios in Emeryville which included a tour of the sprawling facilities and a screening of four reasonably-long clips from the forthcoming WALL-E feature film.

The Pixar campus/compound is a truly impressive facility, right up there with the Electronic Arts headquarters -- built around a large, inviting central atrium that serves as lobby, cafeteria and game-room. Its spacious corridors sprawl out in all directions, decorated everywhere with original artwork, sculpture and storyboards from films such as Finding Nemo and Ratatouille (there's a great, creepy, full-sized portrait of the snooty food-critic in one upstairs hall). They've got a volleyball court and pool outside, a massage room indoors (whose occupants quickly and wisely clicked their door closed when they saw our geekle of game-press coming their way), and even an ongoing "University of Pixar" (that's "P.U." to you) where employees can take classes in everything from sculpture to scriptwriting.

Oh, and a word about that WALL-E preview in their theater. Now, I have been to LucasArts headquarters at the height of their paranoia -- where you might have to key-card your way through four doors just to get to the bathroom -- but Pixar brought the security thing to new levels: We were actually patted down and wanded before we could get into their screening theater. I understand the concerns over camera-enabled cell phones and such, but these guys were opening packs of cigarettes and shaking disposable lighters and stuff. Sheesh. Oh hey, security guys, just so you know: You missed the bottles of vodka, so phhbbbbtt."

The good news is, WALL-E actually looks really good, as you would expect any Pixar feature to be. It's also oddly bleak, at least at the outset -- the story of a lovable trash-compacting robot left behind on an abandoned Earth that is little more than a garbage dump. Until the sleek, equally-robotic, and almost cryptically-feminine Eve enters his life from, literally, another world. The film eschews traditional dialogue (and indeed traditionally-anthropomorphized characters) in favor of electronic beeps and expressive gestures that nevertheless get the point across. Cred to Pixar for getting a theaterful of reasonably-jaded journos to alternately applaud and laugh their asses off with a series of out-of-context clips. Can't wait for the movie.

Anyway, we got a look at the all-platforms game too, of course -- as well as numerous others at the end of the day, once we rolled back across the Bay to the Editor's Day proper in San Francisco. A frou-frou part-time art gallery/nightclub space crammed with gaming stations, pulsing music, flatscreen monitors and heavy-handed bartenders -- it's what an "Editor's Day" should be. The games available on tap -- almost all of which were available for hands-on play, and most of which we'll be previewing/reviewing right here in the months to come -- included:

Saint's Row 2: It's still looking a tad crunchy compared to its inspiration, Grand Theft Auto (GTA), but the co-operative multiplayer is great fun with a friend or "friend:" One of your drives the smoking junker you just carjacked out from under a ghetto booty-girl, while the other leans out the window with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and takes out the cop cars that are increasingly turning their attention in your direction. Now that's co-op.

Red Faction Guerilla: Seems the liberating good guys from the last game have become fat, comfortable and evil, and now they're the bad guys -- so the only thing to do is stage a guerilla uprising, and this time everything in the game-world is destructible. We're talking every last building, until there's nothing left standing on the planet, if that's what you want. Of course, destroying the structures of the oppressed locals as well as the overseeing baddies won't make you any friends, and you're going to need that help. It's a follow-cam game now, with some vehicle-based goodness as well. Get your ass to Mars.

Baja: The demo setup for this one was really kind of an unfair tease: Three flatscreens arranged in a wraparound setup, first-person view, a big 'ol dune-buggy of a wheel-and-pedal setup... who wouldn't be intrigued, especially after a few drinks? As it happens, the game will support the three-screen thing off the shelf, but of course, you'd need THREE 360s or PS3s to do that. T'yah, that's going to happen. Anyway, the game presents the entire, 200-something-mile expanse of the Baja race, all roads and open terrain available. If you can see it, you can get to it, legally or otherwise. No loading-times anywhere. On-demand, helicopter-dropped repair out in the scraggly wastes. Another one I'm especially looking forward to, and you should be too.

De Blob: This one caught me completely by surprise: A Wii game suitable for casual, bean-bag-intensive multiplayer, and hands-down the best drinking game we saw that night: Every player is a globby blob of paint, bouncing around and trying to bring back color to a city drained to grays by monochromatic, fascist blobs that have been watching too many black-and-while newsreels of the SS goose-stepping through the streets of Warsaw. Multiplayer is insane and simple: Waive your Wiimote around like a maniac, soak up paint with your Blob, smack against buildings to paint them, and try to keep the other players from immediately re-painting the town in their colors. Cute, simple and dreamlike, De Blob is suitable for kids and inebriated adults, at the same time.

Battle of the Bands: Think Guitar Hero, but with two competing, differently-styled bands (Goth gloomers versus Cowboy Mariachi punks, for example), both literally "fretting" some tweaked-out cover of an established song (a Tejano re-work of "More Than a Feeling," for example -- okay, they probably don't have that, exactly... but only just probably). Hitting the right icons as they scroll up the screen in Guitar Hero style activates certain weapons and power-ups that immediately inflicted themselves on the opposing band. More on this weirdness as I get a better understanding of it.

Deadly Creatures: I don't entirely get this one, either, but it was impressive: A story-driven follow-cam action game where you play, alternately, a tarantula and a scorpion. I'm not talking some wisecracking, anthropomorphized scorpion named "Dix" voiced by Joe Pesci, I'm talking a realistically-rendered scorpion in straight-faced, ground-level combat with other creatures. The tarantula levels were so convincing that the more arachnophobic editors among us literally had trouble bringing themselves to play the game.

Destroy All Humans - Path of the Furon: Pretty recognizable gameplay, but a new era to mock: The first game lampooned the red-scare 50s and the second surfed the hippie 60s. Let's just say that, in this one, the alien wears bell-bottoms. Groovy, man.

Between Disney, Pixar and Wrestlemania, you can understand if I'm not ready to rejoin the real world just yet. Thankfully, Midway's having their event for This is Vegas next week, so I'll be taking a trip out to -- you guessed it -- lovely Boise, Idaho. No, seriously, it's in Vegas. We've previously posted a chat with the designers of that forthcoming sandbox-style tribute to Sin City from Midway, but I'll come back with some fresh impressions.

Either that, or I won't come back at all, I haven't decided yet. Now, where's my sword...?