I’m in a hotel room right now, after spending a day on the floor of the Boston Convention Center. PAX East is in full swing, and as soon as I get home you can expect some major coverage of what I saw. Galleries, cosplaying stuff, swag round-up, the works. Until then, here are the highlights of what I checked out today:

2K Games’ The Darkness 2 looks surprisingly fun, but it’s kind of weird to see a sequel to a launch title this late in the game. The Darkness came out nearly 4 years ago. Still, you get to pick up parking meters and spear gangsters against walls with them. So… yeah, pretty rad. And megaviolent.

Gearbox had a huge, ornate Duke Nukem Forever booth filled with no less than four booth babes in tiny blouses and short skirts. They were dressed just like the two girls at the beginning of the game I tried that… were totally doing stuff to Duke while he watched TV.

The Behemoth filled its booth with arcade cabinets for Battleblock Theater, and a huge four-player Castle Crashers cabinet. The games are awesome (well, Battleblock Theater will be awesome, when it finally comes out) on consoles, but I want one of these cabinets in every bar in New York. I would never keep quarters in my pockets for more than 25 seconds again. Also, met with Dan Paladin. He drew an antlerbear attacking a little dude. I’m gonna frame it. Check it out:

Nintendo had nothing new at its booth from when I went to its big 3DS lineup event in New York last month. Of course, it comes out in 3 weeks, so… not really many groundbreaking announcements Big N can put out.

Monday Night Combat is getting a new map. So I’m probably going to be burning another 100 hours on it when it gets released. Also, Cardboard Tube Samurai assassin skin.

Speaking of which, Valve showed off Half-Life 2 Episode 3. Psych! They showed off Portal 2. My prediction: Portal 2 will be great, Valve will put out a half dozen Team Fortress 2 updates over the next year, and we won’t see anything about Half-Life until 2014.

Child of Eden looks amazing. It’s the sequel to Rez. It will probably last an hour and a half, and be totally worth it.

More to come!