We spent time with dozens and dozens of games at last week's E3, from your Gods of Wars to a fishing game. Some were good, some weren't -- and some good ones may have seemed bad (or vice versa) because of how they were shown. And so, forthwith, we present the best and worst demos of E3 2009. (Many more after the jump.)

The Best:

The Beatles: Rock Band
"Two things make up a good demo: 1) A game that obviously shows well to an audience, and 2) A presenter who is every bit as entertaining as the game. The former is fairly easy to accomplish, but it's very rare when these two factors come together, like they did for The Beatles: Rock Band demo.

You've got the iconic songs of the Fab Four for starters, but it's also weirdly fun just to watch people play Rock Band (especially folks who obviously have a good time doing it, like the ones in our demo). Couple this with a witty presenter who wasn't afraid to make fun of himself (or the game) and an amazing room constructed to look like a recording studio and you have one damn good demo." -Michael Donahoe

RUSE
"This is a bit unfair to all those boring videogames being played on plain ol' HDTVs (how 2008 of them), but Ubisoft showed off real-time-strategy game RUSE on a giant, tabletop touch screen in their booth. The demo driver looked like a DJ from the future (or a tiny person playing on a giant iPhone) as his fingers swept, swooped, and danced all around the screen while he effortlessly and elegantly moved his units and panned the camera from sky down to street-level view." -Dan "Shoe" Hsu

Dance Dance Revolution Wii
"Last year, Konami badly botched their Rock Revolution E3 presentation when they shoved a marketing rep onstage to handle the plastic guitar -- in retrospect, we should've realized it was a portent of disastrous things to come.

This year, they took no such risks. Flamboyant, charismatic producer Naoki Maeda is DDR to many fans, and his flowing, dyed-brown locks took center stage in demonstrating the first major DDR revolution in a decade -- taking the series from the dancepad to the Balance Board. With his Elvis-style hip swiveling, Maeda's boundless enthusiasm infected the crowd and really showcased how the series will change on the Wii. And even communicating in broken English, the DDR legend proved that at E3, it's really all about enthusiasm, spirit, and evidence that you actually care about your product." -Andrew Fitch

DJ Hero
"This demo succeeded because it explained to me a game I had no idea what to expect from going in, and it made me excited for it. Now, I don't follow the DJ scene at all, yet this demo, headed by members of the development team, got across how the game is played and how the new peripheral works -- essentially showing that it is much more than some cheap Guitar Hero spin-off. The presenters obviously believed in their product, and their enthusiasm carried across." -Greg Ford

Project Natal
"There are three kinds of demos at E3 -- on the show floor, behind closed doors, and then 'secret' behind closed doors demos, the kind that PR people will lie about and claim aren't actually happening if they don't feel like letting you in. The Project Natal demo was one of those.

Microsoft Game Studios' Kudo Tsunoda recapped his MS press conference presentation, more or less, but also showed a version of Burnout modified to work with Natal. We already wrote up a big thing about it already, so I won't go into detail again here. But seeing Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto walking in for the next demo after us, that was pretty cool." -Demian Linn

The Worst:

Heavy Rain
"We're told by our peers that Heavy Rain is much better than we think, but we spent our 10 minutes on the demo wandering around, unsure of what to do, fighting with the sluggish and unintuitive movement controls. Hold R2 to move forward really slowly (it's worst than Resident Evil 1), flick the L stick to change your direction, flick the R stick down to inspect something on the ground...what?

To be fair, we didn't go through a tutorial, and the developer or producer who's supposed to give us a guided tour wasn't around -- players normally wouldn't just jump straight into a random level without either of those. Just goes to show that publishers shouldn't leave people alone with certain demos." -Shoe

Battlefield: Bad Company 2
"Uh, normally demos are supposed to educate you on a game via a demonstration. Because, well, that's what a demo means, right? Well, for our Battlefield: Bad Company 2 demo, we were immediately thrust into a chair upon entering the room and forced to play multiplayer for a game we knew absolutely nothing about. Luckily, I've played one of these newfangled first-person shooters before, so I was able to somewhat cope with my confusion, but I found it incredibly frustrating (and annoying) that I had to constantly be asking what the hell we were doing in the game. Hell, at one point, I had to interrupt the main presenter of the game (who was narrating the match with a microphone), to ask him how to complete the objective of our particular scenario. We're all for getting hands-on in a demo, but it's pretty sad that I left my Bad Company 2 appointment knowing absolutely nothing about game. Well, at least my team won! Not sure how, though...." -Michael

Mass Effect 2
"Look, I realize the BioWare fanboys are gushing over the follow-up to 2007's epic space-opera RPG. But in my mind, the point of an E3 demo is to showcase the game for all potential audiences -- and that includes folks who didn't play the first entry, like me. Sure, just before the demo, EA claimed the sequel will be accessible even to newcomers, but they never actually explained how -- instead, they showcased major plot twists and showed off buxom alien chicks of varying hues without even cursory introductions. I'm not asking developers to dumb it down for newbies, but imagine selling The Empire Strikes Back to an unfamiliar audience with "Luke, I am your father!" and Han Solo in carbonite. At E3, we wanna see the game, not the cut-scenes." -Andrew

Brink
"Brink's not a bad game by any means. This class- and experience-point-based shooter looks quite interesting, actually. But do we really need developers spending a lot of time showing off their create-a-character modes? It's E3! Time's limited, we're exhausted, and we got other games to see! Get to the action, please." -Shoe

The Hunt
"We don't normally cover peripherals, but Griffin was demoing the first motion-sensing controller for Xbox 360 (we signed up for a slot long before we heard about Project Natal). Worth checking out, right? Maybe? Even though it was a fishing controller?

Well the controller and associated game, The Strike, was the usual videogame fishing experience, perfectly fine, not exactly amazing. Then I tried Griffin's other game, The Hunt, with a lightgun peripheral for Wii (a 360 gun is also in the works, but wasn't available yet). The controller worked as expected, which is to say not amazingly well because the Wiimote isn't the most precise aiming device. But the game made me want to laugh uncontrollably. I played an arcade level, an on-rails walk through the woods, if the woods were basically made of rabbits and squirrels doing their best imitation of the Flood from Halo. It was wall-to-wall cuddly wildlife, coming right for me, and needing to die. Their little bodies -- if they didn't instantly fade into the ether upon death -- would have been piled high that day. Sorry, Griffin. I'm sure the career mode involves plenty of stalking and true-to-life dabs of deer urine behind the ears, but that arcade mode is just ridiculous!" -Demian

Not pictured: 100s of squirrels and rabbits, poised to attack.