Okay, first thing I will say about Call of Duty 2 - there are two of them.

One of them is Call of Duty 2: The Big Red One. This is a squad based first person shooter set as part of the "The Big Red One" the US Army's First Infantry Division. You'll start the game in North Africa and proceed through Europe as part of a single squad, doing your best to keep your squad mates alive while helping with the war.

The game looked nice, and that's about as much as I can tell you about the game. Activision promoted this game more as "The Big Red One" than "Call of Duty 2" though they did tell me that they were specifically addressing concerns that gamers had shown about the previous Call of Duty game in this title.

It appears that this title is intended for the current generation of consoles.

So, what's the other one?

Well, the game that they were just calling "Call of Duty 2" is also a first person shooter set in World War 2. This one, however, has multiple campaigns included.

As part of the E3 promotion, Activision was showing off an "exclusive" D-Day level in a bunker set up in their area. Thanks to my shiny purple media pass, I got whisked to the front of the multiple hour line in order to see the demonstration of game play. The game is being made for the PC and is also intended also to be an Xbox 360 launch title. Given the level of the graphics that they showed us, I'm darn excited to see what it'd look like on a newer generation console (and not just because I'm an Xbox fanboi).

The scenario that they showed us was Pointe Du Hoc. For those of you not familiar with your D-Day history, this was an attack by the Army Rangers (a new unit formed during World War 2) in order to take out German guns threatening the Allied landing. After scaling a sheer cliff, the Rangers found that the guns were fakes.

This battle has special meaning for me. One of my best friends in high school had a father who was a Ranger in World War 2, and he was involved in the battle. He'd told me all he could remember about it - the last thing he remembered during the battle was the sight of the bodies of his friends falling past him on the cliff, and then the fight was over at sunset and he was still alive. His poncho was shredded by shrapnel and a grenade in his pocket had stopped a bullet.

I admit that when he told me the story of that longest day over the telephone for an Army ROTC class I was taking in college that I cried. Therefore, it was with no small amount of trepidation and concern that I started watching the demo of Call of Duty 2 when they said what battle you'd be re-enacting in the game. I have a lot of emotional investment in it.

That being said, the game was graphically quite impressive. The confusion and the horror of war made it feel like you were there, including disorientation from nearby explosions. The demo started off hitting the narrow beach, went up the cliff, took out some bunkers, and then fought through a small village and into the hedgerows.

The AI - both Allies and Axis - seemed to react pretty realistically. The UI stayed out of the way for the most part. For the most part, the game got you into the chaos and action of the battle as it moved forward, and it held no punches in showing war the way it is - from the point blank execution of surrendering soldiers to the falling bodies of your men.

It looked very chaotic. I wasn't certain in some parts how the person playing knew which way to go or what to do other than perhaps through experience. While it was clear that you were eventually being funneled a certain direction, the appearance of the game was that it was a very open field. You switch between the ranged combat of a sniper to the claustrophobia of tunnel fighting to flushing out die hard defenders in houses.

The weapons all looked and acted accurately to their historical versions, down to the loud "ping" the M1 would make when out of ammo.

In a genre, World War II shooters, that seems to rapidly be approaching saturation, Call of Duty 2 looks to raise the bar once more. I'm excited about seeing more on the game, and, as I said, seeing it on a high end system.