It takes exactly 3 minutes and 40 seconds to become excited by L.A. Noire. There will be those of you -- like me -- who have been enraptured by the prospect of a Rockstar game following detectives in 1940s Los Angeles ever since the debut trailer surfaced over four years ago. Since then, Rockstar's formidable reputation for storytelling has been bolstered further by the magnificent Red Dead Redemption, and that talent is being unleashed on the same mean streets once explored by Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.

And if you're still not convinced, 3 minutes and 40 seconds is the time it will take you to watch of Motion Scan, the ground-breaking facial capture technology that could make L.A. Noire a creative milestone.

At last year's execrable Spike Videogame Awards, the single biggest cheer of the night wasn't for the confused minor celebrities clogging up the red carpet. No, that honour was reserved for the , despite the fact that it showed nothing more than a carved, stone dragon.

Since the initial rush of excitement a few shards of reliable information have been revealed by Bethesda, the most important of which is the news that Skyrim will be built on an entirely new engine -- better graphics, better load times, and most importantly, no more stilted conversations with dead-eyed NPCs. If that doesn't get you going, you may well be dead.