Fancy drinks—you can get those anywhere. Fast cars—every city has them. Rolling up to a hot new club in a fancy car to sip on killer drinks after spraying down scantily-clad women with a water fountain from behind the bar—that only happens in Vegas. Headlining Midway's Gamers' Day with its stylish visuals and hilarious action, This is Vegas made its first playable debut. Part Grand Theft Auto, a bit of Dance Dance Revolution, and a heap serving of saucy satire, This is Vegas shows huge potential.

“We're like the cool style of Ocean's Eleven crossed with a parody of a Will Ferrell movie,” said Executive Producer Alan Patmore. This is Vegas slides you into the shoes of a young newcomer to sin city, arriving to the adult playground expecting lucrative deals and good-natured debauchery. Instead, you find mega-millionaire Preston Boyer has begun transforming Las Vegas into a family-friendly resort town. Restoring the ways of old Vegas becomes your top priority as you fight, party, gamble, and race your way into its social elite. To put it simply, you're the man charged with bringing back the good times to the neutered strip.

While the game adheres closely to a central story, you're free to tackle missions at leisure and take on side missions to boost your reputation called "gigs." These range from racing against the local street gang, gambling your way into the high rollers club, or even partying it up with the city's most popular clique. Populating Las Vegas are various communities in which favor must be culled as you work to kick the city back into gear. Completing a few gigs to help out the Diamonds, for example, bolsters your reputation among high rolling gamblers. This might upset other communities around the city such as the Spades—whose rough and tough biker ways contrast with the lavish lives of the Diamonds.

Missions fall into one of four categories: partying, fighting, gambling, and racing. A few scripted missions showcased partying, fighting, and gamble, but racing wasn't shown; Midway promises to highlight this feature, as well as the free-roaming aspects of the game at a later date (read: E3). By far, partying looks to be the most fun of the bunch with a wide range of cool interactive tasks including dancing, bar-tending, and bouncing—in the available mission, our guy arrived at the slick dance club Aqua where the DJ pleaded with us to help get her party started. The dance floor empty, the club hardly hopping and little in the way of entertainment on the sidelines, there was certainly work to be done before any partying would get underway.

Encouraging people to get out on the dance floor means busting a move yourself. Dancing involves timed button presses in line with the beat of the music. Complicated moves earn more party points, which naturally help grow your party faster. Of course, these moves require more complex button combinations. You're free to slide by with simple combinations or jazz it up with multiple buttons. Drink too much, though, and dancing becomes pretty difficult. Just like a true drunkard, our dude was flitting about the floor in a stupor induced by too many drinks. Only by heading to the restroom to relieve himself was his buzz able to subside a bit.

With the party going a bit, the mission shifted from dancing to bouncing lames trying to put a damper on the club's rising heat. Talking won't make the party-poopers leave, so you need to knock some sense into them and kick them out. A basic combat system lets you pull punches with the X button, grabs via Y. Holding down X enables you to power up punches or you can tap for a quick hit. Successful blows contribute to your buzz meter, which when filled allow powerful buzz bomb attacks with a tap of the left bumper. A couple of punches and a buzz bomb attack were enough to bounce the downers from the club.

Now that the bad element has been ejected from the building, you can move onto serving drinks. Similar to the service industry hijinks of Cake Mania or Diner Dash, bar-tending has you fulfilling drink orders and lighting cigarettes of the club patrons. As customers step up to the bar, hitting one of the face buttons enables you to meet their request. Tap A and you flick a lighter to start their cigarette, serve up a pint of brew with X, pour liquor with Y, and attack asinine patrons with B. Perform well and you're rewarded with a wet t-shirt contest. From behind the bar, you hold a water nozzle which you direct using the thumbsticks to spray down coeds until their white tied-off shirts are transparent. Activities like this fall into what are being labeled as "Vegas Moments."