Star Wars Galaxies: Phoenix's mid-day E3 report: Day II

Today started off fairly normal and I didn't have many hopes of seeing anything new and exciting, but I planned taking today to just give some of the better titles another look over and make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Well that's not going to happen today because there is even more stuff happening today than yesterday!

My first stop was to head over to Bandai and check out some of their .Hack series(I'm a .Hack junkie) games and movies. First off Bandai's booth is very large and ultra packed usually. I managed to beat the crowd but still had a good 30 minute wait to try out .Hack://Quarantine, the 4th game in the .Hack series for PS2. Overall it's pretty much like the other games in the series but seems to have improved the graphics and gameplay as well as you can port over your previous characters from the other 3 games in the series so no having to restart. Yay. I also got a great looking T-shirt from them for trying the game out, a .Hack://MUTATION(2nd game in the series) demo disc, and *hopefully* a drawing of a .Hack character that was drawn by the creator of the series and signed as well. I begged and pleaded for them to get me that pic(I couldn't get an interview since her schedule was ful), and *hopefully* around 6pm I'll have it. If not then believe me, you'll hear about it.

So, after my .Hack fetish was fulfilled, I headed to meet Sabrehawk at the Soul Calibur II display at the Namco booth. On my way there I noticed a large crowd around a display. Upon further investigation I saw Gary Coleman with 3 booth babes on his arms. The little man himself is apparently an E3 pimp and owns the booth babe business. None the less, I got a nice pic which I'll send to Fenris later.

After my short detour I headed back to Namco and met back up with Sabrehawk. My timing appeared to be perfect as the Soul Calibur II tournament was just about to start. Within 5 minutes the place was packed and Namco started tossing shirts into the crowd, I managed to get Sabre and myself shirts before we decided to sit down and watch the tournament. There is just something about watching a fighting game on a 40ft LCD screen hanging above your head. The crowd cheered with every landed blow and even winced as player characters were tossed around like ragdolls. It was a hell of a tournament and I doubt I can look at another fighting game the same way.

From there it was kindof everyone for themselves. I had to go view a few console games and Sabre had a few things of his own to do, so we split and decided to meet up later.

Now free of Sabrehawk, I decided to go check out a few of the more hyped titles like StarCraft:Ghost, MegaMan X7, and whatever elsed peaked my interest along the way.

StarCraft:Ghost was on display on 4 XBox machines and had a person at every terminal with about 4 more people behind them waiting to play. The graphics where outstanding. The characters moved seamlessly and respond to sight and sound based on what your character is doing. Some of the effects, like the thermal vision and stealth suit, looked great and caused no noticeable drop in framerate. Even though Blizzard is basically giving the PC market the finger since StarCraft:Ghost is only on consoles, it still looks like it's going to be a great game and worthy of your hard earned 40-50 bucks.

Next up was MegaMan X7 for the GameCube. Now, anyone who is at E3 cannot help but notice that Capcom has spammed the place with MegaMan stuff. It's the blue bomber's 15th birthday so Capcom really went all out. Mega seems to have 4-5 new titles coming out soon but MegaMag X7 is supposed to be the greatest of them all. From my brief playtime, I found that MegaMan X7 is just like all the other games in the series before it. Now, don't take that as a bad thing, it's built around the great action/platforming action of the rest of the series. MegaMan X7 does have an interesting feature where while most of the game is a sidescroller, it does change to a 3rd person camera behind MegaMan that follows him in a 3d world. This little change is a welcomed way to relax from the constant jumping involved in most platform games. Overall it appears to stay true to it's ancestors and still continue to improve the series.

My last stop before heading to the media room to catch Sabre was unexpected and is also probably one of the most underated but interesting products coming to market. GameShark is releasing a product next month called the GameShark Media Player. This little device turns your PS2 into a networked digital media player. It runs a Java server on your PC(Mac, Windows, or Linux) and the client runs on your PS2 via the cd-rom which is hooked into your home network using the PS2 ethernet adapter. This 2mb program that sits on your computer will talk to your PS2 and automatically configure it for network use. I know you're asking yourself, "That's great, but what the hell does it do?". Well if you would let me talk I would tell you! That little application allows you to stream video and music files from your PC to your PS2. This means whatever movies you have on your PC you can view on your TV as long as your PS2 is hooked into it and is running the software. Believe me, there is no short support on the amount of supported codecs either. Off the top of my head they had confirmed support for DiVX 3.1 - 5.5, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG 4, MP3, WAV, MIDI, XViD, QuickTime, ASF, WMV, Ogg Vorbis, and all the others out there today besides RealAudio(but who likes them anyway?). The videos are shown fullscreen on your TV and use the PS2's hardware to help keep the pixelation down. They showed me a movie that originally was the size of 240x120 and, when blown up to the size of the 62in. widescreen TV, still looked crystal clear with no image distortion. Since the files are streamed off your PC there is no need to burn the videos onto a CD first, you just pick what file you want and it's streamed to the PS2. The server also checks itself against the companies website and will update itself when they need to add more codec support or fix any bugs. The PS2 software itself is never updated and never needs to be. This to me is amazing as it provides me a way to watch all my movies downstairs on a larger TV than infront of my 19in. monitor. I can also set it up for 5.1 sound downstairs if I use the PS2's optical out. Not too shabby for a little $50 piece of software.

Well, that is it for this little update. I have tons of pictures to upload and even more things to talk about later. I'll make sure to get Fenris the new pictures so you guys have something new to look at. Till then I'm off to play some more games!

Phoenix's E3 Loot Report:
T-shirts - 4
Keychains - 2
Magazines/Books - TONS
Demo CD's - 8
Dog Tags - 1
Hats - 1
Cool Bags to hold your stuff in - 5
Pens - 5
Glow Sticks - 1
Signed .Hack picture drawn by the series creature - 1 (hopefully)