E3 Expo - Day Two Report by Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik   Posted on May 20, 2005   With day one of the expo out of the way, day two kicked off a lot more smoothly. The power was completely restored to the entire building, which allowed the media center to be open all day. Day two also allowed for more booth babes to come out of hiding, as seen in our photo gallery for day two. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out our photos for the other days of the expo as well. The Expo started with a mad dash of people to get in line for whatever they deemed most important. For myself, this was the line for viewing the Playstation 3, not so much because it's "most important," but more of the fact that I wanted to see it before the line grew out of control. Even with a forty minute wait, the Playstation 3 is amazing. During the Playstation 3 presentation, we were presented with a number of clips from various PS3 games in development. Unfortunately, this was a behind-closed-doors presentation, at which no video or photography was allowed. Each and every game presented looked absolutely incredible, with sweat spraying off the faces of boxers as they're punched, to cars battling each other for rank. You can find some pictures of the Playstation 3 itself here. Following the PS3 demonstration it was time to check out the rest of West Hall. The line for Nintendo's new Zelda game was in excess of four hours, so that wasn't an option, but there were plenty of other games on display to pique my interest. As I was on my way to the Midway booth I happened to notice poker star Phil Hellmuth at the Yahoo Games booth, demonstrating Yahoo's new technology for online gaming, which now includes Texas Hold'Em poker. Mario Party 7 was also on display, which will continue the rather interesting style of gameplay as seen in the previous games. Batallion Wars also looks to be a fun tank game for GameCube. Heading on over to the MidWay booth, and not feeling quite ready for the UT2007 behind-closed-doors presentation, there were some promising games presented. Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War looks like it will have great appeal to fans of city-based strategy games. L.A. Rush reminded me of Burnout: Takedown but with cops added in, while Matrix: Path of Neo sure had a lot of swordfighting in it. Understandably the E3 build will be scaled down some, but it would have been nice to see Neo do something other than completely dominate enemies with a sword. The next major stop was an appointment with AGEIA regarding their new PhysX Chip. Similar to the advent of dedicated 3D Accelerator cards introduced by 3DFX and allowing for greatly improved graphics, AGEIA has developed a dedicated hardware accelerator. Containing around 125 million transistors, it is a very complicated piece of equipment, which AGEIA hopes to have on the market around Q4 2005 and expects to be initially priced at $250-$300. The demos that were run on the hardware itself were incredible: imagine the side of a mountain with an avalanche of thousands of boulders going down the face of the mountain, bouncing off the mountain, cliffs, trees, and each other. The PhysX chip is capable of doing what is currently impossible in modern games, and it can handle thousands of rigid bodies. The most amazing demo was one in which an airplane came crashing through a hanger. Every single object that it impacted reacted realistically, including deformation of the plane itself. We will be posting many of these demos themselves on our site soon. At the Games for Windows booth I was able to get a good feel for Battlefield 2. As hyped up as the game has been recently, I was still impressed by it. I am a bit disappointed at how similar it feels to the free Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, and although I enjoyed playing the game, I hope that more is done to set the game apart from Desert Combat. Lastly, the Unreal Tournament 2007 demonstration at the theater in MidWay's booth was viewed. As with the PS3 demonstration, we were not allowed to record any of the UT2007 demonstration, but it looks amazing. A highly detailed Malcolm was used as a guide through the demo, which concluded with around five minutes of in-game footage. The graphics are amazing, and many classic weapons are returning, in a slightly more upgraded manner. Physics has become a larger part of the game, and while nothing about UT2007's physics in specific has been mentioned to involve AGEIA's PhysX chip, Epic Games has incorporated support for the chip into Unreal Engine 3. For more screenshots of games and for booth babe pictures, check out our picture gallery.