First, read the Guitar Hero III Quick Impressions here.

Ok, so now here's what else I did at DigitalLife today.

1) Waited in line for Guitar Hero 3- BESIDES THAT. I took a brief trip to the Microsoft booth to see if it had the same setup as last year, with two rows of Xbox Live Arcade games (including Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Lumines Live and Doom) ripe for the picking. NOPE. But, it did have Gears of War PC - dear lord, mouse control makes that game so much more awesomer than it already is (and we know it's already quite awesome); Crysis (didn't get to play it, just gaped in awe at the unprecedented visuals); and Hellgate: London (also just looked at it for 3 seconds). I'll go back to this tomorrow and give Crysis and Hellgate a try, and perhaps try not to die right away in Gears PC. Schwag: a deck of ... Windows Vista ... playing cards.

2) Dell had a booth and was showing off some new silent, water-cooled PCs rigged with Peltier-cooling GeForce 8800s in SLI. I think they were GTXes but I didn't confirm that. In any case, BioShock was running at 1920x1080 (that's 1080p, folks) at 60 frames per second. In DirectX 10. It's the best I've ever seen BioShock. Ever. And this is after looking at plenty of hi-res Xbox 360 and PC footage and experiencing it for myself on my PC (at 1280x1024) with everything set on max. Then I noticed that there was a Samsung TV with the same video feed, and it looked even better. 5 G's for a PC that can do that, as well as edit and encode video and music? Umm. Yeah, actually. If I tripped over a duffel bag full of money, I'd totally build something like that / just buy that outright. Unreal Tournament III was also running on another screen, looking tarted up and beautiful. I'll check it out tomorrow.

3) Took a peek in Namco's booth. Every year it's that same damn Namco Mobile thing. I'll check stuff out tomorrow, but... mobile gaming. Ye-ea-ah. I guess I shouldn't disparage it, but tain't for me. I did see Mr. and Mrs. Man walking by again, though - it being the Namco booth, and all. They posed for a shot. I obliged. They didn't wakka wakka though. I was disappointed. The booth had lines of cIassic Namco games lined up, including Galaga and Pac-Man of course. I will probably unwind by reliving my youth at those machines.

4) Watched a dude break-dance under one of those projected image thingies that react to your movements.

5) Stopped by the Newegg setup right by the Guitar Hero III space. It had a huge Mitsubishi TV playing... Guitar Hero II. (And a bum guitar which was finicky with the HO/POing and alt-strumming.) I turned in a sorry performance of Six (130k) and a Newegg dude came by asking me and the three other guys there if we'd like to be in a (makeshift) tournament. It had to be done in like, 30 minutes, so the rules were that we had to agree on a single song and compete for the highest score. Unfortunately, the game didn't have all the songs unlocked and we were trying to use the Playstation 2 version's unlock-all-songs cheat. We gave up without realizing that it was the wrong cheat. After a little brainstorming, we finally agreed on, "Whoever survives the longest in Jordan wins."

Yeah, I haven't beaten Jordan yet. Eat me.

So anyway, the first guy to go - Shawn - was obviously going to win. Unfortunately the star power didn't activate for him during the part we all dread. (I will blame the guitar - it worked for all of us every other time, including him, except for that one part. He tilted it in the exact same way he did before. In short, he got screwed because it was obvious to me that he was the best of the bunch.) So, he failed at 48%. The second one to go failed at 21%, and the last contestant and I both tied at a 56% failure. They then demanded a tie-breaker song. Shawn chose the song for us - it ended up being Less Talk More Rokk. Another 335k performance from me? Wrong. With the bum guitar, I managed a paltry 197k. Thankfully, my opponent managed 130k. The prize? A $20 gift certificate to Newegg. Eh, not bad.

After trying a bit more Guitar Hero III, I went back to see that they were holding a second tourney later. I helped the guys at the TV - including Shawn - unlock the songs in Career Mode to make them available for the tourney. In the middle of completing Set 3, someone else came running by with the Xbox 360 version of the unlock-all-songs cheat. Problem solved. I stayed out of this tourney to let someone else get a crack at winning, having a sneaking suspicion that it'd be Shawn. That was fine - I figured he got jilted out of the $20 last time. The Newegg people turned to me, asking, "Are you playing again?" I said no, so they responded with, "Ok - so YOU pick the song now! Make sure it's not too long though since this time we have 7 contestants." After thinking for 60 seconds, I announced - with an evil grin - that the song would be Misirlou. There were three failures, a score under 100k, two scores between 103k and 107k, and Shawn's winning score of 157k. After that we fooled around with Jordan and I left. Schwag: Windows Vista T-Shirt, soft foamy Newegg egg, Pac-Man Ghost Lollipop.

PHOTOZE! Check out the gallery of shots I took from the show floor. A cameo appearance from Alyx of Half-Life 2 fame and more!

SCHWAGGERY! The... uh... playing cards, and the foam egg. And more. Yeah.