TGS coolidge so far

UPDATED: Added Soul Calibur IV video, link to Xbox.com's "Bringing it Home", and more info on Lost Odyssey.

OK, I'm not really able to stay away from game happenings, even while I'm trying to avoid Halo 3 spoilers.

Cool / interesting stuff is coming out of the Tokyo Game Show (TGS), and I'm pretty stoked.

• PS3 gets rumble -- I feel bad Sony's thunder was stolen by a third-party partner, but they did get to announce the DualShock3 at TGS -- so Sony now has Sixaxis (yawn) and rumble. Sweetness. (List of supported current and upcoming games is here.)


• Seaman 2 -- Stop giggling. Turns out they're making a Seaman 2 that is weirder than the first game, so it'll probably never see US (or maybe even EU) shores (how did the first game ever make it stateside?).


• MetaPlace announcement -- Wunderkind Raph Koster's MetaPlace "open MMO platform" made its official debut at TGS. Official after winning in the TechCrunch40 conference and being chatted up at the Austin Game Developers Conference. But official. Again. (This is part of what motivated me to share about my AnthropoMMO(TM) idea.)


• Soul Calibur IV -- One of my favorite franchises has a new, less-jiggly trailer (thank goodness)! The trailer has cutscene and gameplay footage, and shows tastes of the melodramatic (but for me, fun), mythos, and the WTF one-liners (love those). The video's also downloadable via Xbox Live as part of Microsoft's "Bringing it Home" effort.


• Metal Gear Solid 4 -- Gameplay videos have finally shown up, and I'm hoping the bandwidth hogging lets up so I can watch the officially released vids to get a sense of the non-cut-scene quality. I am hearing that even folks who hate MGS (probably the same folks who dislike Splinter Cell) are loving it.


• Lost Odyssey -- A playable version of the game is being shown at TGS. I really hope gameplay vids come out this week. Its from Hironobu Sakaguchi, fer crying out loud. Another nugget on the game? It'll be on four discs. Yeah, first Blue Dragon on two DVDs, and now L.O. on four. I wish Microsoft would rethink the non - high - capacity format thing, and the "don't - require - the - hard - drive" thing (but not in the "memory - management - poor - 5GB - per - PS3 - game" way). But, streaming is allegedly better off of the DVD-9 format compared to first- and second-gen Blu-ray streaming, so there is that.
  
• 2007 Game Awards -- Part of TGS are the Japan Game Awards. What's interesting is that the 360, despite sucking hardcore in the Land of the Rising Sun, picked up the "Global Award: Japanese Product" for Dead Rising and the "Global Award: Foreign Product" for Gears of War.
  
• PSP/PS3 neatness --Looks like updates to your PSP and PS3 are going to lead to some coolness. Things like turning your PS3 on or off when you're somewhere else with your PSP, using your PSP as a rear-view mirror for Formula 1 Racing, using your PSPs as PS3 controllers (Why? If you feel that extra analog stick is annoying?), and (eventually) you'll be able to play the PSPs and one PS3. That's all pretty cool.
  
• Folding @ home -- With the addition of the PS3 in the network, the project recently achieved the "petraflop" -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second. That's the equivalent of every person in the world (at the same time) doing 75,000 calculations in a second. That's cool because of its gaming connection, but it's cooler to me for the bigger application of successful (and useful) grid computing (whatever happened to Butterfly after the IBM acquisition).

There's more coming (in particular, I'm hoping for good some stuff from Capcom), but this stuff rose to the top for me so far.