At the Sony press conference — which turned out to be less a press conference and more of a free dine and wine where a bunch of gamers sat around on bean bags and played Loco Roco to the cooing of their own personal booth babe — I had the opportunity of trying out SOCOM 3: US Navy S.E.A.L.S. at the Sony booth.

I noticed something was a bit odd when I wandered into the SOCOM 3 building and everyone was lying flat on their backs, wearing headsets, staring unblinking at the ceiling. But that was as far as I got before an obsequious Sony bimbo (and, lest I be accused of chauvinism, this bimbo was a guy) said that the cave was full, and suggested that I "climb to the roof."

Climb to the roof I did. As it turned out, SOCOM 3's press both was a two storied miniature building. On the ground floor, players laid flat on their backs and played SOCOM 3 on a monitor embedded in the ceiling. On the roof? Inverse. Players laid flat on their stomachs, inserted their faces through the floor, and stared down at a monitor... as well as the person laying directly below them, twenty feet below.

Three things happened to me in quick succession as I lay down to play SOCOM 3:

1) My crippling vertigo kicked in.

2) Slick from a day wandering the halls of heat-emanating nerd ubiquity, my glasses slid off my nose and crashed down on the horizontal display below.

3) As I stood up to ask the adorable Aryan booth babe standing near me to somehow fetch my glasses, I realized that laying with all my weight on my crotch had given me a quite visible erection. And then she realized it too.

How was SOCOM 3? I dunno. I think I ran three hundred clicks to Charlie or something. Florian Eckhardt

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