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All in all, Saturday's expo isn't much different from Friday's opening. It's not the pushing zoo of people that Friday was, so it's easier to get around. Here is some interesting stuff available on the expo floor. . .

Wow, you can actually feel waves of hatred flowing between these booths! The booths for 3DFX, nVidia, Elsa, and Guillemot/Hercules were all clustered together, and each seemed to be trying to outdo each other with presentations of their latest graphical wonders.

The booth-babes were still well in force. They seem to work in shifts. As soon as one booth retires its babes, another booth parades out a new set. The flashiest babe this year is undoubtedly the Elsa silver fish-woman. Yes, this conference is 95% male. Doesn't it show?

The only male booth-bim in sight was silver-man from HEAT.NET. He wandered the show-floor doing heroic things like rescuing kittens from burning buildings and passing out flyers for his namesake online gaming service. He was truly an inspiration to us all.

Discreet, the 3D Studio MAX developer that seems to change names on a 6-month cycle, was there. They had a well-done booth showing off their latest plug-ins for character animation, skinning, etc.

Not far from Discreet was one of its competitors, Nichimen. They had a tiny, but well-done booth, using all the space they had for demo-ing version 1.1 of their high-end modeling tool, Mirai.

Speaking of Mirai, GameSpy was giving away a free copy. To enter the drawing, all you had to do was to beat one of the world's greatest female Quake-champs in a one-on-one death match. From what the competitors were saying about her skill, it didn't look like there would be many entries --she was clobbering everyone in sight.

Tucked way off to the side in the cheap seats, there were some very interesting, new technologies. Loki Entertainment, a company that ports Windows titles to Linux, presented their OpenAL sound library. They are trying to create an open standard for cross-platform sound in much the same way that OpenGL does for 3D graphics.

Also to be found way off to the side was Pacific Media Worx. They had no flashy monitors or annoying music, but they did have a genuinely cool 3D tool kit to show off. Their demo of mixing 2D and 3D was quite impressive.

Showing off a cool peripheral that will be useful for all of two games, Interact was there with their pool-cue controller. It's neat to watch, but it really doesn't enhance the experience that much, as there's no force-feedback. The device does, however, double as the world's most uncomfortable mouse.

In an idea that will undoubtedly change the gaming industry in the same way that 3D transformed the movie industry, iSmell and AromaJet were showing off competing interactive scent devices.

IOMega was there, showing off their new ZIP-drive technology for Dreamcast. It is yet unclear how the drive will be realized in the device, but it does make available the possibility of downloading and playing games from the internet. We'll see.

And, finally, there was the media. Adam Sessler from ZDTV's GameSpot TV was on hand today to tape a couple of reports from the show floor.