With two groups of PS2s playing SOCOM 3 playing on a solid connection the action was smooth and without any noticeable lag. Players were able to team up on the vehicles, drive through the environment and pull off some coordinated group attacks on the other team. Many of the players on the floor were already doing so well with the game that one Zipper Interactive employee said that some people were already doing better than the Zipper guys. And that's with the show floor open for less than two hours.

When I asked about how well lag would be handled for the true online test of 32 people playing through 32 different internet connections, I was told that that was basically something that Zipper couldn't do much to help. Essentially, if people have a great connection and can pull off the 32-player battles, then they should go for it. But if there's a bad connection in the bunch, then that will still slow the game down.

I also asked about what the situation would be for the maps in the game. Currently, there are plans for 12 multiplayer maps and none of the maps from SOCOM or SOCOM 2 will be included. Ever since we published our story about the new multiplayer features last Friday, fans of the series have been e-mailing Zipper and posting on several forums about how they desperately wanted the old favorites to be brought back. Zipper might be bringing back the old maps in the future, but it's not likely to be out this fall and this could lead to the old maps appearing on discs to be stored on the HDD.

The main reason for the old maps not being brought back is that Zipper has changed the format that it develops the maps in. With its streaming technology in place for the new maps it's not just a matter of drag and drop to put the classics into SOCOM 3. They will have to be redone in the new format and Zipper's current push is to make the 12 maps they have now as good as possible in order to make the ship date. Any other time would take away from making the new experience as good as they want to make it.

As for the 12 maps, other issues as to the subsets of maps have been cleared up as well. Instead of the game choosing how big the map is, from the full map to the smallest subset, that decision is entirely in the hands of the host. If the host wanted to, he could cram 32 people in a tiny map or leave 8 folks wandering around a huge area, it's up to him.

As for the subsets, these are not just a chunk of the map that feels randomly generated. Instead, they are areas that are naturally set off from the rest of the map. One small subset could be a couple of houses with a clearing and some trees and is bounded by some hills around it. The same approach is being taken with all of the maps so that the personality of the different maps will remain intact.

Right now, the different maps have one single subset for each size that's needed. So if there is a need for an eight-player map, there is just one of those available in a map. The same thing goes for the 16-player map. Zipper is looking into the possibility of multiple subsets for the different game sizes and will hopefully implement that into the final game.

We had also reported earlier that helicopters would be available for use in the game, but in fact they are going to be used for air-strikes. Multi-player will have vehicles with trucks and tanks and boats and such, but no helicopters. This keeps the vehicles within their areas that are defined by the bodies of water for the boats or roadblocks and hills for the road vehicles