As mentioned yesterday, today is officially the first day of the Tokyo Game Show. So far we haven't been disappointed, and while we're not even halfway through all of our appointments, we can give you a quick glimpse of things to come as well as a few small pieces of info.

This morning saw us hanging out with Ubisoft right off the bat. We sat down with Jason Vanderbergh, Creative Director for Red Steel and asked him some questions while being pulled through a demo - Wii owners will be very happy about this game.

We checked Avatar in a lot of detail and can tell you, until you're experiencing this game in 3D, you're not getting the full experience, and it is also a lot more than a simple movie tie-in action title; there's some incredible depth here and some great symbiotic game ideas I haven't seen implemented before.

Splinter Cell: Conviction was finally in playable form, and not just the demo level we had to watch hands-off at E3 - this was a new vertical slice of gameplay ripped right from the dev floor, bugs included - just for TGS. It looks awesome, plays awesome and plain is awesome. Stay tuned for a more detailed hands-on preview shortly.

R.U.S.E. is actually a lot more enticing and involved than any trailers or screens would have you believe. And similarly to Red Steel, we sat through a demo and asked a host of RTS-specific questions, but if you could marry solid RTS with amazing theater-of-war visuals (that put Supreme Commander to shame) and elements of the Civilization series, you'd just be beginning to scratch the surface here.

We learned Australia will see Zune Video arriving for the Xbox Live Marketplace (ergo your Dashboard) this Spring, with promised 1080p On Demand movie streaming (no specifics for film or television partners have been revealed locally, however).

And finally, we just sat in on a Project Natal Creative Developer panel which featured Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid), Keiji Inafune (Capcom) and Toshihiro Nagoshi (SEGA), all talking about their thoughts on Microsoft's new controller and interactivity device, and what they see as the future in gaming based on it - stay tuned for a more detailed write-up on that, too.

All great stuff so far, and even more to follow. So check back for more as we have time to make it available to you.

Kanpai!