Ambling up to Sega's booth at E3, I was only mildly surprised to see actor Mark Sheppard loitering about. You probably know him from Battlestar Galactica as Romo Lampkin, a lawyer with an imaginary cat and briefly President of the Colonies. It's only mildly surprising to see him here, because he's the main voice actor in The Conduit, a Wii shooter Sega will release later this month. I figured they brought him in to loiter about and be recognized by geeks like me. Not that he had on a suit or was standing under a sign that said "Meet Romo Lampkin". If you didn't look closely, you wouldn't know any better than to think he's just some dude standing there. Odd. I would have expected they'd call more attention to him.

But what was most surprising was that Mr. Sheppard wasn't loitering at all. He was actually demoing the game. He knew enough about it to explain the different weapons, and to guide players to a few secret areas, and even to go into the options screen and mess around with some of the more elaborate customization options. For instance, he knew that a PC gamer like me would want a tighter bounding box to more closely tie the cursor movement to the character movement. He knew enough to explain about HUD transparency. He knew to call the Z button on the nunchuk attachment a Z button.

But the real surprise was when he took up the Wiimote himself. I don't know if the dude is just good at shooters or if he's simply been playing a lot of The Conduit. He not only managed to play the game well -- and beat one of the bosses -- but he had the rare ability to play well while answering annoying questions from a journalist (i.e. me). "What's that bar mean?" "How do you get more health back?" "Is that ammo?" "Who are those guys?" "Can you take his gun?" "What happens if you go that way?"

Oh, and the game itself? It's one thing to see screenshots. It's another thing to listen to one of the developers make some rather grand claims. But it's yet a third thing to see it in action and disabuse yourself of certain notions about what the Wii can and can't do.