Joystiq

Jaffe comes out for a unified game console standard

Kyle Orland — 2008-01-11T12:15:00+00:00

Filed under: PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Retro, Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360

Vocal support in the industry for a single-console solution continues to gather steam, with roustabout game developer David Jaffe airing the case for an uber-system on his blog. On the surface, his arguments have some merit, but we feel the the case for a "unified" console begins to break down when you really examine it. If you will, let us play a bit of devil's advocate with Jaffe's case:

"We have it with DVD, we had it with VHS. We have it with televisions (in the sense that- for the most part- every TV is capable of broadcasting the same signal). So what do we lose by having it for game consoles?"

Jaffe seems to be forgetting that VHS only became the monopoly "standard" after a bloody battle with JVC's Sony's competing Betamax format (edit: brain fart). There was no consortium of companies deciding what would be "best" for the market -- competition simply decided that one format was overwhelmingly better for the price. Sony had similar near-monopoly control in the PlayStation 1 and 2 eras, and it was competition, not cooperation, that brought it about. And for every cooperation success story like DVD, there's a flop like Phillips/MCA's LaserDisc format.

As for television signals, they require a monopoly of sorts because of the limited broadcast spectrum. When you take that away, you get the channel-building, selection-expanding competition between cable, satellite and FIOS TV services.

"Sure you miss out on some features that may otherwise be available if another console was there to compete. But this is always the way when one format wins over another and becomes the standard."

Jaffe seems to forget that the development of video games has been much more dependent on technological change. Without the Genesis pushing Nintendo to upgrade the NES, Nintendo's first system could have easily dominated the market for another five years at least, setting back the state of the art in game design all the way down the road. If a consortium of hardware producers controlled the gaming standard, resistance to change would be even greater.

"And for those few features you lose, don't you make up for it in so many other ways? Massive content choice, being the main one."

The current competitive system allows for thousands of games to be produced every year, the wide majority of them for multiple platforms. Yes, it might suck for the developer to have to port one version of a game to multiple systems, but middleware tools are making that process increasingly streamlined.

"And before you toss 3DO at me as an example as to why this won't work, don't. 3DO failed because- for the most part- it had crap games and was way too expensive and could not compete with the new game hardware coming out that was selling at much cheaper prices. But if the 3DO had been an XBOX 360 or a PLAYSTATION 2....or even a Wii? Well then I think things would have gone differently."

That's the thing ... a 3DO-style system probably wouldn't end up being a PlayStation 2 or a Wii. When a consortium of companies designs a hardware standard (as opposed to just a software standard like DVD), feature-creep tends to set in -- one company wants motion sensitive controls, another wants Blu-ray support, another wants an even more powerful graphics card, another wants digital video recording and a 300GB hard drive, another wants an attachable toaster. Before you know it you get a bloated, expensive system that no one wants to buy and, thus, no one wants to make games for.

With competition, hardware makers have to be price conscious and therefore focus on just the features they feel the consumer and developer markets want. That's why the new, lower-priced hardware you mentioned won out -- because they were designing for the market instead of the pie-in-the-sky desires of a polyglot group of companies.

On the other end of the spectrum, a government-imposed hardware monopoly (the only kind that can really work) can freeze out innovation. Before 1968, only AT&T-provided phones could connect to the nation's single telephone network. Without the opening of this standard to hardware competition, we probably might have never seen advances like answering machines, fax machines, cordless phones and computer modems. And that would be a shame.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Jaffe wouldn't mind a little involvement with God of War III

Alexander Sliwinski — 2007-12-06T15:55:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture

David Jaffe, creator of the original God of War, says he would love to be involved somehow with God of War III, even though he's no longer with Sony. He notes that if he could figure out how to freeze time and still make it home for dinner with the family -- and if Sony would let him work on the project -- he'd do it. Jaffe says that he had a "master plan" for the God of War story when he was still with Sony and that the Santa Monica team has his notes -- but whether they want to follow them is their choice.

That's just one small part of a large interview done by GameDaily BIZ with Jaffe. In the full interview, he discusses his new studio Eat, Sleep, Play and what it's like focusing on medium-sized titles. There's a pretty frank discussion about how he just couldn't get into BioShock -- he blames being too focused on the "nuts and bolts of play mechanics." There's a lot more straightforward Jaffe talk too, but honestly, did you expect anything less?

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Jaffe pops the top on Eat Sleep Play's Logo

Kyle Orland — 2007-10-17T18:27:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 2, Sony PSP, Casual

Ever since David Jaffe announced he was striking off on his own with new development house Eat Sleep Play, there's one particular bit of information gamers everywhere have been clamoring for. No, not the company's first original title -- what gamers really want to see is the logo.

Well, the day has finally arrived. At long last fans, well-wishers and hangers-on can check out the above logo, courtesy of Newsweek. Jaffe says the soda-bottle-cap logo represents "the heart and soul of what our company is all about ... fizzy, refreshing fun." Frankly, it makes us think of Popcap Games more than anything like that.

Along with the exclusive logo reveal, Newsweek has also posted up the first two parts of a three-part interview with Jaffe wherein he talks up the financial possibilities of smaller games and bravely reveals that he doesn't know what the word "remuneration" means. Careful David... those internet trolls are real sticklers for vocabulary.

Read - The logo revealed
Read - Newsweek Jaffe interview (part II)

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Jaffe's warehouse pics possible studio space in Utah [update]

John Bardinelli — 2007-06-23T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 2, Sony PlayStation 3, Sony PSP, Business, Casual

After swearing off blogging earlier this year, God of War and Calling All Cars mastermind David Jaffe returned weeks later to post images from what appear to be an abandoned warehouse. The pics have recently been confirmed to be in Utah, which just happens to be the location of Incognito, the studio Jaffe collaborated with on Calling All Cars. Jaffe's recent post on the future of videogames as "SHORTER, LESS EXPENSIVE" projects instead of marathon development periods may hint at the direction the studio will take when (if) it comes to life.

Update: To clarify, Jaffe is not moving to Utah and is still an employee of SCEA. 1UP speculates the studio space could become a "full fledged company or [fill] a more focused role within Sony" and the idea of Jaffe traveling back and forth between Utah and San Diego (as he did with Calling All Cars) "sounds on-target". More here.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

David Jaffe returns to blogging (but only with pictures)

Alexander Sliwinski — 2007-06-13T23:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture

After swearing off blogging over a month ago for reasons unbeknownst to us -- Jaffe's back! Wave your rollies in the sky and wave them side to side. Whoop, whoop! He returns to blogging with pictures and not words -- actually, not true, the title of the post is "coming soon". The post holds two pictures, the one you see above and one after the break. It's very avant-garde, what Jaffe is doing here; the pictures speak the words for us. It's blogging 2.0.

What does it mean? Well, it's one man's struggle against words while probably showing his new office getting all fixed up. Or maybe they put gamers in the fishbowl off to the right side to observe their behavior, helping craft an optimal gaming experience. Obviously Jaffe is building a mystery and carefully choosing what to reveal. Or he's just building an office. One or the other, we're pretty sure.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Jaffe un-promises, Calling All Cars delayed

Ross Miller — 2007-05-01T20:55:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Action, Driving, Online

Like a little girl struggling to keep her favorite doll out of the garage sale bin, David Jaffe is returning to the world of Calling All Cars to make some fixes and revise some of the criticisms the title received via reviews, even after announcing that the title has gone gold, according to a post he left on the NeoGAF forums. The title, therefore, has been delayed for an unspecified time.

The bug fixes concern network connection and voice chat issues. Jaffe apologizes, of course, and notes that the previously-mentioned release date was never official. ("Sony was kinda annoyed that I claimed 5/3 as release date," he said.) Would gamers have preferred the game be released on time with a patch promised at a later time? We're leaning towards no, given the importance of multiplayer in the game, although our opinions might sway depending on how long these two "key bugs" take to fix.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Calling All Cars is done, due out May 3

Ross Miller — 2007-04-27T15:33:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Action, Online

David Jaffe has announced on his design blog today that Calling All Cars (formerly Criminal Crackdown) has gone gold and is expected to hit the PlayStation Network on May 3. The game had been previously delayed for focus testing and other minor tweaking, but it now seems that Jaffe is happy enough with the product to let it go.

Has it been worth the wait? Reviews are slowly coming in, but IGN is calling it "Sony's first truly original, must-have title on the PlayStation Network" and claiming it bests just about everything on Xbox Live Arcade. Strong words; we'll see for ourselves next week.

[Thanks, Pete]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Shed a tear for Jaffe's Heartland

James Ransom-Wiley — 2007-04-23T18:16:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture, Portable, Sony PSP, Action, First Person Shooters

Newsweek's latest exchange with designer David Jaffe dredges up memory of Heartland, one of the industry's recent missed opportunities. In October 2005, when Heartland was known as 'Project HL', Jaffe went public with his goal to make gamers cry, describing his PSP epic as an examination of "what's happening with America and the military". A year later, Heartland was shelved and forgotten, until Jaffe squeaked out a few details in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month. "Hearing myself talk about it now makes me a bit sad," lamented Jaffe, who was re-realizing that the would-be allegory that depicted a fictional Chinese invasion of the US would have been an important effort for the games industry -- and perhaps Western culture at-large.

Our perception of what Heartland could have been has been damaged by Jaffe's often-manic outbursts. The designer essentially snuffed out all curiosity in the title when he spastically proclaimed last September that the future of the industry was in (in all caps) "SHORTER, LESS EXPENSIVE" games, beginning with his PSN launch pad Calling All Cars. Though the Calling All Cars delays will apparently cease by mid-May, the untimely delivery has led many of us to tune out Jaffe's banter. So, just as we've yet to join Jaffe's "pop songs" crusade (a belief that small-time games will pwn the market), we have little faith in the notion of his PSP tearjerker. Shame on us then for feeling a pang of sorrow -- that sudden urge to pour one out -- over Heartland, as Jaffe confesses to Newsweek's N'Gai Croal his reasons for abandoning the project:

"If the team would have been the right size, we would still be in production with Heartland today ... [but] the main issue that made it clear that we could not continue was that WarHawk kept taking our team members... [We] didn't want to wait 18 months [for Warhawk to be finished] to make our game so we came up with one that could be done by the team size we currently had. But, the thing is, if I had really been ready to leap back into the hell that is epic game making (my personal opinion,) I could have worked with SCEA to try and hire more folks or found a team that was of the proper size to make it... But my heart was just not in it. These days I feel like down the line, I may be ready to tackle a game like that again. But right now, not so much."

Not that Heartland would have been an exception to the grueling task of developing a marquee title, but as "a liberal person's response to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq" it certainly could have been an exception in the commercial games market. In the end Jaffe's heart was in the right place, with his family, and he chose to invest in his responsibility as a husband and father (though Jaffe has intimated that if there was a "pot of gold" in it for him, he'd have made the sacrifice). We only wish there was another equally coveted, but less family-obligated designer to take his place. How many developers would SCEA green-light to do a thinly veiled critique on the Iraq War using a 'China vs. America' set piece? Not many.

The industry doesn't need an all-out 'serious games renaissance', but a skillful attempt at conscious, empathetic gaming, and a heartfelt reminder that the war has already been waged for four long years would be welcome.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Jaffe: fixing scoring gap reason for Calling All Cars delay

Ross Miller — 2007-04-05T16:55:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Action, Driving, Online, Casual

Insomniac Games (Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet and Clank series) interviewed David Jaffe (God of War) for the second episode of their new podcast, The Full Moon Show. Of note is Jaffe's explanation for the delay of his upcoming PlayStation Network title, Calling All Cars.

Jaffe said that during playtests people were enjoying themselves more when the scores were close, rather than when the scoring gap was wide. He talked to some industry vets who had worked on a few Midway titles to see if they had any code that could be used to narrow that scoring gap, and sure enough they had some code.

"We certainly don't want to go into and put in tons of that, but we've gone in and added just a little bit," he said. He continued to say that his hope is folks who are within 20% of each other's skill levels to have very competitive matches. Jaffe also explained that this was the reason for another playtest, and if the code's effects are noticeable then they will take it out.

Jaffe noted that they are still planning for a release during the month of April.

The interview starts 21 minutes into the 2-hour podcast. Jaffe also talked about his frankness in discussion, his love of playtests (the fifth one is coming up) and his ambitious, now on permanent hiatus, PSP tearjerker Heartland. The podcast also includes updates on Resistance: Fall of Man and the upcoming Ratchet and Clank Future.

[Via Aeropause]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Pajitnov, with needle and thread, wins Game Design Challenge

Ross Miller — 2007-03-09T05:05:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture, Puzzle, Simulations, GDC, Casual

The game design challenge is an honored tradition four years in the running at the Game Developers Conference, pushing creativity in a competitive, humorous environment. This year's winner was Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov who managed to create a viable action-puzzler using needle, thread and cloth. He bested both David Jaffe (Calling All Cars, God of War) and last year's winner Harvey Smith.

The following is a pseudo-live blog of the event from earlier this afternoon. Read on for a full description of each game proposed.

GDC Program Director Jamil Moledina is in attendance. The chairs in the room fill quickly. Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov is the last to show up, wearing a dress shirt and vest and holding a bookmark. He serves as a stark foil to the other designers, who dress and act much younger. Game Lab's Eric Zimmerman sports the skin-tight grey collard shirt, thick-rim glasses, and the hipster-obligatory thick leather watch strap.

Jaffe and Smith prepare notes while a GDC techie preps the microphones. Music best described as rejected They Might Be Giants material is playing through the speakers, marking the time when the session was to start. Our guess is that it's a torture device intended to speed up preparations so the session can start as close to on time as possible.

The lights dim slightly. Zimmerman beckons that those with adjacent empty seats reveal themselves. Zimmerman explains his reasons for conceiving the game design challenge. "There are certain kind of games, game themes, subjects, styles that have yet to be explored and need to be explored," he explains, and the Challenge is for developers to push themselves in the theme. Previous year themes include:

When story felt integral. Challenge: Game that tells love story (Will Wright was crowned victorious)
When licensing were all the rage. Challenge: Emily Dickenson poetry (Will Wright wins again)
Rise of serious games with social agenda: A game that would win Nobel Prize (Harvey Smith wins for a DS title about peaceful flash mobs).

This year, there was a rise in interaction and hardware. The Wii is referenced. This year marks the first technological challenge, the needle and thread interface. The participants were let known the challenge in January. Each has 10 minutes to present their game, followed by Q&A session, then the winner is selected by informal vote of the audience.

The basic elements of the challenge: the cloth, some thread, and needles. A thin but sturdy cloth 2 x 2 square, any color or visual pattern. Plastic needles of varying colors and sizes, and threads of different colors and sizes as well. The cloth sensor knows which needle and thread you chose, and there are some other small details that are and are not part of the sensor (folding the cloth is not detected). "Eight cloths connected to a television" is shown to the bemusement of the crowd.

Paper Airplane

Jaffe goes first, giving the challenge the new title of "are you fucking shitting me?" as it was known at the Jaffe household. He then went on to describe Pajitnov as Russell Crowe's character in Cinderella Man, Smith as the film's antagonist, and Jaffe gives himself the relation to Paul Giamatti's character.

The Atari 2600 Adventure and Pac-Man are cited. A remake of the Journey arcade game was considered. "It was going to be like cel animation; as you layer the fabric on top of each other ... the fabrics would be staircase, bridge etc. and you would make the path needed and sew weapons that would drop in the environment to help Steve Perry's character ... For me, everything has to be fun. So I sat there and pretended I was doing these things ... it just wasn't fun to me."

Jaffe found a fabric that has paper-like qualities on the internet. "So I thought, wouldn't it be cool if -- and I call this playper -- and it's cool in the sense that it's paper you hook it up to the TV." So derives the Paper Airplane toy game.

The goal of Paper Airplane is to design and create the best paper airplane to launch through and master various obstacles and scenarios. For purpose of focusing on the design aspect, Jaffe decided to make the actual launch of the airplane easy, with all external conditions equal for every throw.

The sewing mechanism comes from the creation of artwork and weaponry on the craft, depending upon which needle you use and how you sew the items. AI will decide to use the gadgetry based on what it is and where you put it. The better the stitch you make, the better the gadget's functionality. Again, the focus is on design.

Ending his presentation, Jaffe shows a picture of Pajitnov Photoshopped onto a victorious boxer, with a Photoshopped picture of himself below.

"I totally expect to lose," Jaffe notes and concludes his presentation.

Stitch & Cross

Pajitnov is next, showing his e-mail address to the entire room. Technical errors plague the first few minute (Silly PowerPoint). The game consists of a common screen. Each player has one cloth for input.

The move consist of two stitches, the visible and hidden, as with the simplest of stitching when you go over and under the cloth. Your goal is to stitch your away across the map first -- Pajitnov estimates this would be done in five visible and five hidden stitches. You can fight and destroy your opening by crossing his visible stitch. To combat the notion that one could make a long hidden stitch and reach the end unscathed, Pajitnov decided to make a rule so that the visible stitch would be greater in length to the hidden stitch.

As Pajitnov explains, "Basically I feel that approximately five steps in this field sounds to be good. I'd like to leave it five steps, one goes 20% per ... I want to keep it simple, but we want it to be more visual, so visible parts should be longer. The cross killing should happen on the visible part."

More problems were discussed:

The tail is very vulnerable. Pajitnov decided to have the tail melt at approximately one stitch every five seconds.
The steps are predictable, no room for strategy. Each player therefore gets two needles, though all needles are identical. We're not sure what he means here.
The play field looks boring. Pajitnov envisioned obstacles spanned out over about 100 stages.

Other rules Pajitnov decreed:

A new move is not allowed before the current is done.
No cross of opponents' spots (needle will return to start), obstacles, field design.
The loser of a fight will return to the start.
Each game lasts up to five points with the difference of two (we think he means like the Tennis scoring rules)
If there is no activity for 40 seconds, the needle returns to start.

Zimmerman quips that even mathematicians can make mistakes, noting the two number eight list topic in the last slide. He then goes on to talk about the designer's different foci, referencing Pajitnov's focus on the detailed rules in explaining the game. Pajitnov's attention to detail and fleshed out proposal is intriguing, and once we grasped the full picture we found ourselves wishing this game was real.

The Tailor's Daughter

Harvey Smith takes the stage to discuss "a highly , physically simulated 3D adventure game." Smith laments that not enough Myth-style games are made. In his introduction, he quotes Miyamoto as saying to "start by thinking about the controller."

"It has never been more true than with this interface," he said. He thought about controller shape, form aesthetics, body position during play, connection to electricity, and mapping controller surface to game mechanics. "My initial reaction was this was going to be really difficult," whilst "batshit crazy" is listed on board. Smith decided to take the user interface seriously, imagining how to play some of his game with needle and thread and make it feasible.

The needle was easy, he said. Smith imagined it contained an RFID tag read by a transponder in the cloth, to be sold in various colors like guitar picks of DS styluses. In thinking about a cloth, he thought of a loom that looks like a computer desk but doesn't seem very practical. He then thought of a lap loom and he decided it was comfortable, the right size / shape, and more importantly it maps to a living room.

"Which lead me to consider Native American snowshoes, naturally." (Pictured; our apologies for the bad quality.)

The cloth is stretched over a wooden frame. Imagine this with modern branding, plastics, etc.

A swivel connector would be on the right, allowing cloth frame to flip. The other side has UI and map settings.

Putting the shoe and needle together. "I wanted to talk about another step that I went through. I try to envision playing actual games that I like with this controller. So minesweeper to start seemed super simple. But then I thought about it, the needle would be tripping squares and you might accidentally sew the wrong square. So I came up with the notion of partial insertion ("just the tip"). Full insertion registers a click. The crowd laughs and moans at all the innuendo.

Smith talks about Guitar Hero. It's fun but you lose left-hand to button pressing. The right-hand strumming becomes more complex: picking out notes. the needles system would be like playing a fretless bass. and you know, where you pluck the screen. "Guitar Hero, in my opinion, would be a lot of fun.

Smith talks about his upcoming game, Blacksite. A first-person shooter would be different with controls -- it becomes slower, more 2D. "But then I thought about it and if the pace of the game was slower, I could envision using the right hand side to move forward. I think Nintendo solved this with Metroid DS, but I wouldn't want to do Blacksite with a controller like this."

The Tailor's Daughter is a 3-dimensional physical adventure game with a quilted art style. "I imagine a watercolor through a rendering filter that makes it look like cloth," he said. The game itself is allegorical fiction pertaining to current U.S. political issues that drew considerable enthusiasm from the crowd. We'll abstain from the political themes for this post, but essentially the game revolves around Noa and her stuffed animal companion as she uses her father's magical needle to save his kingdom and regrow the Life Tree. Battles would be fought in a Final Fantasy style.

The stitching element would come in with stitching and tearing portals in the fabric of time, and stitching pieces on your stuffed companion. While the game was fleshed out, we felt it was unclear what creativity was being brought via the cloth input.

Smith thanks the audience and the Q&A session opens up.

The first question is posed for for host and creator Zimmerman, who wonders why no female game designers were invited to a design challenge about a predominantly-female hobby of stitching. The crowd cheers at her pointed question and Zimmerman responds that when the designers were selected in a process with him and CMP, gender was not a primary inspiration. "But excellent question," he said.

Pajitnov had some pointed responses about letting players make their own maps in his game. "I hate to trust level design to customers, I feel it''s just up to the designer himself. I would rather design a couple hundred levels," he said. All developers and level designer, not unexpectedly, cheer at his remark.

One point that was made is the controller's intent was to do something that could only be executed effectively with the needlework. A questioner asked what about Smith's game could be done with only his controller. We found Smith's response a tad confusing and not reassuring.

When asked if the three designers attempted needlecraft during their research, Smith admits that he "almost set some stuffed animals on fire, that's the closest [he] got." Pajitnov explained that "once I made pants for myself." Jaffe just shrugged, laughed and said nothing, motioning to move on. "I think his answer is no," interpreted Zimmerman.

Following the Q&A session, Zimmerman called out former contestant Clint Hocking to come on stage and help hand out the awards, which are bronze, silver and gold sewing needles of varying sizes.

The vote is gauged by audience decibel level:

Jaffe: Pretty loud clapping and mild hoot / hollering
Pajitnov: Universal screams, explosion in room. whistles abound
Smith: More hoots and hollers, clapping; Almost ties with Pajitnov, but dies more quickly.

Zimmerman and Hocking, after minor deliberation, decide that Alex Pajitnov earns the gold needles, while Smith takes second and Jaffe places third. Hey, he did predict it.

"You know people that talk about creative crisis in games industry," concludes Zimmerman. "Maybe that's true top-down, finding commercial concepts we can make [successful], but there's nothing stopping us from conceiving of games and having activities and exercises like this and even making games inspired by the Game Design Challenge. There's nothing to stop us from making game inspired by what we've seen today." The design challenge proves yet again to be one of the show's best hours.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

David Jaffe hates focus testing

Ross Miller — 2007-01-31T22:59:00+00:00

Filed under: Culture, Sony PlayStation 3, Action, Driving, Online

Designer David Jaffe's latest blog entry, as vulgar-laden as usual, was a liveblog of his day at a focus test for Calling All Cars (previously Criminal Crackdown), an upcoming PlayStation 3 downloadable title. You won't find much in terms of new game details, but aspiring game developers could learn a lot from this manic entry.

We know that some of you out there don't appreciate Jaffe's verbose language or feel like the designer, who's probably known best for God of War, hasn't "earned" his street cred yet, but naysayers can still walk away from this transcript with an understanding of the inordinate amount of anxiety put on game makers when they watch their projects get critiqued and criticized by various demographic representative, for better and worse, and how technical issues will vastly affect the situation.

Calling All Cars is planned for a release next month in the range of $5 to $10.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Hands-on with God of War II

Dan Choi — 2006-05-08T18:24:00+00:00

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 2, Action, Adventure, E3

IGN got an early hands-on preview of God of War II, and they're lovin' what Sony's Santa Monica studio has come up with so far.

Without revealing too much of the sequel's plot, our hairless hero now sports some new magical attacks and context-sensitive finishing moves. Needless to say, prominent Greek mythological figures will also be showing up to keep Kratos company, and there will certainly be a lot of flashy slashing-first-ask-questions-later kind of action to fill the hours.

For more spoilers on "an early section of the sequel," simply follow the image link above or Read link below, where you can find a few more details on the new power-up system and annoying enemy combatants (otherwise known as smarter fodder for your sharper blades). A practical explanation goes into the reasons for keeping things on the PS2 rather than the PS3, and hopefully less frustrating puzzles are revealed as well. More will likely be revealed at Sony's big E3 press conference today.

See also:

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments