I have been pretty busy lately getting the next game we are working on up and running so sorry for the lack of communication everyone. We still have a lot of work to do but I think I am finally getting my head around this thing. Not that I fully understand it yet, because I am far from that, but I have made some good progress.We had the God of War II wrap party on Friday, which was a freaking blast. The team was on the tail end of their breaks and it was good to see everyone from the team enjoying themselves even if it was under somewhat inebriated circumstances near the end of the evening. We got the first week sales numbers which were pretty freaking amazing. It is very strange to work on a game that outsells most of my other games in the first week. I still look back on the game and nit-pick several things about it but overall I am very happy with what we ended up with. It is a little sad to reach the end of God of War 2, but also very liverating to know that we are comeltely done with it and people are digging it. Though to be honest I did stop looking at reviews recently since I am so swamped with work and reading them just puts me into a nit-pick mood again.
Also sorry about that whole website confusion…we had some silly routing issues that were never checked out and a bunch of stuff got screwed up. My bad on that one folks. I am proud to see someone who follows this site found the secret first…though I am bummed that it was all messed up when you found it (edit.) GodModeGod. (Sorry..my bad!) Stay tuned for the reveal of what it is all about.
Thank you again for all the kind words and feedback about the game. I have finally caught up on everything and rather than respond in a bunch of comments I thought I would just write a post. The European version will have two different SKU’s, unfortunately the US version is the only single two-disc version. If you want both discs you will need to get the two disc edition in Europe. I have put some calls in about the PAL demo and when I get it I will be sending it out to everyone who is on the PAL list.
Let’s see what else is new…sadly not too much. Prepping for the next game is taking up almost all of my free time. I did get to pick up S.T.A.L.K.E.R this weekend but it took me forever to get it up and running. You know, as much as I dig playing PC games I think I am going to cut down on the number of PC games I play. It seems that I usually spend a day or so just trying to get the damn things running. Then I find out that my machine is unser spec for the game to run smoothly with at least some of the cool looking options on so I end up thinking about an upgrade. No good. I think I will be sticking to console games for awhile since it is just easier. I will say that the drama I had with S.TA.L.K.E.R was mostly due to my own machine though. The CPU kept overheating when I was trying to install it. I needed to open up the box and clean it out…then it worked like a charm. That is until I loaded up a game and realized that I have to turn almost all the options either off or really low just to get a decent frame rate. Boo for that. But I spent some time tinkering and found a somewhat happy medium…total time from opening the box to actually playing…6 hours. Not too much fun. I start lacing up the boxing gloves when it gets that 'unfun' :)
This is not to say “GOW developer gets a PC game, gets disappointed” or anything. Because that is so comepltely not true. I just don’t have the time like I used to spend fiddling with things just to get a game to run.
I have been playing a little bit of Dawn of Sorrow on my DS as well…I really like that game. Sometimes Castlevania games are hard for me to get in to right away, which cause me to stop playing. But I always end up picking them up again and finding that groove. I found that groove on the plane back from GDC. I got to a point in the game that had me thinking about what free time I can steal to sit down and play some more. That is definitely the sign of a good game to me.
I am still not playing much of my Wii though. I went back to Trauma Center and tried making sure the lighting in the room was solid...it did feel better, but I still suck at it. The DS version was more about the fun...this one feels like it is just harder. I got a lot further into the game but there was a point that I just stopped. I might go back to it, but that game was kicking my ass. I haven't had as much time over my 'mini-vacation' to play the new Zelda, which bums me out. I want to see all the cool things people keep talking about. Maybe I will do that tonight?
We got our copies of the soundtrack CD today so that was cool. I have been listening to the master recording they sent me when we were in production so it will be nice to finally have a real CD.
I just realized that this is my first official post about the next game I am working on…crazy. It is definitely good to have that first one out of the way, but going on to a new piece of hardware kind of makes me feel like I am hitting the reset button all over again. Which may be a good thing since I think it makes me work twice as hard, which in turn makes the game that much better!
So there you go. Hope all is well with everyone and you are enjoying the game!
Cory
