GodofWarBetrayal
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Contest: Cosplay as Kratos, win a PSP
[Update: Submission period is over! We'll be picking the winner soon.]To help promote Kratos' first portable outing, Sony has offered us a PSP to give away to one lucky reader. But it's not so simple. Now that God of War has gone mobile in God of War: Betrayal, we thought we'd ask readers to, well, go mobile as the god of war. Wherever you're likely to break out your cellphone to eviscerate some minotaurs kill some time, we're asking you to: Take a picture of yourself dressed as Kratos in a mundane location; think: bus stop, DMV, waiting in line, etc. Submit your image in .jpg format, no smaller than 800px wide, to joyswag.submissions+kratos AAT gmail DAWT com between now and 5pm on 9/5/07 You may submit one entry each day, giving you more chances to win Winners will be selected based on creativity, uniqueness, and humor Please, no real weapons, we don't want anyone to get hurt. Try cardboard or styrofoam instead! Please consult the official rules for more details. You can purchase God of War: Betrayal on Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, or by texting KRATOS to 4SONY.
Phil Cohen talks up God of War: Betrayal
We never thought we'd have a canonical God of War game on the cell phone but that's exactly what happened. We asked Phil Cohen, producer and designer of God of War: Betrayal, what it was like to squeeze such a huge franchise into such a limited platform.How hard is it to get a high-paced action game onto a mobile device like a phone with limited memory and processing power?"Hard" is a relative term. Every project is hard in its own way. For God of War, that had to do with getting all of Kratos' look, animations, combat and abilities that everyone expects to see, the variety of enemies and their deaths, and the isometric look to the environment. It really comes down to the tools, and our developer, Javaground, has the best mobile toolset that we've ever used. Of course, with every project you try to push certain perceived limits of the handsets and try to figure a way around them ... be it God of War or a casual game like Spider-Man 3 Puzzle. That's always a hard, but fun part of the development process.What struggles did you and your development team encounter upon creating the visual aspect of this title?With just a few hundred kb and much less on most handsets, we spent a lot of time coming up with a single tileset and palette swapping scheme that was diverse enough to portray multiple environments and lived up to the SCEA God of War team's high standards. That was probably the hardest part. Our Art Director, Nathan Leland, did a fantastic job.How long was the development process for God of War: Betrayal?I wrote the initial design document between September and October 2005 when I first got hired on, then it sat and stewed for a year before revisiting it in August 2006, the same month development started. The versions for high-end handsets were completed 9 months later in April. We wrapped up the final versions for low-end handset over the next 2 months, completing the 1st 6 handsets in June 2007. After that, the porting team took the game to over 200 handsets in a matter of weeks.
Behold the wonder: God of War mobile isn't bad
When our own reporter came back from the Sony gamer's day and said God of War: Betrayal for the cell phone was good, we feared the poor man had cracked. But now comes word from IGN, which gave the game a 90 that it is, in fact, a good solid game. We may never look at our mobile the same way again.God of War: Betrayal takes place after Ares' defeat but before the events of God of War II. IGN says the game is a 16-bit "glory days" 2D side-scroller and is a God of War title "through and through." Guess for those who can't wait for God of War: Chains of Olympus on PSP and have a compatible phone, maybe it could be worth checking out this mobile game. We hope this doesn't make us reexamine mobile gaming entirely -- let's call this a one hit wonder for now.
Ring, ring: God of War on your cell phone
Click for larger version. Sony Online Entertainment invited us out to their Gamer Day 2007 event recently to show off all of their new and upcoming releases, and there is some pretty exciting stuff coming out of their six different development studios around the world. Strangely enough, one of the games that looked the most exciting wasn't for a next-gen console, or your PC, but rather for the tiny screen ... your cell phone.God of War: Betrayal is easily one of the closest-to-the-real-thing games we've ever seen on a phone. The graphics won't blow you away, but they're definitely good enough for your cell, and still manage to capture the whole God of War feeling (especially the eviscerations). The controls are incredibly simple: you move your finger around in joystick fashion over the main key to control Kratos, and the middle button does everything else. You can jump, attack, use special moves, climb ladders, and splatter gore all over the screen.It's the first in a series of promised God of War cell games. We played it on a Sony Ericsson, although we're not sure what other platforms / phones it'll make it to. Check out the gameplay video after the break, on our stellar less-than-high-def camera.%Gallery-3060%
