God of War Collection

[Oddiophile]

God of War: Collection

Now listed on EBgames/Gamestop.com with a release date of 11/10/09 for $39.99.

http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/Produ...oduct_id=75861

Can't wait.

[Help]

Originally Posted by Oddiophile

God of War: Collection

Now listed on EBgames/Gamestop.com with a release date of 11/10/09 for $39.99.

http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/Produ...oduct_id=75861

Can't wait.

Sweet November is going to be an expensive month for me.

[dereksworl]

Originally Posted by Help

Sweet November is going to be an expensive month for me.

Fixed for me lol

[Nerdkiller likes BD]

Originally Posted by dereksworl

Fixed for me lol

Don't be so sure. With all the games coming out in November, you won't be sad at all...that is unless the wife leaves ya.

[dereksworl]

Originally Posted by Nerdkiller likes BD

Don't be so sure. With all the games coming out in November, you won't be sad at all...that is unless the wife leaves ya.

Thats what i'm afraid of. So many games, so little time


Plus i still have to shell out $150 to cure my PS3 first

[Nerdkiller likes BD]

Originally Posted by dereksworl

Thats what i'm afraid of. So many games, so little time


Plus i still have to shell out $150 to cure my PS3 first

Sigh, I just hope this doesn't happen when I'm trying to platinum the GoW Collection. That would just tick me off more that a time bomb.

[Xerios]

Originally Posted by dereksworl

Thats what i'm afraid of. So many games, so little time


Plus i still have to shell out $150 to cure my PS3 first

panic face makes me laugh hysterically every time

[Psybits]

The fans spoke and we listened.
Thanks to your feedback, we are excited to announce the God of War Collection for this Holiday Season.

did you hear that squaresoft?!
now where's our FF7 remake??

BTT:
yeah i'm getting this since I haven't gotten to play it yet wee

[mikejet]

Best $40 I'll be spending all year.

[sinister184]

damn thats awesome.. hopefully they upped the audio too. those intros sound awesome.

[Cplhicks]

I own both of these for PS2 and my PS3 is backwards compatible, but if the HD upgrade is nice enough I might consider this. Playing GoW2 after a PS3 game just looked a bit painful. Have to admit, didn't expect to hear about the HD upgrade. Nice.

[Shin-Ra]

God of War Collection Q&A
We find out why we'll be playing through the PS2 classics for the quadrillionth time and loving every minute of it.

Two lots of trophies, God of War II's extra DVD video content content available through the XMB video player and more.

[PS3-Playb3yond]

I just found out about this today. I think it's great they're doing this. I never played GoW2 so this makes it much more worth it.

[Bageara]

http://www.vg247.com/2009/09/02/no-g...urope-in-2009/
Quote:
Whoops. SCEE’s just confirmed to VG247 that God of War I and II won’t release for PS3 in Europe this year.
Said a rep in a statement:
“We are currently looking into options to bring God of War I and II to SCEE consumers on PS3; however it will not be possible to release the games this calendar year. We will provide further information in due course.”
The remakes, hitting American PS3s as part of a pre-Christmas God of War Collection, are being handled by Sony Santa Monica. The games are totally remastered, run at 720p and support Trophies.
Unlucky, Europe. Still. Region-free, eh?

Shame oh well looks like ill be importing

[Septimus Prime]

Yeah, if these are indeed BD builds, they should be region-free. You just won't be able to play on 576 PAL resolutions.

[Hedchekr]

Can anyone post the Q&A for those of us behind filter. Please and thanks.

[SoCalTiger]

Originally Posted by Shin-Ra

God of War Collection Q&A
We find out why we'll be playing through the PS2 classics for the quadrillionth time and loving every minute of it.

Two lots of trophies, God of War II's extra DVD video content content available through the XMB video player and more.

Content:

God of War Collection Q&A
We find out why we'll be playing through the PS2 classics for the quadrillionth time and loving every minute of it.
by Chris Roper

US, September 1, 2009 - The Internet rejoiced yesterday as Sony officially announced the God of War Collection, a PlayStation 3 release that will see both the original classic plus its sequel hit the PS3 sometime this year, just in time to whet our appetite for next March's release of God of War III.

When we hear about something new related to the God of War franchise we always want more, so we got on the horn this morning with John Hight, the director of product development at Sony Santa Monica Studio, to find out what's in store for us.

IGN: First off, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

John Hight: No problem.

IGN: Let me start with some more generalized questions because the hot issue these days is backwards-compatability with PlayStation 2 games. So to clarify first off, is this package a "port" where you actually went in and changed the code to work on the PlayStation 3 as a PS3-specific title, or is this something that's running inside of an emulator?

John Hight: Well, I don't necessary agree with just the terminology "port", but given those two limited options, then we'd have to put it in the "port" category. We haven't developed general purpose code that would now work for every PS2 title out there. Basically what we wanted to do was we wanted to remaster [the games], and we've done a lot of things to not only have it run on the PS3 but also make it look better, perform smoother and have a little bit extra functionality.

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War.
IGN: So how difficult was it for you to move it over to the PS3? A lot of people wanted to see God of War go there, but also things like the Team ICO stuff and a lot of other classic PS2 games. How difficult was it to move the game over, and do you think that this would be something feasible for other studios to do?

John Hight: Well, that goes back to how games were developed in the first place. For us, it wasn't too difficult because, and I'll brag on our engineering team, but the code they developed is pretty straightforward, well-documented, we don't do a lot of assembler programming, it's all straight C… Some teams have developed their own scripting language or whatever that would then require a translation of that interpreter over to the PS3 - we don't do that, it's straight C, so it made that aspect a lot cleaner. Plus, the other thing is that we've had very little attrition in our engineering team in our history of this studio, so the guys that originally wrote the code for God of War 1 are right here. Some of them worked on the port, some of them were able to offer, "Oh yeah, this is what's going on here. This part of the code's important" or "Don't worry, that part of the code's not important, you can ignore that", so it made it go a lot smoother, to have those guys around.

IGN: What we understand about the port, for lack of a better word, is that it's now at 720p, it runs at 60 frames-per-second, it's got anti-aliasing going on...

John Hight: 2X anti-aliasing...

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War II.
IGN: Did you all do anything with using higher-resolution textures? Is there any way that the art has changed, or the number of frames of animation or anything like that?

John Hight: That's a good question. So, we're still kind of evaluating, but we were prepared to upgrade the textures, at least on Kratos on both games, but honestly it's looking so good that we're thinking, you know what? It's probably better to keep it in its pure form. We're playing around with potentially swapping out textures on some of the user interface and the fonts just to make them a little more readable. It looked great back on the PS2 on a regular TV, or even an HDTV, but once you get into an HDTV running at 720p, some of the text gets a little weedy, so we are going to swap that out.

IGN: Are there going to be any changes to the games whatsoever? Be it new content that's added in, or anything removed? Or will anything be tweaked, like for instance the spinning pillar in hell?

John Hight: [laughs] No, we're not tweaking anything. If we open up that can of worms, we would probably spend another year trying to right any wrongs we may have had, or areas that were perhaps a little more difficult in retrospect than we had hoped they would be. Instead, we kind of took the stance that we want it to be the pure experience, what people would have played when they played God of War originally.

But in terms of content, what we did add was network Trophy support. We felt like that was a pretty cool feature and it wouldn't violate the sanctity of the original games. But it also gives some bragging points.

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War II.
IGN: Speaking of that, how are Trophies being handled in the game? Are they being treated as if there are two separate games, or…

John Hight: Yes, yes it is. We actually got the OK from our network platform guys to give us… essentially we're getting double the amount of Trophies because we have two games on one disc.

IGN: So are there two Platinums in there?

John Hight: I haven't looked at the final list, but I would say "probably".

IGN: Going back to the content, one thing that was great about the original releases of both games is that they were essentially huge collector's editions in the regular package, with all sorts of behind-the-scenes stuff, documentaries, a museum where you could walk around and see models that weren't used, the Challenge of the Gods... Is all that stuff returning?

John Hight: All of the content that was in God of War 1 was in the playable image, and that will be in there. With God of War II, we actually had a separate DVD that had some bonus content in it, and what we're exploring with that is... We didn't want to just put a DVD on a Blu-ray disc. We thought that that would be kind of lame. So what we're exploring is putting that content in what's called a media file, so you'll be able to use your PlayStation 3 XrossMediaBar, go over into the Media area and have all the functionality of that to view those movies. So, one of the benefits is that you'll now be able to stop the stuff, rewind, fast-forward, so you'll treat them just like media files. So that's pretty cool.

The only thing is that we're a little concerned that because it's not in the same directory as the game itself that consumers might not realize that that content is there, so we will have a little menu item that says "Additional Bonus Content for God of War II" and it'll direct them to the Media section of their XrossMediaBar. We just felt like why should we reinvent a movie player when there's this awesome one on the PlayStation 3.

IGN: Moving on to two other games in the God of War franchise… Firstly, there were rumors going around before the compilation was made official that a demo for God of War III might be on it. What's the case on that?

John Hight: That is unlikely at this juncture. First and foremost, we want to be able to have this available for this holiday, and we don't have a demo available yet that we feel is release-ready. I know a lot of people played the E3 demo and dug it and everything but, as far as our standards, it's not ready to go into everybody's home. So we wouldn't want to hinder our efforts to get God of War 1 and 2 out. We felt like the fans were pretty outspoken as far as, "Man, I want to play now" and "I want to play this Christmas", so we put the emphasis on that.

IGN: And then the other game is Chains of Olympus, which was fantastic on the PSP. Was there ever any thought about including that on this disc in some fashion?

John Hight: No, that won't be part of this disc. The goal for this was really, "Let's bring this experience up to the PS3". We have all of the original assets, the assets were done at a level that was… You know, a lot of people claimed, "Wow, you know, God of War II looks like it's PS3…" Well a lot of that has to do with the fact that we built this thing with higher-res assets. And even God of War 1, this stuff holds up because we work at a level higher than our target platform, so we can go back and pretty easily move this stuff up, so... It's a little different case with the PSP.

Screen from the original PS2 release of God of War.
IGN: That pretty much does it on our end. Is there anything that you wanted to mention that we hadn't covered yet?

John Hight: No, I think we pretty much got it. The main thing I want to run home to everyone is that we wouldn't be doing this if our fans hadn't been so outspoken about having it. We had talked about the potential of doing this about a year ago, and it sort of died on the vine. But it was sort of the outcry from the fans saying, "We want to have this" that led to us saying, "OK, let's do it. Let's put this together." Clearly there's an interest, and it kind of provided the ammo to make this happen. So just encourage people to always speak up, say what they want, and we'll try to respond.

IGN: Thank you very much for talking with us.

John Hight: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for taking the time.

[Groo The Perverted]

Originally Posted by Oddiophile

God of War: Collection

Now listed on EBgames/Gamestop.com with a release date of 11/10/09 for $39.99.

http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/Produ...oduct_id=75861

Can't wait.

Someone needs to tell Amazon then cause they have it as 12/31/09

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...X0DER&v=glance

[kx11]

[Elandyll]

Made me look up who was doing the narration for GoW and GoW 2 (heard also in the commercials) ... always thought somehow that it might be Dame Judy Dench, but it appears to be Linda Hunt.

Great voice ... and she returns for GoW III!