At this point in his career, it's difficult to tell whether Sony Santa Monica creative director David Jaffe is better known for his great games or his brash behavior. The Twisted Metal series of car combat games would have been sufficient to secure Jaffe a place in the console pantheon. But upon the 2005 release of God of War , the side of Jaffe that many only saw privately--fiery, profane and uncompromising--burst into public view and never retreated into the shadows. It was as if the dark odyssey he'd survived to make his magnum opus had transformed him into his own title character; a comparison Jaffe encouraged when he drew parallels between Kratos' raging at the Gods over the Ares-induced murder of his family to the anger Jaffe himself harbored for having embarked on an insanely long and difficult development process that was keeping him away from his wife and child.

The Jaffe of 2007 continues to be outspoken and inflammatory, but he's a workaholic no more. While game director Cory Barlog, executive producer Shannon Studstill and others handle day-to-day development for the God of War series, with Jaffe in an creative oversight role, he has chosen to focus his own game directing efforts on smaller games ("pop songs," as he described them to us last year ) rather than the big-budget epics ("operas") that he's previously been identified with. As he and his team of developers at Incognito were winding down work on Jaffe's first ditty, the party game Calling All Cars, he took some time out of his schedule to answer our Team Assault questions about the extent of his involvement in God of War PSP and God of War III for PS3; why he cancelled the sure-to-have-been controversial PSP game Heartland; and the ongoing tension between his own desires as an artist to spread his wings and those of his fans who want him to keep making large-scale action games.

After completing the first God of War, you assumed the role of creative director for the entire Santa Monica studio. What does that entail? Does that cover the studio's games for Playstation Network like Blast Factor and flOw?

In Part I of our Team Assault Q&A with God of War II lead programmer and Sony Santa Monica director of technology Tim Moss, he took us inside the technical approaches that have made the franchise stand out from its competitors. In the second and final part of our email interview with him, he explains what he admires about the programmers at Epic Games, Capcom and Insomniac Games; reveals that the God of War engine is already up and running on the Playstation 3; and explains the nature of the relationships among Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog (makers of the upcoming Uncharted: Drake's Fortune) and Ninja Theory (the studio behind the much-anticipated Heavenly Sword.)

When you cast your professional eye upon other games, what do you look for from a programmer's perspective? Which games--both Sony first party and from outside developers and rivals--stand out to you as having been especially well-programmed, and why?

Different things stand out to me from different games. I got my start in the demo scene 20 odd years ago, so a really well written fast piece of code impresses the geek in me. The engine written by Naughty Dog that was used in Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank is a good example. It's pretty much unrivalled in its performance on the PS2 and has a number of pretty cool bits of tech in it mostly geared around very cool, fast level of detail solutions for rendering.

Then there are games like Gears of War, which I admire for the well balanced set of decisions they took on the technology. The Unreal 3 engine has a lot of bell and whistles, but if you try and use them all it will make for a slow game on a console. So Gears is a good example of picking your battles well, they have a simple lighting model that allows them to spend a lot of time and resources on the characters. This is important because the characters are front and center and if you don't make them appealing the whole game will just not work. The art style is consistent and polished and the game has some really nice innovations to the shooter genre.

I am also very impressed with the engine that Capcom have used on Dead Rising and Lost Planet. They have published a couple of articles on the details of it and it has some very cool features including motion blur and depth of field. They have already made two standout games using that engine, in fact Dead Rising was probably my favorite game of last year. The proof of any good tech is in the game you make with it, I am long past the point of being impressed by cool tech demos. I am always thinking, "Yeah, that's very nice, now show it to me working in a real game."

I like things that someone has obviously spent a lot of time and effort fine tuning. Attention to detail is the thing that impresses me the most. You can tell the games that have had the time spent on them to remove the rough edges, where nothing is too annoying. Geometry Wars is a good example, it's pretty much as perfect an arcade game as anyone has ever made. The menus flow well, the game is fluid and fun but never cheap.

From the very first moment we picked up a Dual Shock 2 controller to play an early build of the original God of War, we were spellbound. The visuals were stunning, to be sure, but it was the interplay between the highly responsive controls and the impressively detailed animations that made us feel as though we were Kratos. To get the lowdown on the technology that enabled the first and second games, we conducted an email interview with lead programmer Tim Moss, who also serves as Sony Santa Monica's director of technology.

Moss has spent most of the last 20 years making videogames, from demo scene games for the Atari ST to licensed titles at the late Argonaut Games, where he worked before joining Sony. In this final installment of Team Assault, Moss discusses how he and his band of coders pulled off the original God of War; details the changes they made for its sequel; and takes a shot at the haters who doubted his team's Island of Rhodes Easter egg.

The original God of War was a considerable technical achievement: 480p resolution; 60 frames per second visuals; terrific lighting; crisp textures; strong animations; and, in what was the first aspect I noted when I saw the game at Sony Computer Entertainment America's (SCEA) Foster City HQ ahead of its E3 2004 debut, combat and controls that were so fluid and responsive, their quality could only be described as Japanese. From start to finish, summarize how did you and your team of programmers pull this off?

Initially we spent a lot of time looking at the action game genre and neighboring genres. Many of the members of programming team, including me, are pretty hardcore gamers. I am a big fan of platform games (Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, etc.) so I knew that I wanted it to feel like those games do, in other words, very arcadey and responsive. We decided that this could be best explained by the gameplay controlling the animations rather than the animations controlling the gameplay.

Initially I got a simple sphere moving around in the world, jumping, wall hanging, climbing, making fast turns and then tuned it to feel good--the right speed. We then placed a character inside that sphere and played its animations, walking and running etc, at the speed that the sphere was moving. We also do a lot of animation blending, things like making the character lean into turns, play a land animation while continuing running so as to not break up the game flow. These are subtle, but make the character feel less wooden.

It couldn't have been easy for Irvin Kershner to assume the director's chair on "The Empire Strikes Back" after the success and acclaim for George Lucas' "Star Wars," but the result was what is universally regarded as the best movie in the series. Similarly, God of War game director David Jaffe is in more ways than one a tough act to follow (just look at the responses online to the outspoken Jaffe's recent statements on Geoff Keighley's show "Bonus Round"), and after Jaffe declared that he was passing the torch, many wondered whether the unproven Barlog could fill his shoes. But once the phenomenal reviews for God of War II started pouring in, all doubts evaporated as it became evident that the franchise had been placed in good hands.

Barlog, a former visual effects artist, worked on such colon-sporting titles as Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and X-Men: Next Dimension before joining Sony's Santa Monica studio as the lead animator on the original God of War. During those rare moments when he's not working on God of War PSP and God of War III, Barlog maintains a blog of his own, where he's been known to touch off a controversy or two himself. In Part I of our two-part email interview with Barlog, he discusses how he graduated from lead animator to game director; why he, unlike Jaffe, hasn't lost his love for making epic games; and whether the original game may have had stronger emotional hooks than the sequel.

How did you go from being the lead animator on God of War to director of God of War II?

To be perfectly frank, I have no idea. When I came onto the original God of War, I was actually planning on taking it easy. I liked the game, but I was so used to working way too much on really terrible games that I was not motivated to push myself really hard anymore. I had reached a point where I wanted to have a life, since it seemed I could not catch a break and make a good game. So I decided that when I came to Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), I would work normal hours and just have fun. If the game turned out good, well then that was a bonus. That lasted all of a day or so...then I got my hands on the Kratos model. I stayed all night working on a series of animations for how Kratos would attack with the Blades of Chaos and I was in heaven. I loved the character and my mind was just racing with all the crazy things we could do. For the first time in a long time, I felt "This could be something really cool. Something I won't be embarrassed to tell people about." From that moment on I worked like crazy and put everything I had into the game. I think that my tenacity and passion for making the game the best that it could be got the attention of those above me. Plus I was using the Jedi mind trick on Dave [Jaffe] every day--"These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along"--so I am sure that didn't hurt either.

After we finished the original God of War, producer Shannon Studstill came to me and asked how I would feel about directing the next game. To be honest, I thought she was kidding. The thought had never really crossed my mind. I took a day to think about it, but that was mostly to not make it look like I was too eager. You know, play it cool. The next day I said I was interested and few weeks later I was writing up story ideas and gameplay outlines. The rest, as they say, is history.