I <3 Jason Rubin

As some of you may or may not know I travel a lot these days. Specifically I've been traveling to San Francisco once a week for work. As I was flying back to town the other day I looked into the seat back pocket and found an issue of Star Magazine. As everyone knows I'm a sucker for gossip so I got all sorts of excited and started thumbing through it when I found this:



"Just three days after confirming that she had split with her rocker fiance Benjie Madden, Sophie Monk was spotted having brunch with video game director Jason Rubin! The Aussie singer, 28, and Jason "looked like they were having a good time" while eating al fresco at Griddle Cafe in West Hollywood on Feb. 15, an eyewitness tells Star. "It looked like a date."

So it's official. Jason Rubin has won the war to be the first Video Game Designer to be in a gossip magazine. He even got an exclamation point after his name. I'm a little bit jealous, I won't lie. Oh well. I guess I dropped the ball on creating crazy websites like he did.

GoW: Chains of Olympus

Over the weekend I got to play this great little game called God of War: Chains of Olympus. This is the first God of War game that I have never worked on. Like...at all. haha. I liken it to watching your kids go off to kindergarten for the first time. Of course I have no idea what that is really like but you get the idea. As you can guess when I went to go play the game the battery on my PSP was dead so I had to recharge it.

I must say that I think RAD did a really good job with the game. It has all the ingredients from a typical God of War game. It also has what might be the best subweapon that Kratos has ever had - the gauntlets. Me and eric argued a lot over hammer in God of War 2 - I'll say it straight out I think we dropped the ball by not having the soul at level 1. As a player you get this crazy new weapon but then your evade is taken away from you. The design goal for the hammer was to be a slow weapon but the souls were the setups to let you use the slow weapon. Enough of Gow2....

The art looks fantastic and they managed to stream everything in which I was really impressed with. The sounds are all spot on (it sounds like a gow game!) and the music is great as always. There is a mini-game at the end that has the potential to go down as another great example of interactive story telling.

Although not everything is perfect in this PSP world. Level design was kind of a low point for me along with a lot of the combat scenarios - I think there are more 'demon doors' in COO then GoW1 and 2 combined. Back to level design - I'm not really sure if it was a tad bit weaker then previous GoW games or if that I just didn't know where to go like I normally do. Hard to tell without bias thats for sure. Either way - weak level design in a GoW game is definitely better than the greatest level design in DMC4.

There are some things I would have done differently (like more health chests!) but it's a fun roller coaster ride on a system that hasn't had one in a really long time. If you own a PSP and are a fan of God of War you should definitely check it out.

Now that my PSP battery is charged up it is time to go check out the Jpnese demo of Echochrome.

P.S. Sorry El Jaffe but the story left me a tad bit confused this time around.