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.