Kratos is stunned: there isn’t a flock of identical zombies…

After the short and sweet opening cinema detailing the you-whomp-‘em-Persian-guards objective, you’ll become immediately aware that the tried and true hack-‘n-slash formula is in full, familiar force in Ready At Dawn’s God of War: Chains of Olympus. Fortunately, that means loads of enemies on screen to catch the business end of Kratos’ blades in the neck, eyeballs or frequently bisected torso. In true God of War fashion, Chains of Olympus flows at a smooth pace as players progress through mythological Greece as a tormented and violently angered, hopping from one legendary location to another.

Unfortunately, the amount of backtracking required to progress to a new setting limits the amount of scenic routes to about a half dozen. Puzzle solving on COO, while equally satisfying and tedious, requires hiking it through entire temples or caves, which are shockingly huge and completely devoid of load times. Navigating Kratos from one end of a city to another, through buildings, over bridges and vertically towards rooftops, is seamless and without framerate drops.

The scope of this game is as impressive as its art style and visual design. Epic views of a crumbling town, complete with a look-out of your future path, compliment the great character models and beautiful textures. Facial and combat animations are spot on, and the dialogue – while irritatingly pretentious – is well delivered throughout the entirety of Kratos’ six hour, vengeful adventure, which will requre you to do nothing but rapidly beat the hell out of your square button to succeed.

Oh, there they are.

The length of the game might seem too short, but the repetition of the square-square-square combat and overpowered magic attacks will have you thankful that it’s over when it is. The story is almost non-existent – perfect for those who just want to get their killin’ on – focusing exclusively on Kratos trying to, you guessed it, rid himself of his torturing memories in this prequel to the console predecessors.

Because this has no reference to the original games, anyone who’s been avoiding the franchise until now will be completely at a loss as to what’s going on, and the limited insight COO offers to fans is practically worthless, with a mere taste of satisfaction in the final moments of the game.

Until that point, you’ll be mashing away on the square and triangle button – with little deviation from square – to deal with the identical mass of undead baddies. It makes for boring action when you’re smacking the same action button repeatedly until everyone falls down, and when you consider the complete absence of enemy AI outside the monstrous enemies, it’s even less of a satisfying experience.

The complexity offered is in the magic, adding a press of the R button in sync with an attack as Kratos brings on the fury of flames in punching and throwing form, and holding L while attacking to make the angry fella spin in circles, making him an almost invincible death dealer in an already too-easy game.

Adding a Gauntlet as a secondary weapon is, for the most part, useless. Intuitively tied to the Down d-pad key, Zeus’ Gauntlet costs you limited attack range in exchange for an unnoticeable increase in attack damage and loss of speed. You’re best off if you stick to the Blades of Chaos, since the aforementioned square tapping will get the job done in no time.

If you want the job done even quicker, combat can be completely eliminated by the Circle/ grab move. The insta-kill shaves off seconds of time and mounds off effort. Without having to weaken soldiers down, you’ll avoid the need to execute enemies, which consists of tapping buttons at the correct time that rarely correlate to anything that’s happening on screen, save for the inaccurate analog-nub rotation for decapitation. It’s annoying to have beaten the snot out of a mini-boss, such as a Cyclops – of which there are too many, eliminating bigger bosses and, in turn, crazy-awesome memorable moments – or bigger-than-usual minotaur.

The Mini-Taurs [sic]. A quick press of Circle drives it home instantly.

Sound familiar? That’s because new enemies are nearly non-existent. I don’t know if they skipped town at the beginning when Attica is being burned by a gigantic Basilisk in the opening scene (one of the best fights in the series) but if you’re looking for anything resembling even a pallet swap, you’ll be disappointed to see the same sword wielding, helmet donned zombies eating your sword over and over.

Still, despite the lack of “holy crap, that was awesome” moments, God of War: Chains of Olympus is still fun. The combat never struck me as entertaining, but fans of the franchise will appreciate the similarity to the console versions, including the same controls and attacks, as well as an intuitive R+L+Move replacement for the right-analog-roll. This feels like a God of War game from front to back, inside and out. Epic battles may be scarce, but if you’re in to cutting up legions of faceless baddies in a batch of new, beautiful scenes, Chains of Olympus is absolutely worth your time. This probably won’t convert the haters – though it did kind of impress this one – it’s definitely one of the most impressive titles on PSP, with a ton of replay value if you feel the need to wreck more cow-men and single-eyed monsters. The ending pulls everything together in a pretty emotional set of decisions made by the loathing Kratos, but everything leading up to it is just more of the same.

But hey, if you’re in to that, this is the stuff from the heavens. If not, just hold Earth on your shoulders for all eternity – it’ll be more exciting.

[Rating: 7.5/10.0] 7.5/10

7.5/10

So you really want to play God of War on your PSP, huh? Maybe you don’t have the money to buy it, the parents cheaped out, or perhaps you’re just incredibly cheap. Lucky for you Nukoda and PGRevolution are here to hook you up like two topless and randy Greek vixens.

We’re giving away a free copy of God of War: Chains of Olympus because we liked it so much and want to spread the love. Our review copy was so good to us that we want it to share its gruesome, gritty Greek-God action with the readers and listeners of the Bmashers network. How do you get in?

Check it after the jump.

• Leave a comment below (make sure you’re e-mail address is tied to the comment so we can get a hold of you!)
• Visit the Forum Thread and comment
• E-mail us

It’s that easy. Follow these simple rules, make sure we can get a hold of you, and you’re a sure-shot in our random drawing! Anyone 17 and older can enter – sorry kids, this is an M rated game, and unfortunately we’re going to limit this contest to North America.

(Give us a break, EU! This is our first ever give-away. If you’re clever enough, maybe you can get one of your NA buds to hook you up.)

If you want to increase your chances, visit the forum after you leave a comment, then e-mail us to triple your odds of winning our random draw, but try to avoid leaving 40 comments and e-mail spamming us – that will cripple your chances (you’ll be disqualified). Get the entries in before the March 31st deadline and you’re gold!

Thanks guys, and good luck!

With the release of the new 3.30 firmware, full screen video support has finally become feasible and the developers of PSP Video 9, Red Kawa, are all over it. In less than twenty-four hours, they put together a version of PSP Video 9, albeit very beta, capable of encoding at 480×272 and 720×480 resolution. There are only two encoding profiles to choose from, but you can’t complain considering how fast they released this puppy. This new version features a redesigned user interface. However, only 3.30 users will be able to get anything out of it because this version is only for PSP users of firmware 3.30 only. PSP users with firmware lower than 3.30 should use the most current non-beta version (1.94).

Head on over to Red Kawa for more information and download links.

PSPVC (PlayStation Video Converter) is a video conversion tool for the PSP much like PSP Video 9 for the Linux operating system. There was a tutorial on how to convert video for the PSP on Linux a while back but the process was very tedious and required advanced knowledge of Linux and everything was done through the terminal. PSPVC has a GUI so it should make it much more user friendly. PSPVC can output in standard MPEG4 and in H.264.

Download PSPVC v0.2

Download PSP eBook Creator

Features:

• Landscape/ Portrait page formats
• Background images
• Smart formatting (efficiently fits text to psp screen dimensions)
• User defined fonts, ink color and page color
• Navigation bar (including page numbers and custom title)
• JPG compression settings
• PSP display window
• 1:1 page previewing
• Chapter breaks

Thanks PSP411

http://www.linuxpspvideo.org

Needless to say, if you’re at all interested in creating PSP-compatible websites, this is something you’ll certainly want to check out. It is without a doubt the easiest, most advanced, and most convenient tool for the job.

Check it out at mypsphomepage.com

PSP Updates reports that SukkoPera recently released a new version of his Windows application called Upspear. This PC program is aimed towards 1.50 PSP owners who use homebrew. The feature list includes:

• Install new homebrews in a very simple way.
• View homebrew you have installed, rename and delete them.
• Reorder installed homebrews to your liking.
• View savegames and delete the ones you don’t need anymore.
• Backup your savegames to zip-compressed files on your PC.
• Hide/unhide “Corrupt data” icons or move to bottom of the list.
• Kxploit a 1.0 eboot.pbp, making it work under 1.5 firmwares.
• Identify useless folders in psp/game.
• View the contents of a .SFO format file (i. e.: param.sfo).
• See information about the memory stick.

I downloaded his program and tried it out. I must say I’m pretty impressed. The features I’ll probably using the most is the “reorder applications” feature and the “push down corrupt data icons” feature. I’ve always been frustrated by the annoying corrupt icons and having them mixed in with the actual homebrew programs. With this, I never have to worry about it again!

Download Upspear v0.15

StaxRip, an all purpose open source video converter, now supports PMP for PMP Mod. It also supports PSP formats and others as well.

Video formats: DivX, XviD, x264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4
Audio formats: MP3, AC3, MP2/MPA, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, DTS, WAV
Container formats: AVI, MP4, MPG, MKV, DIVX

• No spyware, adware or any other form of malware.
• Open Source, Freeware.
• No registry bloat, settings are saved in files within the application’s directory or within the user directory. No lost settings after a fresh windows installation.
• No awkward setup/installer, no system changes, system bloat and trash.
• Easy to use and highly versatile and customizable.
• Reasonable default values for filters, codecs etc.
• Rich help system including, online help (assistant), context sensitive help and forum support.
• Rich and convenient cutting facilities e.g. to remove ads.
• Batch processing (jobs).
• Rich feature set to manage, integrate and download required third party application transparently instead of awkward or dangerous codec packs or application packs.
• AviSynth powered to achieve excelent video quality and support of almost any source format.
• Rapid development using the latest and greatest technology .NET Framework 2.0
• Reportet bugs get fixed quickly, often a new version is available on the same day!
• Many feature requests get incorporated very quickly.

You can download it here.

via PSP Updates

However, Sony was very clear about the capabilities of this software and want to make sure that people understand the tool isn’t guaranteed to be able to recover game save information. While the software is capable of recovering JPEG images, and MPEG-4 movies (both Memory Stick Video Format and MPEG-4 AVC), they also said that it cannot recover data that is copyright-protected.

zmcnulty actually download the tool and has given it a try. So be sure to check out the full article for screenshots and his impressions of it. One interesting thing to note is that SanDisk memory sticks do not work, but Sony sticks do which is unsurprising.

Haven’t had a chance to try it out but it looks pretty cool. VEMode stands for Video Encoder for Mobile Devices. Notice that it’s for mobile devices and not just PSP. That means if you own other gadgets like the iPod or Pocket PC devices, this will work for it to.

You can get VEMoDe here.

Features:

• Easy to use interface. Just pick your file and go!
• Very fast encoder (uses FFmpeg)
• Existing settings for several popular devices (PSP, iPod, Palm, Pocket PC), plus you can create settings for other devices.
• “Encode by Size” to get the most quality for your memory cards.
• “Split by Size” to maximize quality and portability
• Easy to configure encoding options.
• Cropping options to get the best screen usage.
• Select the start and end positions to remove those long credits.
• Auto-shutdown for overnight encoding.
• It’s free!

I have started updating the theme section in our downloads, Please note that this system isnt ideal for themes at the moment as it doesnt allow for users to upload their designed themes, But we will work on something shortly to have that done. For now we will be using the section Themes in the downloads section. Please note not all themes have been uploaded and I am working on getting it done.

There are currently 11 themes posted on the site ranging from Simpsons to The Matrix. If you are running PSP-OSS and want something different, check em out.

New features include:
-All new “Aqua” and “Dark Aqua” look.
-Several fixes for the “Out of Memory” problems.
-Updated source code.
-Redesigned standard 12 hour digital clock.
-iTunes/iPhoto-READY

Due to time restrictions, some more major features such as ‘iTunes’ and ‘iPhoto’ software, which were originally ETAed for the 1.5 release, will rather be incorporated into X5 via a downloadable ‘Software Update’ (through the control panel in X5) as soon as it is ready to be released.

This web portal works with all 2.0 and higher firmware PSPs.

You can get the portal by heading over to http://x5.psp3d.com/ although the site is having heavy traffic right now.

You can download the Aqua version directly here or the Dark Aqua version directly here.

I personally still have a 1.5 PSP due to the fact that I am a homebrew freak. This is the ONE application that has made me debate upgrading to 2.0 as everyone I have talked to loves it. If you have 2.0, I highly recommend downloading it and checking it out.

Their new software compresses live television in real-time, which means no more waiting for boring old progress meters to finish up. If you’re not a Mac owner, however, you’re out of luck since this only works for those in the service of Steve and his white-clad minions. If you’re a Macphile on the other hand, prepare to simplify your life.

On the official site they say this about their beta test:

EvolutionTV 2.6 Public Beta One

EvolutionTV 2.6 adds real-time iPod Video and Sony PSP compression options to EvolutionTV. The video and audio architechture has been redesigned as well.

Please submit any feedback on the Public Beta One to support@miglia.com

You can download the Public Beta One here.

+ Changes from 0.2:

*Homebrew launched from PSP-OSS should always go back to
PSP-OSS when pressing Home

*LUA Files are supported and also go back to PSP-OSS

*Mouse Speed can be edited from the Settings Menu

*Short cuts can be created by clicking O on any item in the file
file browser, then click on Make Ql and they will apper on the desktop. Eboots will have to
be renamed.

*CPU Speed bug fixed in this release

*Vista Skin Included

I really dont recommend going higher then a mouse speed of 3. You can edit the file from outside psp by going to
\PSP-OSS\SYSTEM\CONFIG\MOUSE_SPEED.cfg
open it in notepad and change the number to “1?

You can download PSP-OSS v0.2b here.

In addition to that, you can download the BMIIDX12 Happy Sky Skin for PSP-OSS here.