IGN's Death Jr. 2 blog has been revealing some real gems of info. The latest entry goes into the technical aspects of creating the game. Read the lengthy, but genuinely informative, blog to find out more on what kind of evil magic programming the team had to do to get HDR lighting running in the game. It gets pretty complicated, showing off scary XML code. I was personally fascinated by the images from the developer's tools (PB Viewer and Maya Viewpoint)-- this is the kind of behinds-the-scenes stuff that we don't get enough of. The blog also explains more complicated-sounding things like vertex lighting and light seams. Finally, they reveal some of the special visual effects the game will employ: softening, eggcrate, fisheye, ripple, and vortex.

All this technical mumbo-jumbo's being thrown around to razzle dazzle us, and I have to say it's sort of working. Although the game is going to pretty, the real test will come the game ships this Halloween, when we'll be able to test all of its gameplay.

Konami's Gamers Day has been very good to PSP owners. Gamespot (are they the only ones covering this event?) posted some new gameplay videos of Death Jr. 2 in motion. While I can't really see any HDR lighting in it, the game does look pretty sharp, and if Gamespot is to be believed, it does have advanced light blooming and shadow effects. Although my eye may not be trained to see the technical details, I do see that the quirky charm has been retained: there are crazy chickens that shoot lasers at you!!! They are far more vicious than the chickens of Zelda and clearly, they must be stopped.

Watch - Fight against chickens
Watch - Boss fight

Death Jr. was the first PSP game to be publically shown, and it wowed a whole lot of people with its technical prowess. If a new interview at QJ.net is to be believed, it appears that we'll be wowed again. Chris Carla commented:

Well, we used Renderware on our first game on PSP, and it wasn't exactly perfectly tuned for PSP. After we removed it for [Death Jr. 2], we found our framerates hit 90fps... before we knew it, thanks to our fantastic tech staff, we had light blooms, High Dynamic Range lighting, and lots of other lighting and frame buffer effects running in the game. The net result is that we've probably got some of the most technically advanced features of any title on PSP at this point, which is pretty cool. We've done a lot more than that as well; I think people will be pleased by the tech in the game, and our loading times are still extremely short.

Can this really be possible on a handheld? Death Jr. 2 seems to address the problems of the original and throws in a multiplayer co-op mode to boot. The sequel comes out this Halloween, but until then, don't forget you can check out the original for only $10.