On Tuesday, Sony released new screenshots of the PS2 game, called Twisted Medal: Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition and while the shots fired up fans of the Twisted Metal series, it also opened an opportunity to talk to the fabled game creator about what's playing, what he's not and how life has changed since his departure from Sony.

BIZ: What do you think the big hook is with Twisted Metal and what do you see as the way to get Twisted Metal fans who haven't played in a while to come back?

Jaffe excited about Eat Sleep Play's future

I think that if you haven't played Head-On, I think that is really the main course of the meal. It's a great game; it was a really big hit for us on the PlayStation Portable and now we're adding a level. I was really unhappy with the video we released, even though I thought it was edited great, but I should have put a lot more Head-On footage in there because the upgrade to the visuals is really substantial. I'm really excited to get that footage out there and I think that if you haven't played the PSP game, it really looks like what Twisted Metal 2 would have looked like on PlayStation 2. It's really kind of a facelift for what many people think is the best game in the series. That's the main course, but I think that if you'd played the PSP version, obviously the thing you get with the PS2 version, even if you played it on the PSP is, you get the classic trash talking mentality, which is very much a staple of the series with the split screen. You get the updated graphics, you get a new level, but then you also get these brand new Twisted Metal Black 2 levels, which I think are really exciting. We had a blast going back in and touching them up and adding tons of gameplay to them. I think that there's a lot there even if you've played it. If you haven't played it or haven't played Twisted Metal in a while, I think you're going to find even more in terms of lots of content. We're stuffed the disc to the brim and it's just overflowing with lots of cool features for Twisted Metal fans.

BIZ: How far is the game along now?
Jaffe: We're submitting to format I think tomorrow night so I think that we're pretty much done. I'm sitting here right now when you called and I'm playing through the game on hard mode, the Lost levels on hard mode, to make sure it's actually hard enough. Because one of the things we did was tone the difficulty down for the default mode. When we made Twisted Metal Black, we kind of tuned the game for us, which is a classic rookie mistake, even though we weren't rookies at the time. We should have known better but we kind of made that the default mode and there are a lot of people out there that thought that was just way too hard. I think that the franchise lost a lot of people, even though it was a big hit for us with Twisted Metal Black, but I think that it was just too intimidating. So we made the default mode [in Twisted Medal: Head-on: Extra Twisted Edition] much more user-friendly for not new players but more traditional action players. Then we're making sure that the hard mode is crazy hard for Twisted Metal veterans. So the last thing that I'm doing on it creatively is sending my notes tonight and it should go off to format tomorrow night, and if we get lucky and there's no real bugs, that's all she wrote and we're moving on to our new game.

BIZ: You seem excited to return to your Twisted Metal roots. What is it about the series that has gotten you so pumped up?
Jaffe: [pauses] I think there's something for me and fans of the series that's really special and hits that "gamer's sweet spot" about that mix of a first person shooter with the pace of Unreal mixed with arcade driving physics. If you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it's really is like a peanut butter and chocolate mixture that for a lot of gamers out there, myself included, it's a really good blend of stuff and those two things go really well together. When I heard that we were entertaining the idea of doing it, I was like, "I don't know, let's get away from Twisted Metal. I think that we're all sick of it. We're all bored with it." And the minute I sat down to look at the levels that had been done for Twisted Metal Black 2, since I wasn't involved with those, I started going, "What if we added a bridge here and a tunnel here and what if we did a cool thing with pickups there." It all started to come back. But when we started to do some split screen gaming with some of the designers that deeply play it, I was still like, "This is really fun. This still really works." So I think that it's just a great blend and it was such a blast to come back to it. Now it's going to be hard to pry us away from working on it since it's so much fun now.

BIZ: So the one question that we kept asking was with your last big game, Calling All Cars...
Jaffe: My last big small game...

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