We all know what a big deal God of War 3 is. But it's actually a small deal, too. A bunch of small deals.

Fans will get plenty of skyscraping titans, grand environments, mythical creatures, and vicious combos -- just as we'd expect. But they'll also be getting a lot of little features that may not be back-of-box bullet point material.

For example, undead grunts are made up of randomly generated parts, making them look mostly different from one another. So when an army of them descends on Kratos, it won't look like they've been popped out of an assembly line.

Using the Helios Head item (aka, your "flashlight") will blind enemies and put a slight glow on them, allowing you to tuck the head away to fight freely in the dark.

Besides static grapple points, Kratos can latch onto Harpies, attacking them to gain lift (you'll have to hop off before you kill them). Not a big deal of course, but it gives something as simple as grappling some personality.

Best of all (well, best of all the "little stuff"), the developers made a small tweak to quick-time events (or "context-sensitive moves" as they're called in GOW). Instead of intrusive triangle, X, circle, and square buttons popping up in the middle of the screen, over the fancy cinematic action that you're somewhat "controlling," the button prompts are now at their respective outer edges of the screen (triangle button prompt is at the very top edge, X at the bottom, circle on the far right, and square on the far left).

What does that mean? You don't even have to read the button symbols in God of War 3. Your peripheral vision will catch the general direction of the button you need, and you can just press it while your eyes are focused on the action in the middle of the screen. In other words, if you see a button prompt at the very top of the screen, you don't have to look at it to know instinctively that you have to hit your top-most (triangle) button.

It's such a simple tweak to an overused mechanic, and it works amazingly well. It took only one fight to get used to this style -- now I can never go back to the old way of quick-time events. Funny enough, it may just be the best part of the short, otherwise still awesome GOW3 demo that we played.