Jarralz Gaming News Portal -

It is unusual for the best compliment for a video game to be that the PC version is identical to its console predecessors. But that’s the case with Street Fighter IV with one… well, three exceptions.

Playing Street Fighter IV last week using a Street Fighter Fight Pad plugged into a laptop made it easy to forget I wasn’t playing the game on a console. Despite the potential, not even the online play has been tweaked, according to Capcom. In fact, there was only one noticeable difference between the console versions and the PC one.

The PC game uses shaders to add three new filters that can be applied to the game’s graphics: Watercolor, Brushstroke and Poster. Read more…

Sucker Punch software engineer Chris Heidorn stopped by the PlayStation Blog today to discuss the trophies to unlock and stunts to perform in their upcoming superhero game inFamous.

Chris goes into great detail about the stunts included in the game, which are sequences of events and combinations of powers used to kill the enemy creatively. Sucker Punch teamed with the Sony testing team to generate a list of more than 80 stunts, narrowing that down to a little over 20 using an “experience monitor” that measured the power used versus the damage done.

Chris also delivers details on the trophies included in the game, which they’ve broken down into six convenient categories, including:

Game, story and mini-mission completion
Collect all dead drops and shards
Traversal
Stunts
Power-Based
Karmic decisions

Examples include the “Get off my cloud”, which is received for knocking someone off a high building to their death. Once again, I find myself extremely glad that life has no achievement system.

In Lost Planet 2 there is no main character, instead you are the main character, one that can be customized and made to spank him or herself in a square studded helmet and chain-framed bikini.

“We prepared a very detailed customization system that will allow you to create your own character,” said Capcom’s Jun Takeuchi. “So you can create your own character and put it together in the game and you yourself become the main character of the game.”

Lost Planet 2 allows you to select your character’s head model, body model, back pack and legs. You can also make the character a man or a woman.

“Every one of the parts will have many dozens of variations in them,” Takeuchi said. “You can also change the color of each part.”

As he spoke the character quickly slipped between an eclectic, and sometimes bizarre, selection of body parts including a square helmet with spikes, what appeared to be a fully enclosed helmet based on a World War I trench helmet and a few unadorned heads.

The female body types includes quite a few revealing outfits such as a bikini with chains wrapped around the woman’s bust. When the character moved her body noticeably reacted to the gravity.

The game also supports quite a few customized weapons, Takeuchi said, which can be placed in the right or left hand of the avatar. The weapons are divided into categories like normal, gun, disk and support.

Finally gamers will be able to assign gestures to their characters.

“You can have standard or flashy poses,” he said, while the female avatar started grinding and humping the air and then began to smack her own ass on the television behind him. “The developers will make sure that the gestures and poses don’t affect the game’s rating.”

Dead Rising 2 will not have photography. Capcom’s Keiji Inafune was pretty clear about that when I spoke with him last week.

That’s because the photography in the first Dead Rising was tied specifically to Frank West and his career as a photojournalist. He’s covered wars, you know?

Dead Rising 2? It stars Chuck Greene, a motocross champion, Inafune told me, that means that he will be “damn good” on the motorcycle and get it to do some pretty amazing things. But Inafune hinted that Greene won’t just be about the motorcycle.

“Based on his personality and the different choices he made he will have different skills,” Inafune said.

Like what? Too early to tell, but not too early to guess. Read more…

Ubisoft finishes what Nintendo Power started as they officially announce Red Steel 2, offering few new details on the Wii MotionPlus-enabled sequel to the Wii’s original first-person shooter.

The announcement mainly centers on the fact that the game was created from the ground up for the Wii MotionPlus, and will be Ubisoft’s first title to fully integrate the peripheral. Aside from the peripheral back-patting, the only other information provided is that the game takes place in a “desert-bound, high-tech metropolis”, which explains the Western look of the game’s protagonist.

“Red Steel was a unique opportunity for Ubisoft to work in tandem with Nintendo to create a title exclusively for the launch of the Wii console,” said Tony Key, senior vice president of sales and marketing US at Ubisoft. “Red Steel 2 is another milestone for the company as it is the first Ubisoft title with full Wii MotionPlus integration.”

See? It’s all about Wii MotionPlus, and why shouldn’t it be? No other launch title highlighted the limitations of the Wii remote as well as Red Steel, so it’s up to the sequel to show us how much better control works now that Nintendo has fixed it.

Red Steel 2 is aiming for a Holiday 2009 release.

Like every other big-name multiplatform game these days, Batman: Arkham Asylum will be appearing not only on console, but on PC as well. Here’s what you’ll need to run it.

Posting on the game’s official boards, an Eidos rep/mod has revealed both the game’s minimum and recommended specs to be:

Minimum
o CPU: Intel single core 3 Ghz or AMD equivalent
o Memory: XP = 1 GB, Vista = 2GB
o GPU: Shader Model 3 NVidia 6600 or ATI 1300 or higher

Recommended
o CPU: Pentium D 3Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Dual core)
o Memory: XP = 2GB, Vista = 3GB
o GPU: NVidia 7900 GT or higher

The game will be enhanced for users with multi-core PCs, while it will also – courtesy of its Games for Windows integration – include achievements as well.

What do you with a derivative IP in a saturated genre that has continually disappointed since its first sequel more than six years ago? Why trademark a fourth sequel, of course!

Sorry, but this franchise hasn’t done anything particularly well since 1999, which was the original Driver: You are the Wheelman on PlayStation. That was nearly 10 years and two console generations ago. And since then open-world crime and driving has been done, redone and overdone while this franchise remained at least a step behind. So word that “Driver 5″ will be called “Driver: The Recruit” does not really fill me with giddy anticipation.

A mini-foofaraw sprouted this week over the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV, when a Windows Live update either introduced or worsened a stuttering issue in some players’ computers.

That’s been fixed in lightning-fast time, according to Microsoft. “Thanks for your patience, a new update is avaible that addresses the stuttering issue with GTA IV. Just log in and apply the new update.”