“I’ve been playing FIFA competitively since 09 but it's only as of about January this year I learned to control my aggression towards it,” says David Bytheway. Bytheway, a competitive FIFA player from Wolverhampton, reached last year’s FIFA Interactive World Cup final in Rio De Janeiro, but fell at the last hurdle to Denmark’s August Rosenmeier.
The game finished 3-1 with Bytheway squandering a first half lead, compounding the disappointment of missing out on not just the $20,000 prize money, but also an invitation to the 2014 Ballon D’or - FIFA’s prestigious real life world player of the year awards ceremony.
]]>The Euro 2012 addition to Fifa 12 shall be DLC rather than a disc-based continental kickabout as has previously been the case. This we already knew. What I didn't expect was for the DLC to contain a new mode which combines world conquering with foot-to-ball, namely the Expedition Mode. Travel the continent, crushing nations and stealing their best and brightest feet, along with the legs and torsos those feet are attached to. It hardly looks like grand strategy but I quite like the idea of constructing a team by conquering rather than by throwing wodges of cash at cigar smoking agents who, one day soon, will start to raise young boys like puppies on a puppy farm. The video below explains all.
]]>Eurogamer bring the news that Keith Ramsdale, EA's Northern European boss, has declared that the company wants all of its brands to become "online universes". That doesn't mean everything will be massively multiplayer, but rather that each player will never have an excuse to stop playing EA games. Play Battlefield, for example, on a console in the evening, a PC in the midnight hours, a smartphone on the commute and a tablet while at the office. All the data, all the progress and achievements, will carry from one device to the other, allowing the player to play "how he wants, when he wants and on the device he wants". Let's have a think about that.
]]>I'm a lapsed football fan, so I'm writing this not knowing a) where Euro 2012 is being held, b) if any of the British teams have made it to the finals, and c) if goalies are paying much attention to the ten-step rule. I have heard of Lionel Messi, though. But even as a missing link in the Mexican wave of foot-o-ball trivia, I knew that there would be an EA Euro 2012 game released this year, just like I knew the sun would be up this morning. What's surprising is that EA Sports UEFA Euro 2012 (that's a mad name) will be DLC for Fifa 12 game and not sold in the shops.
]]>This is probably old news to you, but it's new news to me and my ancient Egyptian ancestors told me during my hypnotherapy that the entire universe is just a figment of my imagination, therefore I can post it if I please and if you moan it's only because I'm imagining someone moaning. Cloud gaming tech Gaikai has been offering streaming demos of various games - most notably Dead Space 2 and Mass Effect 2 - here and there for a while now, but I've just discovered that, over on Eurogamer, you can jump into browser-based slices of Crysis 2, Magicka, FIFA 12 and the Witcher 2.
Update: omigodomigodomigod. There are more demos on the Gaikai site. Including FARMING SIMULATOR. Yes! Also, try this link if you're being region-blocked on the other. It might work: hard to say without catching a few jetplanes to the other side of the world.
]]>In an interview over at The Guardian, EA Sports' Andrew Wilson has been talking about foot-to-ball game Fifa 12, which according to sales figures all of you own several hundred copies of. There's an interesting curveball of a comment from the interviewer though when he compares Fifa to an RPG leading vice-president Wilson to respond thusly:
"I think it's pretty perceptive to look at it as an RPG, and while we don't use that terminology for the game externally, we certainly look at it that way internally. An RPG is made up of a number of things: you have to have a unique ID – or unique character – you need persistence and progression for that character, ever-changing content which keeps the world rich and it's a good idea to wrap it up in a rich economy."
To the Deciphertron!
]]>Again! Again! It's our theoretically regular comparison of Steam's top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman's national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we're going, there be tables.
]]>And again! A not entirely industry-representative yet unquestionably fascinating/depressing look at what comprised the top ten PC game sales for Steam compared to UK retail over the last week. Will The Sims' dominance of retail continue unabated? (Obviously). Will there be any surprise returns to the Steam top ten? (Yeah, actually). Read on to find out the answers to both these questions and more, as long as those questions concern the chart-placing of contemporary PC games. If you want to find out the answer to what the Queen had for breakfast this morning or where Muammar Gaddafi is hiding, I really cannot recommend reading the rest of this post.
]]>In one minute I'll be announcing the announcement that the new demo of FIFA 12 will be being announced in a few minutes. That's a new demo for FIFA 12 that I will tell you has been released just as soon as I've announced that I'm announcing its imminent announcement. There's a FIFA 12 demo out! Wait, damn, that was too soon.
]]>In years gone by our top scientists, professional experts, and visionary cosmologists believed that games could only be used to model and simulate men getting shot. At a stretch the technology could be applied to zombies getting shot, or even man-like robots, but the basic laws of nature suggested that ultimately it was the fate of computer game systems to help us see men being machinegunned dead in their thousands of millions. In 2011, of course, science has vindicated our hope that one day it might also portray men getting stabbed and - in rare, exquisite instances of intense joy - men playing together on a field. Yes. Look at them play. Beautiful, beautiful. It gives me a sense of peace.
Foot-to-ball in videogames is a reality, people. And the world is more wonderful for it. Get used to it. And watch the new Electronic Artball Number 12 video, which I've posted below.
]]>
