EA SPORTS PS3 Under-14 Futsal Tournament 29th October @ The Cage

Greetings, football fans!

Those among you who are parents of teenagers may be wondering how to wean your precious offspring from the irresistibly addictive “finger exercise” that is FIFA 12 and get them off the couch to do some “real” exercise. (Why would you even do such a thing, you evil, evil people?! Unless you want to get them out of the house so you can play some FIFA 12 that they’ll undoubtedly be hogging after their exams, then that’s justifiable… And brilliantly sneaky…*applause*). Or maybe you are a teenager, unshackled from the deathly grip of exam fever, looking to blow off some excess energy or just something fun to do with a bunch of your mates on a lazy Saturday…

Whatever your  reasons are, I am sure you’ll be glad to learn that EA Singapore, together with Sony Playstation 3 and organizers ESPZEN, is providing our young “virtual footballers” a stage to parade their very own real-world dazzling footballing skills at the EA SPORTS PS3 Under-14 Futsal Tournament. Held at The Cage, located at 38 Jalan Benaan Kapal, just a short walk away from the new Stadium MRT station, this 29th October 2011 event promises a great day of fun, clean physical exertion for all participants. What better way than a good workout to expend all that pent-up examination stress?!

All you have to do is form teams of 8 and register over at this site. Oh, also just make sure all the players are aged 14 and below, yeah? But hurry, cause places are limited! Registration per team is only $30! That’s only $3.75 per player! To further sweeten the deal, each player receives a free sponsored jersey that’s theirs to keep! You can’t even buy a cup of Koi Bubble Tea with $3.75, let alone a jersey! Oh, and there’s fantastic prizes to be won too! The top 2 teams will be receiving medals and trophy while the overall champs also walk away with a copy of EA Sport’s newly-released FIFA 12 for their choice of either the Sony PS3, XBOX 360 or PC for each player on the team! (Terms and conditions apply)

So parents, what are you waiting for?! Hold off on buying that extra bowl of laksa/wanton mee/ba kut teh/whatever, pass that $3.75 to your kids, get them to psycho 7 other friends to form a team (This shouldn’t be much of a problem unless your kids are socially inept, like me. I have no friends… Sorry, digressing…) and get them to register now! Then kick back, relax and enjoy the peace and quiet of a teenager-free day on 29th October, safe in the knowledge that they are out having some healthy exercise… (Come on parents, admit it, you were thinking that, weren’t you? Be honest, I won’t judge… much…) As for the teenagers, you guys never really needed much reason to hang out with your friends and have fun, so why not, especially when there’s chance to win something while you’re at it, right? Win-win situation…

Hope to see all our budding future Lions/Lionesses on the 29th of October at The Cage! Remember to bring along your scoring boots, guys and gals! To find out more about The Cage and directions on how to get there, please surf on over to their official webpage located here. For further details and the rules and regulations of the event , click here.

Till then, happy gaming!

FIFA 12 PREVIEW PART 4

Greetings, football fans! Welcome to the last of our 4 part preview of FIFA 12. This week, we are taking a look at some of the new modes included in FIFA 12.

Of the new modes, the coolest one, in my humble opinion at least, looks to be the EA Sports Football Club, henceforth referred by the much more manageable EASFC. Much like the gameplay innovations mentioned in the previous posts, EASFC is a completely new addition to the series. It is a rather unique concept that is truly unlike anything you or I have ever seen before in a sports game or indeed, any game.

Perhaps the most apt way to descibe it would be a sort of “Facebook for FIFA”, if you will. It has been billed as a platform for the millions of FIFA player worldwide to connect to one another and through the game, effect some sort of social.

Indeed, it is a level of social networking for gamers the likes of which have been thus far unavailable. But EASFC also promises much more than just merely somewhere to interact and issue challenges to other players of the game.

(Disclaimer: These features are subject to change as the EASFC platform matures but these are tidbits of info I have managed to gather so far from the Alpha Build)

Anything and everything a player does in FIFA 12 promises to be rewarded with XP points. Everything from playing a friendly match to much heftier tasks like creating players in Creation Centre is a XP-rewardable action, though I would reckon the amount would vary depending on the difficulty of said task. Obvious, but hey, you never know…

All that hoarded XP will go not only towards leveling up your own rank (mostly only useful for striking a sense fear in newbies you play online) but also to contribute to the bigger picture of the Support Your Club mode, which in essence, will hopefully be the world’s largest interactive football league.

So, the premise is that I, as a Chelsea fan, will earn these XP points to not only boost my own online ranking but also play own little part in Chelsea’s continued well-being in said interactive league. As will all the other Blues fans around the world. And Manchester United fans for the Red Devils, Real Madrid fans for the Meringues, Woodlands Wellington fans for the Rams… Okay, maybe not that last one but you get my drift.

Based on the fervent support and/or obsessive XP-whoring of their supporters, clubs will then be placed in the appropriate leagues with other similar-tiered teams, regardless of the actual nationality of the club’s actual league. Interestingly, it is entirely possible for team like the Seattle Sounders, with the catchment area’s wealth of IT and gaming enthusiasts, to be placed in a league above the likes of Manchester City, who for all their own money and diehards are actually located in a relatively poor area of the UK .

How? Simple. It’s not just about who contributes the most total XP but rather the AVERAGE XP per supporter that is taken into account. So fear not Nottingham Forest fans, after 30 years, you could be back rubbing shoulders again with the likes of Barcelona and AC Milan at the top echelons of football, provided your supporters are decently handy with the game, of course. Smaller clubs can finally compete on an equal footing with the giants of world football. Gone is the gaping divide between the perennial haves and have-nots. And we may finally get to settle once and for all the age old question of which club’s fans have the most passionate FIFA players of all.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa game brought with it the insanely popular Scenario mode and if you’ve played that before, you’ll have an idea what the new Challenges mode entails. However, EA promises that Challenges will be of a much larger scale and that there is a whole development team solely dedicated to constantly updating the mode with cool new things to do all year round with playable scenarios based on the most exciting matches and storylines as they occur in real life.

You’ll be dropped into a game with pre-defined teams, players, scores and more, and your objective will be to complete the challenge we give you. Whether it’s to recreate history or rewrite it, you’ll get to relive all the great storylines in the world of football, earning valuable XP for yourself and your club as you do.

Taking a leaf out of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit’s book, FIFA 12 includes its very own take on the former’s wildly popular Autolog system. The News Feed system that will share your FIFA news and accomplishments with your friends on the fly, so they can see what you’ve been up to and you can see what they’ve been doing. The addictive thrill of rubbing your friends’ noses in real-time with your newly-attained skill move accomplishment or the burning desire to trump their latest win that just propelled them to the top of your friends leaderboard is undoubtedly going to be a driving factor to play more FIFA 12, and one that never feels like a chore.

And while you’ll be kept informed of all this activity in the game, you’ll also be able to share the news outside the game, whether on the easportsfootball.com website  or on social networking sites. Cause sharing their shame on Facebook is just that much
sweeter, no?

All in all, do all these new bits and pieces warrant a purchase of a copy of FIFA 12? I’d say a resounding HELL YES! No self-respecting football fan should deprive himself of the chance to play the game which I daresay that promises the most authentic interactive adaptation of The Beautiful Game.

FIFA 12 PREVIEW PART 2

Greetings football fans and welcome to the second part of my preview.

After our last look at the main interface changes of FIFA 12, we now move on to the game engine changes. As all hardcore gamers can attest to, while it is important for a game to look nice, the primary concern is that it must play well.

To that end, David Rutter, lead producer of FIFA 12 over at EA Canada, has boldly promised “a revolutionary year for FIFA … especially in the gameplay department.” And indeed, true to his claim, FIFA 12 does sport several unique features over its predecessors. But are the self-proclaimed “holy trinity” worthy of deification or merely false gods? Let us examine them individually in greater detail, starting with the most-hyped of the trio, the fancy, new Impact Engine.

After a long development phase lasting several years, the Impact Engine has finally been included for the first time in this year’s game. Touted to enhance collision variety, accuracy, and momentum preservation, this is, Rutter claims, the biggest single technological breakthrough since the series made the transition to the current generation of consoles.

From what I could see during my short time with the game, the way the players seem to physically joust and clatter into one another just seems that little bit more realistic. Gone are the obviously canned collision animations of yesterday.The game seemed fluid and dynamic, in keeping with the claim that the collision physics produce differing results each time depending on the way the players are moving at the time and the physical forces involved in the challenges. A definite leap in the right direction for a game obsessed with translating the  utmost realism from stadium to screen

Have you guys ever experienced those awkward-looking collisions in the previous editions of FIFA where the players seem to “clip” through one another after a tackle or aerial challenge? Well, thankfully, that is all now a thing of the past. The players seem to be more solid, physical entities, bouncing off torsos and other assorted outstretched limbs and body parts realistically instead of melding into some form of strange Dr Moreau-esque monstrosity at each coming-together.

Also, the Impact Engine also apparently directly affects injuries sustained by players during a match, but I was not able to cause an injury and not for the lack of trying, might I add. Sliding tackle after sliding tackle flew in in my pursuit of that elusive injury, though in hindsight, perhaps I should have tried it specifically on someone fragile like a Jonathan Woodgate or even better, Owen Hargreaves. These guys could have injured themselves from a particularly violent sneeze, let alone a scything tackle from behind. But I digress.

FIFA 12 PREVIEW PART 1

Greetings, football fans!

Just like buying the new season’s kit of your favourite football team, buying a new copy of FIFA is an annual affair for most, if not all, football fans. In the past few years especially, followers of the FIFA series has been handsomely rewarded. Despite the initial slow progress and critical bashing in its early years, the series has grown from strength to strength, culminating in the ephiphany that was FIFA 10. While FIFA 11 was “evolutionary, rather than revolutionary”, it was critically acclaimed and managed to cement the position of FIFA as the “king of football sims”, a title forcefully wrested away from  Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer,  also known as Winning Eleven in our part of the woods.

All hail the new king!

As previously mentioned, a couple of days ago on the 10th of August 2011, the good folks over at EA Singapore invited me over to their swanky office at Fusionopolis to catch a sneak peek of an Alpha build of their upcoming game, which promises to be “revolutionary”. Over the next week, I will be sharing my insight and opinions of some of the new features on show in FIFA 12. Unfortunately, photography wasn’t allowed, so instead I will try to make my descriptions as graphic as humanly possible. (And enlist a little help from readily-available photos already online.)

Stepping into the EA Singapore office, I was ushered by a very friendly staff member to a private booth and was then left to my own devices. The build I was handed was for the Playstation 3 and had the words “Work in Progress” splashed across the background, reminding me that whatever I am experiencing may be subject to change before the game releases, though I was assured most of the basics were solidly in place already.

Clearly, FIFA 12 wastes no time in trying to carve out its own unique identity. From the off, avid FIFA followers will notice that the menu system of old has been completely replaced. Taking a look around the frontend menu, I notice that the navigation is now much improved with the traditional vertical, left-aligned menu now replaced by a set of slick-looking blades across the bottom of the screen, with sub-menu options popping up when these are clicked. The new menu style takes up less screen real estate and looks somewhat more professional. A small, some might say frivolous, interface change but personally, I kind of like it.

I like the minimalist look. Do you?

Most of the teams and leagues featured in FIFA 11 make a return in FIFA 12 with the added bonus of a couple new international teams such as Côte d’Ivoire/Ivory Coast. Same goes for the stadia, mostly intact with a few interesting additions, including one which resembles Johannesburg’s Soccer City, site of 2010’s FIFA World Cup finals.

As expected, the sexist-comment-slinging, male chauvanist Andy Gray’s no longer part of the commentary team. A nice addition to FIFA 12 is the ability to choose your preferred commentary team between the pairing of Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend or the pairing of Martin Tyler and Alan Smith, though frankly, I like them all. The more than 10,000 lines of speech recorded is massive and will go a long way in avoiding that dreaded feeling of stale, recycled commentary.

Sexist? No FIFA 12 for you!

Next up in Part 2 of this preview, we will take a look at the much-lauded gameplay improvements in FIFA 12 , including the highly-aniticipated “holy trinity”.

Till then,

ultimatefifafan