An EA spokesperson told Reuters, “By acquiring Chillingo, EA Mobile is increasing its market leadership on the Apple Platform as well as reaffirming its position as the world’s leading wireless entertainment publisher.”

This move helps push EA into the all-important mobile platform game outside of their own ports of FIFA, etc. It also helps push them further down the social rabbit hole. Their brand all over iOS’ Game Centre reaches as many eyeballs as a new Need for Speed, so this is a huge move.

Is FIFA11 an improvement on FIFA10? Yes, and no. The niggling bugs have gone away, so no longer in the middle of a game will the game start to stutter and render things at random. Also, the pitch now looks like grass, instead of a Playstation 1 pixel. A single one. Now the mediocrity is spread a little more thinly, instead of focused on a few major areas of the game.

Loading the game up for the first time brings you through an array of settings which takes literally 15 minutes to get through before you’re selecting a squad and readying for a game. For the first time I can recall on a console, one of the first menu’s is to ask if you want to sign up to a load of EA mailing lists. Then it asks if you want to redeem an online code for premium content. Thanks, EA!

15 minutes later (that, by the way, isn’t a joke) and a heap of loading screens into the game and we’re finally at a point where we can play our first game. Picking manager mode with my beloved Bayern brought about another menu, of which I had no idea I chose to see. The game automatically started putting x’s on a calendar in July, with the first friendly taking place on the last week of the month. I had to sit through each box being crossed-out, each taking about 15 seconds each, before it got to the game. I’ve no idea what it was doing for that time, but all the game was telling me was that nothing was happening on these dates, and teams were transferring players.

As a computer scientist, I can tell you that populating a database of the size within FIFA is not a difficult job. Especially when all you’re doing is moving a few bits around, probably at random. It should not take that length of time to do, but somehow the developers have not managed to provide a simple, one line algorithm to make this happen smoothly. They also have managed to once again far over-engineer the menu system to make it difficult to navigate, too noisy and thus making it take an age to load a simple menu to do simple tasks.

Gameplay is familiarly different. That sounds odd, but is the best way of describing it. It feels like FIFA10, but different. It feels like you’re not good enough to play it, not yet anyway. Passes go awry, shots rarely occur and your defense will stand around smoking while strikers stroll by to score goals on you. But this is the same every year, you’ll get used to it and start winning by 10 goals every game soon enough.

Playing through a few games gives you the feeling that, rather then directly controlling everything that goes on with your players, the engine has as much a say in what’s going on as you do. Sure, you’ve got more 360-degree movement (I have yet to experience this) and you control movement of the ball more (again, no idea when I’ll experience this) but it still feels like the game is cheating on me, and there is code somewhere in the background doing more work then I am with my own controls.

All-in-all this is another FIFA. It’s not going to shatter your world, but while it improves in some areas, it gets weaker in others. The engine is in no way refined to the degree a game in development this long should be, but EA get away with it year on year. The only problem is that while there will be a few patches, they will not fix big bugs here. Huge bugs were found in FIFA10 early on, and a year later, it’s only the next iteration that resolves them. Speaking of patches, on day 1, a few hours after release, the first patch came out. So not only have you menus to struggle with, there’s a patch to start your FIFA experience.

The ultimate word du jour to describe FIFA11, and other iterations of it is: over-engineered. Ok, that’s technically two words – but it’s one singular sentiment.

No information other then this has been announced but it’s likely to be a preparation for a multi-platform third iteration of the series. The name “genesis”, if real, suggests the back story will be told. I would doubt a PS3 exclusive prequel was in the works, but rather a boxset of the first and second Mass Effect games is due.

We’ll have more as it comes out later today.

A lot of their profits are derived from yearly updated games. In Europe FIFA trounces anything each year, while in the US Madden trounces anything else. Years ago, racing games were the best example of how to make flashy graphical leaps in console generations, and Need for Speed was top of the pile. It went into the yearly rotations EA did before getting old, tired and worn out. Especially when faced with Criterion’s Burnout series which was infinitely more fun.

A reboot a few years ago cashed in on the generation of hoodlum youths who wanted to imagine their Nissan Micra had neon and they were racing across railroad crossings in slow motion against Vin Diesel. Then the series, as it tried to re-create the same game over and over again rather then reboot the series again and again became tired, old and again trounced by Burnout.

After a break, EA returned with a proper developer who developed Need for Speed into an actual racing game. A game I didn’t like.

It’s 2010, and again the game needs a reboot. Using real developers showed the potential of the series. Not because the series can be good – with the right talent any old crap can be made good. No, what ‘Shift’ did was show EA that there is a genuine lust for a good version of the series. Handing it over to the developers who showed NFS to be crap was a great mood. Criterion created Burnout and killed NFS. Now they’re working on NFS, because of course EA bought the venerable developers.

So how do you work on NFS after you built Burnout Paradise? Well, you do the same – again. One of the failings of Paradise was that, while the racing was fun and the game itself was enjoyable, Paradise city was awful and finding races was a nightmare to do because simply driving around the city was not rewarding or enjoyable. Also the routes of races were long, winding, laborious and not exactly ‘racing game’ ish. It provided very little replay-ability outside of getting new cars, and later on bikes.

So, Criterion are masters of creating a racing title with fun, intriguing racing modes and great cars with excellent arcade-like handling. But the open world was where their last title fell down. So what could they have done, especially now that they’re part of the behemoth EA? Contact someone within EA who might know something about big, open world planning that people love, know and importantly for a racing game, can learn. You need to know when to clip the apex, when to hit the brakes hard or when to hammer down the throttle. Paradise never afforded you that knowledge because it was too big, too open and racing was too sporadic.

Shooter games are like this with open worlds. You need to know where you are. Where can you hide? Where is the enemy hiding? And how can you exploit all of these variables to win by brute force, or with tactics? One game series that does this so perfectly it makes other developers sick is Battlefield. For years level design has been a huge strong point of DICE in Sweden’s. And why bother trying to replicate it when you’re all part of the same global corporate family? Criterion have called their colleagues at DICE in to help with the open world bit of their game.

Burnout Paradise was big and often silly for a racing game. Need for Speed, however, will be four times that size. The 200 men at DICE know a thing or two about this kind of scale, and so they’re going to help the Burnout developers work things out.

“It’s been a great collaboration actually. Early on we set style guides for what we wanted to create out of this game, to offer players the ability to see a wide variety of types of environments from the deserts to the mountains to the forest to the coastal routes and so forth,” art director Henry LaBounta (formerly of George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic company) told eurogamer.

Drivability is key here. Criterion know how to make physics, design and style churn out a beautifully fun but not ludicrous driving style that gives the game finesse but without sacrificing ease of entry for new players. DICE can build a world, and so the mission for DICE was to create a world that was easily drivable and exciting in a race scenario.

Need for Speed was introduced to the world as a game where mad-hatter boy racers could pit themselves against each other, and then get chased by the cops. Through rebranding that got lost somewhere, and Criterion have gone back to the series’ beginnings to get things back on track, as it were. So not only does the game world need to be drivable, it needs to play to two types of scenario – basic racing, and evading.

The game will have a more official launch at gamescon next week, but with these two working on the title it’s bound to be brilliant. Not just as a released product, but the after-sales pitch from Criterion is always worth buying into. This makes 2010 a rather interesting year for racing fans, as for the last few years it’s been weak on that front. No F1 game is being addressed in September, while the lack of next-gen Gran Turismo (ignoring Prologue) will end at Christmas. There’ll be plenty of competition on that front, but it does seem that each game is a compliment to each other, rather then a detraction. With the online mode bound to be epic with DICE and Criterion at the helm, this could be something special for those looking for online racing action.

Also announced is a new system for positioning players and passing dynamics based on the players’ ability with the controller. The system is called Personality+, and aims to take away advantages given to people who only play as the top clubs but are terrible at the game – turning it into a more skill based event.

FIFA11 is out later this year. As we approach the launch we’ll undoubtedly have more info., given this is one the top selling titles in Irish game charts every year!

RISK: Factions includes a campaign mode, featuring five separate missions in which you play as each of the various factions in the game – the Humans, the Cats, the Robots, the Zombies, and the Yeti – each faction with a typically humourous leader intended to portray the faction. The differences between the factions is purely cosmetic, however this makes the battle screen more entertaining, with each side having different types of units shown, with different attacks, and even different styles of dice to add the the humour.

However, the campaign is very short, with only five missions. Also, each mission is just a vanilla game of Risk, as there is no real abnormal objective to accomplish. Thus, you will be forced into custom games or Xbox Live matches fairly quickly.

Custom games, much to the word, can be played in whatever way you want – you pick the map, number of players, and style of gameplay including the new 2008 style rules with objectives, cities, and capitals; or a good old-fashioned take over the entire world game that we all loved to play but hated losing as a child. Classic Risk is also included to play if you can’t bear to embrace the recent changes in the game.

The one major downside to the game is also the main gameplay element behind it – the luck of the dice rolls. When the dice are working against you, the game can get very annoying very quickly, be it losing seven armies to a single army on defense with the AI, to rolling four 1′s when on attack. The AI can also be quite annoying, almost always taking the tactic of dumping their entire draft into a single territory, and steamrolling right through you – but also at times simply engaging in a single attack to take a single territory, then backing off despite having the large unit advantage.

In general, RISK: Factions is a good game to pick up on the Xbox Live Arcade if you are a traditional gaming fan. It brings the game into a more accessible way with the ability to play with others around the world easily, plus the visuals really help offset the fact you don’t have a big giant game board and tons of tiny little plastic pieces in front of you.

Welcoming today’s announcement, Taoiseach Brian Cowen TD said, “EA is the global leader in interactive entertainment and a very important addition to the thriving games industry in Ireland.”

“The new Irish location for BioWare will help us get closer to our fans in Europe,” said Dr. Ray Muzyka, Senior Vice President, EA and Group General Manager, BioWare. “Galway gives us the right mix of solid technology infrastructure and international recruitment opportunities as we continue to focus on bringing the highest quality gaming experiences to market.”

Barry O’Leary, CEO of IDA Ireland said, “EA joins a vibrant digital media sector and is a key endorsement of the skills and expertise available in Ireland for this sector.”

Not only is this a huge boost to the local and national economy, it signals Ireland as a good location for other game companies. Currently we have Activision, Havok, Intel, Vivendi and a few others. This is a good stepping stone, as we’ve now got education resources (Trinity and DIT both offer Masters’ degree’s in game development) to churn out relevant graduates to tackle games.

No plastic peripherals, absurd pricetag or has-been gameplay is to be found here. No, simple, clever and well-rounded is the best way to describe the relatively new EA franchise. And here is the box you’ll be staring at when you choose this over the Activision stable-mate:

360 and PS3 art. I'm not sure why they're both here, given it's the same.

An inferno of Dante's

In a day when news has been so slow it’s like Dublin rush-hour traffic, I can only find one piece of information worthy of posting. And it has nothing to do with us European dirtbag sex addict junkies.

In Americaw, they have this huge game once a year called the “Superbowl”, which allegedly is the most watched sporting event in the country. Making it even bigger then Wrestlemania. Well, one thing we Europeans do enjoy are the insanely expensive ad spots that go on during the Superbowl, and often become more famous then the winners of the game itself.

Never before has an ad spot in this segment of television been taken by a gaming company, despite rumours last year that Sony would use a spot to advertise Killzone 2. This year, though, EA have decided to splash out $3 million in their budget to promo a 30 second clip of Dante’s Inferno, with the aim of garnishing interest from people far and wide that will recognise the games name, but may otherwise not bother to go out and buy the title.

EA president Frank Gibeau said; “Even within the spectrum of live sports events, the Super Bowl stands apart, almost as a national holiday. The Super Bowl is a bull’s-eye in terms of cross-over to our core demographic and the reach is outstanding. Not only does it draw 100 million viewers, but most people watch the Super Bowl live, a rarity in the world of DVRs. While digital outreach to Facebook, Twitter, and online bloggers is a core part of our marketing strategy, we felt that advertising during the Super Bowl is an excellent way to introduce this new IP to a massive cross-section of people who are likely already familiar with the dark and twisted ‘Divine Comedy.’”

It will certainly be interesting to see if this heralds a new era where big game adverts and campaigns become as widely known and populous as cinema release campaigns. It does feel like a little step towards game publishers “growing up” and stepping into the big leagues, if you will pardon the pun.

Glorious

Anyone who’s my friend on PSN will be aware that, of late, I’ve been playing a fair amount of FIFA 2010. I spend a lot of time in Manager Mode, managing Bayern Munich to various league glories. 5 seasons in and I’m a 5-star rated manager with an unstoppable team, only losing two games last season, where for the second time in a row, we did the treble (domestic league & cup as well as ECC glory). I signed a few players. Park and O’Shea from United, Fucile from Porto, Taiwo from Marseille, as well as one or two others here and there.

Last season I invested in a new striker to go alongside Gomez because Olic was due to retire the next season. So, having won loads of trophies and kept costs down I went mad and bought Ibrahimovic from Barca. Sure, people don’t like him and think he’s over-rated, but in the game of FIFA, his stats do the talking. Fact is I can run him up and down the pitch and score from miles away.

He’s expensive, but I could afford him. No issues with wages or club budget. I had plenty left over to possibly buy Xavi next season to cement the midfield as well as get Neuer from Schalke for the goal. Ultimate team! But no, something’s wrong. All last season my manager mode said I was sitting on a massive deficit of about 2 billion in the club and minus 300 grand in the weekly wages, despite consistent wins and bonuses from sponsors. I ignored it, hoping this would be resolved when we won some trophies. Which happened. We did the treble.

This man has wrecked my team!

The club deficit stayed and the wages deficit jumped to minus 800,000! Normally, if you were in such dire straights, you’d sell players. So I decided to do just that before the board sacked me. I couldn’t. The minus figure meant the game thought I couldn’t afford to re-negotiate with players’ contracts. On top of that, the board was telling me to buy players and improve the club grounds with the money I had. Something was awry…

A quick google search returned some amazing stats. On the official forums, EA have been given a list of about 68 bugs in the manager mode. 4 have been fixed since release late last year. No new patches and EA have even suggested that they won’t fix it.

This is a shocking glitch which entirely breaks manager mode. It’s unplayable. Sure I can play matches, but half of the point of manager mode is to be able to trade players and deal with the business-side of football. All of this is now impossible. I’m nowhere near alone either as various threads on EA’s own forums as well as FIFA fan forums have racked up huge numbers of complaints. Last year prior to patches EA staff were on the system boasting the fixes. Since the patch in October, the staff haven’t said a word. Customer service, eh?