FIFA 12 on the PC was pirated an estimated 3,390,000 (yes million) times and on the Wii an estimated 860,000 times which along with the platforms where FIFA 12 didn’t feature in the Top 5 (Xbox360/PS3) still represents a huge amount of lost sales for EA just 3 months after release.

EA SPORTS caused a minor uproar during 2011 when they announced that FIFA 12 PC would not have LAN capabilities as a measure designed to discourage piracy, but from the figures above it’s clear that step hasn’t worked.

Piracy is a topic which touches a nerve for many gamers and some really big questions now need to be asked about how viable future FIFA titles are on the PC platform especially. So with that in mind..

Do you think EA would be within their rights to ditch the PC platform for FIFA 13 all together?

Source: TorrentFreak

Robert Magee – George Best

My favourite player of all time is George Best. I’m from Northern Ireland and although I wasn’t alive for the majority of his playing career, he is a hero among Ulstermen! The reason he is my favourite player is that while Northern Ireland was in a state of conflict and people were being killed nearly on a daily basis – George Best provided a platform for everyone to be united and in support of him, no matter what religion or background they were from.

For someone from a country as small as Northern Ireland to make it big and become, undoubtedly, one of the greatest footballers ever to grace the sport is a huge achievement. His death brought the whole country to a standstill and he’ll always be missed.

Dan – Kevin Pressman

Favourite player of all time is so hard to nail down, but my earliest footballing memories all concern one man. Kevin Pressman wasn’t an international superstar, in a career spanning three decades he never won anything, he never got further than a short UEFA Cup campaign and 3 games at England “B” level (a travesty, by the way), but he was a legend at one the country’s biggest clubs for nearly twenty years and spent much of that time as the club’s undisputed number one.

He was a character, as most Goalkeepers are, and truly loyal to his club, from the heights of making over 200 starts in the Premier League and starring in a team that made five Wembley appearences in three years to the heartbreak of relegation to England’s third tier, Pressman stayed with Sheffield Wednesday, despite being regarded as one of the best goalkeepers in the Premier League. Indeed, when forced out of Wednesday by Chris Turner, the man whose challenge for the number one slot he had seen off some years earlier, Pressman did jump back up a division, playing with Leicester, Coventry and Leeds in the Championship, before going to Northern Ireland and helping Portadown to UEFA Cup qualification, picking up the fans’ player of the season award along the way. Even at the age of 41, the evergreen Pressman was considered a viable option as Scunthorpe’s back-up keeper in one of their recent Championship adventures.
A true legend in the blue half of Sheffield, and still a name that sends a shiver down the spine of those in the red half, Pressman’s displays in Steel City Derbies are the stuff of legend and his 19 years at Sheffield Wednesday took in some of the best and worst times that one of England’s most famous clubs has ever seen and his claim to the number one shirt was unsuccesfully challenged by some of the best keepers around, the likes of Chris Woods and Pavel Srnicek came and went but Pressman remained a constant.

An asset in the goal and from the penalty spot, Pressman scored in two shoot-outs in his Wednesday career, against Wolves and Watford.
Even towards the end of his career, the big keeper was a showman, once, and memorably, nutmegging Newcastle’s Keiron Dyer on the edge of the Wednesday box before dribbling past a couple more bamboozled Magpies’ players to half-way line and unleashing a drive at opposite number Steve Harper’s goal.

But none of that is why Pressy is my favourite player of all time. The quality, the loyalty, the occasional comedy mean nothing next to the fact that this is the man who inspired me to play football, the man who I reminisce about whenever I don my gloves and the man who, despite his advancing years, I would still welcome back into Wednesday’s first team without a second thought.
The fact is, as the Kop’s chant used to go, you’ll never beat Kev Pressman.

Once again congratulations Robert and Dan and thanks to Bright Future and EA SPORTS for the FIFA Manager 12 prizes.

To enter all we want you to do is tell us who your favourite football player of all time is and most importantly why? All entries need to go in the comments of this post and the two best entries will then be selected by the FSB judging panel who’s decision is final. The codes we have for FIFA Manager 12 are worldwide so no matter where you live you can enter this competition.

**Please make sure the email address you have registered to post in the FSB comments is active so that we can contact you with your Origin code and instructions on how to redeem it should you win. The closing date for this competition is Friday 11th November at 5pm UK time**

Who is your favourite football player of all time and why?

Good luck and a massive thanks to Soren Stoss and the team at Bright Future for the prizes.

The download is available via the Official FIFA Manager Facebook page and you will need to “like” it access the download link.

FIFA Manager 12 Demo

If you’ve never played a FIFA Manager game before then i’d urge you to download the demo and at least give it a try. We were pretty impressed with FIFA Manager 11 as our review testified and if you’re looking for something a little different to Football Manager, you may just find this club management experience draws you in.

If you do decide to download the demo let us know your thoughts.

Whilst the FIFA 12 PC edition from Origin doesn’t have a “special” edition per se, it does come with free Ultimate Team packs just like the console variant, with x2 Gold Packs coming your way, each month for the first six months.

The PC version of FIFA 12 is pretty insane with its super high resolution, ridiculously quick loading times and console identical features. So if you’re going to buy it anyway you may as well get your name in the hat for this prize.

All details including terms and conditions can be found here.

We’ll be using this post to announce when things go live. Currently the expected times, according to EASPORTSFIFA are as follows:

PS3 (N America) – 13th Sept *from* 2pm PST

PS3 (EU) – 14 Sept *from* 5pm

The PC demo was expected from 10am, but it’s already live. Link below. It’s from the EA website and it’s the one I’ve downloaded.

*UPDATE* The 360 demo is now live on the dashboard. Access it as follows: Game Marketplace -> Titles A-Z -> E – EA Sports FIFA 12

*UPDATE 2* A few users have experienced issues with installing the FIFA 12 demo with FIFA 11 still installed on their machines. The simplest fix is to back up your FIFA 11 saves, uninstall, then install the demo. Thanks to JC in the comments for his help figuring that out.

*UPDATE 3* There have also been issues with downloads stopping at 99%. One fix we’ve seen is to turn your XBOX off, then try to download again, it should skip to 98% then straight to 100%. Thanks to BlueOggster from the FVPA for that. Let us know if it works for you.

Links:

PC Demo EU Link – 1.5GB

PC Demo NA Link – 1.5GB (Thanks to Dude Dudette for the NA link)

XBOX 360 Marketplace Link – 1.42GB

If you haven’t played FIFA Manager before check out our review of FIFA Manager 11.

As always click below so see in full resolution.

Big thanks to Dux0r for putting this together.

Alexc26: Will the Freezing timer glitch/exploit be fixed ?

IJ – This is at the top of our list to fix and we are working on it right now.

Alexc26: Will FIFA 12 PC be tested to work on Windows 7 64bit as it seems a lot of people had problems with crashes and stuttering on that specific operating system ?

IJ – Yes, we will be supporting Win7 64bit.

Kozuki: When one on one with the goalkeeper a lot of players online pass or shoot the ball with minimum power so it rolls into the goal, goalkeepers should be saving these rolling balls but 90% of them go in, will this be addressed ?

IJ – I’m not familiar with this issue personally but like you, if this is occurring, I’d expect it to be addressed.

I SiR MartY I: Will Pro Clubs be 11v11 This year ?

IJ – All features that you see on PS3 and Xbox360 are in the PC game this year.

Th3GrimR34p3r: Will FIFA 12 PC and/or future FIFA’s have DirectX10 compatablity?

IJ – TBD

isl91: Will there be Arabic commentary in the PC version ?

IJ – Not on PC for FIFA 12.

isl91: Will it be possible to Enable/Disable 3D grass as it causes lag on some Systems ?

IJ – You should be able to turn the rendering settings down to the lowest setting to achieve this.

eladlad: Will there be an option to turn on or off Autosaves because for FIFA 11 they were always on and it wasn’t possible to change it.

IJ – This option doesn’t exist for PC.

kiko111: Will Be A Goalkeeper, be in FIFA 12 PC ?

IJ – All features that you see on PS3 and Xbox360 are in the PC game this year.  :)

TheDoctor76: Will the PC have Custom Chants etc that Console had in FIFA 11 ?

IJ – Yes.  :)

Outsider87P: Will you enhance the chat system? As an example Consoles can use PSN and Xbox Live, the PC does have third party programs but not every FIFA player has them or know what they are and they can cause issues within the game.

IJ – Yes, PC will have VOIP for in-game voice. With in-game Origin you also have the ability to chat via text directly with friends.

Outsider87P: Will there be support/patches etc after the release?

IJ –We’ll see about post launch patches. I’m sure the goal for developers is to get the best game out the door as possible but there are sometimes circumstances as we’ve seen in the past where we need to release a patch to make critical fixes.

AhMeD_ShEvA: what are the System Requirements for running FIFA 12 PC with HIGH details?

IJ –We’re still running systems tests for compatibility. Don’t have a definite answer for you at this time.

PDJEY: In FIFA 12 am I gonna be able to play with my brother in the same pc against other guys, while i’m playing on gamepad and him on keyboard?

IJ –Yes. You can also have up to 5 people on 1 machine.  4 controllers and 1 keyboard.  This was a request I saw on the FIFA 11 PC community forums.

Felipaoox: I’d like to know when are we going to see some in-game gameplay video to check out the fluidity, style, impact engine, etc. Any date for the PC demo? (approximate, at least!)

IJ – Not sure TBH. I’m sure it will be announced around the same time it usually is each year.

Gaius22: There will be unique features on the PC version, besides the graphics?

IJ – The game itself is the same this year ( :) ) but there are some PC specific features that we’ve added. These include:
Integration with Origin for friends, ecommerce, match invites etc.
Launcher config app to control display and performance settings.
The ability to have numeric OR the standard Xbxo360 style (A, B, X, Y) button icons

Gaius22: I guess that we all know that modders play a big part in Fifa PC community, and my question is this: Will you change the type of files or the game code drastically, so that the modders have to learn how to deal the files all over again, or since its more or less the same game engine the modders will have no problem at all?

IJ – The big change for modders would’ve occurred in FIFA 11 PC as we adopted the next gen gameplay / code at that time. If they could mod FIFA 11, I’d imagine that they will be able to do the same fairly easily on FIFA 12 PC.

Gaius22: In terms of graphics customization, will we have more flexibility in setup the graphic settings, I mean will we more than just resolution, AA, detail and V-Sync in the settings?

IJ – Not too much has changed in the launcher config app in terms of display and performance settings. We’ve added windowed mode as an option but the rest is fairly consistent with last year.

Also, this year, the launcher config app has been made to auto-detect the best settings for your machine so the hope is that this resolves a lot of performance issues for people. For FIFA 11 PC launch, I spent a lot of time on the forums when the game came out and saw a lot of people reporting performance issues, only to discover that most were trying to run the game on settings that were beyond the normal abilities of the machine they had.

Gaius22: Will you add more compatible joypads to this year list?

IJ – We’re still running compatibility tests so I can’t give you a definite answer there.

ALIMPAN_BARUA: Will there be “Creation Centre” for FIFA12 PC?

IJ – Yes  :)

ALIMPAN_BARUA: Will “Create a Club” feature be available in PC?

IJ – All features that you see on PS3 and Xbox360 are in the PC game this year.

raul93-fan: Will a Ultimate Team feature be introduced to PC version of FIFA 12 like the users on PS3 & Xbox 360 had?

IJ – Great question. Not able to answer at this time though.

Some promising bits in there I’m sure you’ll agree. Are any of you console gamers looking to make the jump to PC this year?

Long old video attached but if you skip to 07:10 you’ll hear lead FIFA 12 PC producer Ian Jarvis both reveal and explain the decision.

So PC fans, are you annoyed by this? Or do you simply accept that publishers these days will go to any lengths to try and minimise the piracy of PC games, which in all honesty is rife?

Click here to view the embedded video.