FIFA 10 Demo Out Tomorrow!!

Unfortunately, the demo's only available in Europe on PSN and Xbox Live however it's fairly easy to create a dummy European PSN account and I'll definitely be posting impressions tomorrow. The demo will be available in North America next week. I have no idea why they would bother with the delay. The teams available in the demo are; Chelsea, Chicago Fire, Juventus, Bayern, Barcelona and Marseille.

On the official FIFA site there's a great new trailer showing a glimpse of some new features including some new animations, particularly for keepers and defenders, and some great player-player interactions like shoulder-barging players off the ball. You can check out the video here.
Another one of my favourite franchises releases in full retail next week, NHL 2010. Last year’s game was fantastic and by the demo that was released recently there’s every indication that the 2010 incarnation will be even better. If you’ve tried the demo and weren’t impressed be sure to set the gameplay settings to ‘Hardcore’, then you’ll notice much more realistic passing (the success of passes is far more dependent upon player positioning (rather than 40 foot tape-to-tape backhanders), there’s a slower pace to the play and some brilliant board play. You can now pin players to the boards and really work the puck down low. It’s really neat. Regrettably, I won’t be around next week so I won’t get to play the game on release but I’ll be trying to play the heck out of it before FIFA comes out .
Of course, that’s when I’m not playing some of the other top notch games coming out this fall! I was looking up the release dates of games I’ll be picking up and I’m not sure when the heck I’m going to be able to play them all!

NHL 2009 - Sept 15
Scribblenauts DS - Sept 15
Bad Company 2 - Sept 30
Gran Turismo PSP - Oct 1
Uncharted 2 - October 13
FIFA 10 - October 20
Borderlands - October 20
Forza 3 - October 27
Ballad of Gay Tony - October 29
Modern Warefare 2 - November 10
Gran Turismo 5 - Dec 29

I’ll pretty much be picking up all of those games and I still have a number of games I’ve purchased but have yet to get to most notably Mirror’s Edge, Infamous and Fable 2! That said, as a gamer I’d much rather have this problem than the opposite. Oh to be back in high school or even undergrad where you can pull of those marathon 10 hour gaming sessions. I remember playing the original Quake on MPlayer via dialup late into the morning during highschool. Not sure work, or the wife, would appreciate that now!

Lavan
(getting his butt kicked online in Battlefield: Bad Company - that's what you get for playing a game a year after everyone's already got used to it)