It has been announced by EA Sports that they have released the demo for the Xbox 360, and the demo is available to download right away but only for gamers who are Gold members of Xbox Live. The demo is around 1.9GB in size and will give gamers a taste of what is to come when the full title is released next month.

Previously we reported that no other than Lionel Messi had defected from the Pro Evolution Soccer franchise to head over to the team at EA Sports and the FIFA titles. The latest title in the FIFA Street franchise will be the first for the best part of four years, and is being developed by the same team who were responsible for the hugely successful FIFA 12.

The new game will also use the same engine as FIFA 12, and will be available to early adopters of the EA Sports Season Ticket. The just released demo will feature both Italy’s AC Milan, and the English Premier Leagues Manchester City. The latest installment in the franchise has been promised by the developer to be more authentic looking compared to previous releases.

As was reported before EA Sports has added the new Street Network feature, which basically adds a social competition to the game. Meanwhile it is being reported by Strategy Informer that EA is thinking of using some of the moves and mechanics in FIFA 13. FIFA Street will feature a new dibbling system that may find its way onto this year’s FIFA title.

To recap FIFA Street 2012 is set to be released in the US on March 13th with Europe getting the game on the 16th. Will you be getting FIFA Street?

It has been revealed that gamers in the US can get the game on March 13th; with UK gamers seeing it released three days later on the 16th. According to Video Gamer, EA Sports has also announced the new Street Network feature.

This new feature of the game has been designed to add a social competition among gamers, which will enable video capture for players to showcase their best tricks by sharing them in the game with friends. Also gamers will be able to track and compare their progress with their friends throughout the game. This includes the Head-to-Head Online Seasons and the World Tour story mode.

Producer Sid Misra said that the new feature will bring “that real-world swagger into the game”, as players will be able to capture video of their best moments to share. There will also be videos broadcast that feature Goals of the Week, and friends can be alerted to each other’s achievements.

The game will be available for owners of the PS3 and Xbox 360, and UK residents can preorder FIFA Street from retailer GAME and receive an exclusive Adidas all-star team. This features Lionel Messi and twelve of the best players in the world.

This offer will also provide exclusive access to the Lionel Messi Barcelona venue, which the player helped to design himself. EA Sports Season Ticket holders will have access to a digital version of the game three days ahead of the launch.

Will you be getting the new FIFA Street game?

Before we start debating about who is missing from the TOTY let us tell you which players were selected. Firstly Real Madrid’s Iker Casillas got the number 1 shirt and had his attributes boosted from 89 to 93. You can see his a full breakdown of his attributes below alongside the TOTY back four which is made up of Dani Alves, Gerard Pique, Nemanja Vidic and Sergio Ramos – all of these players now have a better overall attribute score of at least +5 compared to what they were previously.

The midfielders which were selected consist of Andres Iniesta, Xabi Alonso and Xavi Hernandez. Once again these players now have an overall attribute score of +5 compared to prior to the TOTY selection, you can see a full breakdown of attributes below. As you can see Xavi has amazing stats for passing, whilst Alonso is better at defending and Iniesta is a much better attacking option.

According to UltimateFifa.com it looks as if Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney will be the three attackers announced, currently these players have overall ratings of 92, 94 and 90 respectively, so perhaps these will also see a jump of +5, if that’s the case we could well see Messi hit an overall rating of 99/100 – how incredible is that!

If you are lucky enough to get any of these players in your packs you can rest assured knowing that they are worth a great deal in the transfer market, however we can’t help thinking that two or three players could have made the TOTY starting 11. These are Tottenham’s rapid winger Gareth Bale, Arsenal’s in-form striker Robin Van Persie and Man City’s Vincent Kompany – do you agree?

In the comments section below we would love to hear who you think should and shouldn’t have made the FIFA 12 Ultimate Team of the Year – it is thought that EA may soon announced some substitutes, when we hear more we will keep you posted.

EA Sports quite often mix things up in its sports titles, a few years back we saw putting overhauled, now every shot you play with a driver, wood, iron or wedge will be determined by a how well you come to terms with a new swing system. We don’t have full details, however we are told that it is very much like before, however now lots more factors are taken into account – such as swing tempo, stance and ball position. We have embedded a video at the bottom of this post which shows the new swing mechanic in more detail.

Other things we can tell you about this game include the fact that it will support Kinect motion sensing and voice control, also there will be 22 licensed PGA professionals to play as and Online Country Clubs. Sadly at the moment we don’t yet know a great deal about exactly what Kinect controls will be like – hopefully it will be accurate enough to be seen as a decent alternative to a standard controller, we will have to wait and see.

The next few weeks should see more Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 details emerge before the game’s released in late March, as and when we hear more regarding new features and improvements when compared to last year’s game we will keep you posted.

What needs to change to convince you to buy Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13? Does the new swing mechanic put you off? Watch the video below and then leave us an opinionated comment.

An article over at CVG.com is reporting that EA Sports has announced it has signed probably the best player in the world. The Argentina and Barcelona star was once the face of fierce rival PES, but the publisher has revealed he is now “the global face of the EA SPORTS FIFA franchise.”

The company also said in a statement about the news “The biggest transfer deal this football season sees the FIFA Ballon d’Or 2010 winner transfer to EA SPORTS and make his debut in March, 2012 on the cover of FIFA Street”.

Barcelona’s star player will also become an EA Sports Football Ambassador and become “the cornerstone” of various advertising and marketing campaigns for the franchise. He will feature on packaging and used in social media activities around the world.

The publisher will also partner with the Leo Messi Foundation that supports educational, social, and health care initiatives for children from all over the world. Vice President and GM of Football at EA Sports, Matt Bibey, said “With Messi on our team we have the world’s best and most exciting player to help EA SPORTS maintain its global leadership in the years ahead.”

The star player said himself that he wanted to be part of the team responsible for the best football game available. He added “EA SPORTS is a brand that shares my values of creativity, excellence and social responsibility.”

The first thing which EA ask you to do is change you password immediately, also they ask you to ensure that you don’t share it with anyone, not even EA Support – the latter part of this suggests that they are aware of people falling for phishing scams. EA’s team have a list of things which they want you to respond with, firstly they need to know your FUT team name and how many coins were lost, they then want you to answer the following questions:

Have you changed your gamertag recently?

Have you contacted Customer Support for any kind of transfer recently?

When was the date and time that you noticed that the team was last intact?

When was the team lost?

Was there an system or console update when the team disappeared?

Once you send across these details the EA development team will review you situation and look into possible compensation, at the time of this post my friend had not received compensation, but things are looking more promising than they one were. When we hear more on the matter we will keep you posted, for now we would recommended changing your FUT password to something more secure than it currently is, even if you haven’t been hacked – you can test how secure your password is here.

We have to say that we are impressed by how helpful EA are being, let us know if you were compensated due to your UT being hacked, if so leave a comment below.

Digital Trends is reporting that the game has become the fastest selling game of this year so far, and has also set a new record for the highest first week sales of any sports game ever made. Only last week Gears of War 3 became the fastest selling game of 2011, but it didn’t hold the title for long.

FIFA 12 has proved to be a massive worldwide hit, and in under a week of being available has already shifted over 3.2 million copies of the game. The figures are taken from September 27th through to October 2nd.

Executive Vice-President of EA Sports, Andrew Wilson said the EA Canada team had done a great job with the game. He added “The massive FIFA online community has overwhelmingly connected to the new live services in the game”.

EA also stated that this year’s title had seen sales increase 23 percent compared to FIFA 11, and the game had sold 879,000 copies for owners of the iPhone and iPad. October 1st also saw a new record for online gaming with EA Sports games with over 10 million gamers taking part in EA Sports sessions, and almost 8 million of them were FIFA 12 games.

FIFA’s annual rival Pro Evolution Soccer is due to hit the shelves later this month, and it will be surprising if it can achieve anywhere near the success FIFA 12 has seen so far. Have you got FIFA 12? What do you make of it?

The public beta testing has allowed the guys over at EA DICE to get lots of consumer feedback regarding bugs in the game and work on weapon balance etc, in that sense this beta has been a massive success as there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of suggestions which may improve the game submitted via the forums – today we will highlight some of the most-popular feedback which has been left.

Let’s start with bullet damage, lots of people think that bullet damage is too high, we don’t agree with this as in real life one or two bullets can easily take out a soldier, therefore frustrating as it can be we should not be able to sponge bullets. As pointed out over at the forums there do seem to be some over powered weapons, I have personally noticed that the UMP45 seems to be many people’s weapon of choice and it get’s kills more frequently than other guns, whilst if you check out the forums others complain that the M249 Saw is under powered – do you agree with any of this?

Lots of people have been asking for EA DICE to allow console gamers to play the Caspian Border map, however please stop asking this as developers are confident that testing on this map has been completed already.

A few relatively small things which people would like to see changed include the ability to see who was the best medic in a round, also people want in-game squad management and others want a bug which sees soldiers sink under map to be resolved (this can be seen below) – we are sure that this will be patched.

We won’t talk about snipe lens reflection too much, but this is something which people still think is way off, also there are plenty of complaints regarding flashlights – all in all you can see that the beta will have a positive effect on the quality of the title when it arrives late this month, let’s just hope devs have enough time to address all of the major issues which have been raised.

What other imperfection should be added to this article? Let us know in the comments section below.

If you ever received a message which read “We are sorry but there has been an error connecting to FIFA 12 Ultimate Team. You will be returned to the FIFA 12 Main Menu” we can confirm that this should be a thing of the past as EA has revealed that this particular issue has been resolved. Below you can see more information about other fixes (you can see full details via this link):

Instances of Debug Text (may require locale change to take effect)
Team of the Week players appearing with “0” stats in show off links
Empty watch list
Inability to load Web App (a.k.a. Stadium Bug)
Inability to load Web App – “Ooops sorry” error upon logging in
Locked out of account, unable to regain access through CS

There are still some unfixed problems which EA’s devs are currently investigating, these include an annoying issue where disconnecting occurs at the end of matches, also one annoyance where console gamers can’t access FUT is being looked into. Finally EA has confirmed that there are bugs with the game’s custom tactics and deleting squads features – so EA has advised against using these for now.

It looks like EA has already rolled out an update to the PC version of the game, however there has been no official word on an update for PS3 / Xbox 360, therefore we will have to keep you posted as we hear more. Let us know if you have received an update in the comments below, feel free to explain whether this update has fixed bugs which you previously noticed.

Let’s start with some PC issues, as PC hardware and software varies so massively there are bound to be some problems, a recent article posted over at GameBooze lists quite a few known FIFA 12 issues and fixes for PC so it may be worth checking out.

The official EA Sports FIFA Twitter feed recently confirmed that they are looking into a known issue with the game’s ultimate team game mode, you can see the error here, the error reads “We are sorry but there is an error connecting to FIFA 12 Ultimate team” – is this something which has happened to you?

When we spoke about the Battlefield 3 beta earlier this week it was obvious that there were some problems with the EA servers, well we are hearing some reports of similar issues affecting FIFA 12 gamers, a quick search for “FIFA 12 connection” on Twitter shows that some people are experiencing lag, despite having a fast connection, whilst this tweet said this: “During a pro ranked match on FIFA 12, the screen freezes at the start of the 2nd half and I get a ‘connection lost’ message”

One minor problem which some people have emailed us regarding the referee’s kit choice, sometimes their is a kit clash between on of the teams and the referee, apaprently when QPR or Swansea wear their orange away kits the ref wears red – have you noticed any other kit clashes?

We are hearing lots of reports of people who are less than happy with the game’s tackling system, we witnessed this for ourselves – but guessed it was just a change which would take some getting used to, and shouldn’t be categorized as a problem – but with so many people struggling with this aspect of the game, perhaps it is quite buggy.

We want to hear what problems you have noticed so far, nothing is too petty, so share any issues you experience in the comments section below.

Update: Here is some official information from EA regarding fixed bugs and known issues – link