FIFA '10 [Review]

 

It’s the fag end of the year and time for the two football video game giants – EA’s FIFA and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer – to pit their annual fruits of labour in the ever shifting race for the top spot. This year, EA Sports gets a head start with the European release of FIFA 2010. Many of us had forsaken FIFA as football game of choice; however, the last two installments in the series showed that developers at EA are finally beginning to understand the game. Let’s find out of FIFA 10 is another commendable effort in the progressive run of sequels or if this is a step backwards.


What’s in the game?

The most touted addition (or improvement as they like to call it) is the “360° Dribbling” system. At least in theory, this feature means greater control over the player with the ball. In my experience, however, dribbling in FIFA remains something of a dark art. Mastering dribbling (and the complementing skill moves) in FIFA seem to require ninja-like reflexes and skills while handling the game pad. If you ever find yourself looking for some close control to go past a challenging player, the only option seems to be unleashing a Skill Move. As the name suggests, these require just as much skill to pull off as their real-life versions. For a mere mortal such as myself, the most reliable way of taking shots at the goal is still pretty much about through-passes and outpacing your opponents with certain players. Crosses and often even short passes are still a case of hit-and-miss—an old grievance that players have had with FIFA that apparently remains unaddressed.

Another significant change with FIFA this year is the effect of a player’s current form on his performance and vice-versa. This effectively means that all the players in your team will have dynamic attributes. If you want to add some realism in the game, this makes a lot of sense. However, form of a player not only affects his mental attributes but also physical attributes such as sprinting, speed and ball control. Additionally, the effect form has on player stats is quite profound, at times changing them drastically. 

The tackling system has become more effective at taking away possession of the ball. This is mainly because the game allows tackling from behind and mostly doesn’t trigger a foul: Referees seem to be quite inconsistent at calling foul on such tackles, so the best option for the player with the ball is to pass it, instead of shielding.

 

Single player career modes

Manager Mode and Pro Season (now called Virtual Pro) have been beefed up with some new features. The most apparent change in the Manager Mode is in the menu system and the overall interface. The core system, however, more or less remains the same and it is sometimes surprisingly restrictive and at times broken.
 

Pro career mode has been given a wider scope, allowing you to use your created player with other single player game modes such as Manager Mode and Kick Off in addition to online game modes. A scrapbook-like career tracker has been added to enhance this mode. Achieving certain milestones gives additional bonus to your players’ attributes and also unlocks additional game content such as football gear, goal celebrations and player traits.

 

Relegated

All the bells and whistles notwithstanding, after playing 70-odd matches, issues with the core system start to emerge. The game is not too bad, but I did have a few bad experiences with the Manager Mode and the Pro Season: The worst was losing my saved games in both these modes. Some other issues faced include the game locking up, several animation glitches and unresponsive game controls. I thought of browsing through the discussion forum on the official website to check if this was just a case of bad karma on my part. As it turns out, users have reported issues as severe as players just disappearing from the roster, only to find him playing for some other club. This is just one example, as one of the more resourceful users on the forum had compiled a list of minor and major issues reported about the game—the last count was almost 70 in Manager Mode alone.
 

Another old gripe with FIFA has not been addressed — replays cannot be saved on the hard drive and the only option is to upload them on the EA servers. With Xbox 360, that means you need to have a Gold account, which effectively translates into paying to save your replays. As if to add insult to injury, there are a couple of achievements that are unlocked on uploading a video and a screen shot.

 

Speaking of achievements, a majority of them are a repeat of last year, just like the commentary which has largely remained the same since FIFA 08 days. In a desperate plea for traffic and user-data, a new achievement is to visit the EA Football World website to create a Game Face and then to download it on you console. And oh yes, there is yet another achievement which is visiting the EA Store.

 

If you do not look beyond exhibition matches; play no more than three or four matches at a time, you may actually like this game. Overall though, FIFA 10 feels like a rushed product, at least rushed through the testing phase, if not the development one. There are some very prominent bugs in the single-player career mode that can be noticed after just a few matches. Even when considering a single match, the game mechanics do not allow for a free-flowing game: An aggressive defense system, a relatively inadequate dribbling mechanic, disappointing passing and crossing, and referees often getting in the way, make for a very stifled and ping-pong style of matches.  

 

If you are like me and need a year-long football fix, then I would suggest holding on to your existing football game or maybe wait and hope for Konami to deliver.
 

Rating: 3/5


Details:

Genre: Sports

 

Developer: EA Canada

Publisher: Electronic Arts

 

 

Platforms:

PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, PSP


Distributors:

PC Version – Excel Interactive

PlayStation and Nintendo – Milestone Interactive

Xbox 360 – Redington



Price:

Nintendo DS – Rs. 1,499

PC (Microsoft Windows) – Rs. 999

PlayStation 2 – Rs. 999

PlayStation 3 – Rs. 2,499

PlayStation Portable – Rs. 1,599

Wii – Rs. 1,999

Xbox 360 – Rs. 2,499

*reviewed on Xbox 360
 

Commens Plz!!!!! 

NASA scientists ready to ‘cook’ water from soil on the moon

Interest in the presence of water on the moon has been high recently, what with Chandrayaan finding traces of it and NASA crashing a rocket into the satellite to confirm the same. 

 

Dr. Edwin Ethridge holds his “moon in a bottle” experiment in his lab at the
Marshall Center. Ethridge's team has successfully extracted water from
simulated lunar soil using a standard one-kilowatt microwave oven. His research
is opening new doors of opportunity to harvest water from the moon to sustain
life and produce rocket propellant for future lunar missions
 

Dr. Edwin Ethridge was intrigued by NASA lunar missions in the 1990s which suggested the existence of ice within craters at the moon’s poles. After five years of research, using a conventional kitchen microwave and lunar soil stimulant, Ethridge and his team have literally cooked water out of the soil!
 
“Water is one of the most plentiful compounds in the universe,” said Ethridge, the principal investigator for the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) project at the Marshall Space Flight Centre.
 
The extraction process has shown to be able to retain 99 per cent of the ice it targets. This new discovery could lead to the moon becoming a lunar outpost for further space exploration, as we could harvest water in the form of ice from the moon to sustain life and produce rocket propellant, Ethridge said.
 
“Finding water ice on the moon and Mars creates a potential for In Situ Resource Utilization, or ISRU,” he added. ISRU is the use of resources found on other astronomical objects, like the moon, to complete a science mission. 
 
HOW IT WORKS
To construct the lab experiment, the team used a standard, one-kilowatt microwave oven, a quartz container with a simulant and a separate liquid nitrogen-cooled container with a simulant to mimic the ground under the top layer of lunar soil, also known as regolith. They assembled a turbo-molecular vacuum pump to simulate the moon’s vacuum environment and sealed a vacuum line from the pump to the flask collecting the water, frozen from a liquid nitrogen cold trap. They placed both containers of simulant in the microwave and heated them for two minutes.
 
“Cooking” the simulant helped the team understand how the molecules in the soil react to microwave energy. The primary advantage of using that energy is that microwaves penetrate the soil, heating it from the inside out. The team found that when regolith is warmed from minus-150 degrees Celsius to minus-50 degrees, the water vapor pressure greatly increased. The simulated lunar vacuum drew the water vapor to the surface, permeating through the regolith particles. Then the water vapor collected on the cold trap and condensed back into ice. This process – called sublimation – uses heat to convert a solid into a gas and cools it to condense it back to a solid form without liquefaction.
 
WHY MICROWAVES
As the lunar regolith absorbs the microwaves, the energy is converted to heat. Heat is what is needed to vaporize the water, making the process energy efficient, Ethridge said.
 
“To extract the ice, we need to heat a large volume of regolith and the best way is using microwaves,” Kaukler added. “Solar heating is not an option because the ice on the moon is in the shadowed craters where there is no sunlight. In addition, because the regolith is a superinsulator, other heating methods like solar, laser or electric heating only heats the surface. Microwave heating allows for deeper penetration into the soil.”
 
The regolith simulant and the cold trap were weighed before and after the experiment. The team found that 95 percent of the ice added to the regolith simulant was extracted in about two minutes.
 
“Of the extracted ice, 99 per cent was captured in the cold trap,” said team member Dr. William Kaukler.
 
THE VARIOUS BENEFITS IT OFFERS
The extracted ice can be used for multiple purposes to meet human needs at a lunar outpost. Water also can be split into hydrogen and oxygen by a process known as electrolysis, which separates materials with the use of an electric current. Once split, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules could be used as a fuel or oxidizer. 
 
“Having water, we can obtain oxygen and have the ability to generate rocket fuel. This makes the moon a more viable test bed for space exploration,” said Ethridge.
 
“With our experimental metrics using a one-kilowatt microwave, we found that if we could extract two grams of water ice per minute, we could collect nearly a ton of water per year,” he added. “That would meet the initial manned lunar outpost water resupply requirement.”
 
There are multiple benefits of microwave extraction of ice as well. Microwaves of lower frequency can penetrate a meter or more into the regolith and release the ice without digging or disturbing the surface. 
 
“Eliminating the need to excavate saves equipment payload and more importantly, doesn’t kick up dirt that could adversely affect the astronauts’ spacesuits or equipment,” Kaukler noted.
 
Ethridge said his team is anxiously awaiting the findings from NASA’s Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission which impacted a lunar crater Oct. 9 in search of water. Spectral analysis of the impact plume will help quantify how much ice is hidden in the polar regions of the moon.
 
“It is very important to know how much water there is and how deep it is under the lunar surface,” Ethridge added. “Hopefully, LCROSS will find large quantities of ice and will help us know how much water we have to cook.”

Black hole created on Earth; Romulans expected shortly

If you're waiting to exact revenge on your ancestors you time might just be coming! Scientists over at CERN have succeeded in creating a black hole here on Earth! 


Well, kinda. What they have managed to do is mimic the curvature of space time that exists around a black hole. This "black hole" which works for light of microwave frequencies mimics the the nature of black holes to trap light. 


A black hole is essentially a mass which is so large and condensed, and with such a large gravitational pull that its escape velocity exceeds the speed of light! For Earth, the escape velocity is around 11km/second, as such any object moving faster than this speed will be able to escape the pull of Earth and will end up in space. In a black hole, the gravitation pull is large enough, that light, even at the speed of 299792458km/second is too slow to escape, and ends up in trapped in the black hole. 

 
Don't expect a commercial time machine, or portals to alternate universes any time soon. The application of these pseudo-black-holes is in creating better and more efficient solar panels, a little exciting, but with some great practical applications. The device would "suck" all light around it essentially curving and warping light around the device and feed it to a solar cell at the core.


Even though the device can only work with microwaves right now, to make it work with visible light will be much more complicated due to the smaller wavelength of visible light and requiring much more fine manufacturing of the device's structure.

  
 How cool would it be to have a black hole powered laptop computer! What's left now but to wait for those anti-gravity drives. I hope we didn't upset the Romulans!

Google to launch online book store in 2010, ‘Google Editions’, with half a million books

At the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday, Google announced to the world that it would soon be rolling out an online store for electronic books, or e-books, which would work with any device with a Web browser.
 
Currently, the two main players in the e-book reader market are Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader. The former has a proprietary format that it requires, while Sony is pushing for a more open database of books. Other players, such as Asus and Apple, have previously been reported to be working on touchscreen e-readers.
 
Reuters reports that the Web search giant said it would launch Google Editions in the first half of 2010, initially offering about half a million e-books in partnership with publishers with whom it already cooperates, where they have digital rights.
 
Readers will be able to buy e-books either from Google directly or from other online stores such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. Google will host the e-books and make them searchable.
 
Google has already come under some criticism and scrutiny for its project to scan and make all the books in the world freely available online.
 
OFFLINE ACCESS ENABLED
Tom Turvey, Google's director of strategic partnerships, now explains that the device does not need to be connected to the Internet to read the book after it was accessed once.
 
Once a consumer pays for and accesses a book online, it would be cached into that browser’s memory and accessible again offline at any time – a mechanism which ReadWriteWeb thinks would probably rely on Google Gears. 
  

 
"As long as you can get onto the library, you can access it," says Amanda Edmonds, Google's director of strategic partnerships.
 
Google also said that it is not looking at anything on the hardware side of the e-book market, stressing that e-readers are nowhere in its current or future plans.

[Adobe MAX 2009] Adobe sneaks Flash content on the iPhone

As expected, this year's Adobe MAX 2009 has had its twists. 

One of the most brilliant new feature announcements this MAX:
Adobe Flash Professional CS5 will be able to create native iPhone applications!

Yes, you read that right! 

Apple's SDK terms prohibit the running of any runtime for executing custom code on the iPhone, and as such the Flash Player would need Apple's special blessing in order to come to the iPhone. Despite much enthusiasm, this has not happened yet, and while Apple is adamant on keeping the iPhone a Flash-free zone, Adobe has now found a way for Flash developers to target the iPhone while adhering to the iPhone SDK license.

Using a new functionality to be available in Adobe Flash CS5, any Flash content will now support being exported as a native iPhone application. Flash CS5 will be able to compile Flash content into native ARM code which can run on the iPhone directly instead of running on the Flash runtime. By modifying a Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler to understand ActionScript 3, and utilizing the LLVMs ARM backend, Adobe were able to publish Flash content directly as native iPhone application which run without interpretation.

Flash content created this way will be able to use features provided by Flash API, the Adobe AIR API and also the native iPhone API (although native iPhone controls etc. will not be available). In fact, Flash content can even use the Open GL ES. Among some of the functionality missing (quite possibly in order to adhere to the SDK license), is the embedded webkit browser functionality in AIR, RTMPE, Loading external SWF files with ActionScript, PixelBender Filters, Microphone and video camera access.

These application will also be able to use native iPhone functionality such as multi-touch, screen orientation detection, accelerometer input, geo-location, copy/paste etc.

Unfortunately the iPhone browser will still remain a Flash-free zone, since the runtime will not be available. This is still good news though, especially for developers, since now you can have Flash content running on every major smartphone platform: Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Apple iPhone, and Microsoft Windows Mobile!