EA Games just finished their presentation which was being hosted by Thomas Zeitner, Managing Director of Electronic Arts Germany. Instead of displaying their entire catalogue, they picked out the most important titles: Skate, Fifa 08 and Rockband. For the Wii they had footage for two new titles: Boogie and Smarty Pants, but you can read more about that on Nintendic.

The presentation started off with a few not very interesting numbers about gaming in general in Germany, but they can probably be applied to the rest of the world as well. Right now there’s only a small percentage of hardcore gamers and that number is only increasing very slowly, but the group of casual gamers is expected to be growing quite a bit.

One of EA’s highest anticipated original titles this year is Skate. A developer came on the stage to give us a small demonstration. Important about Skate is that you won’t be using any of the buttons on your controller very much. Only the analog sticks have to be moved around in order to control the person on the board. Another feature is the replay mode which allows you to replay your actions in real time. During the replay, sound is also slowed down which makes viewing back a crash very dramatic. Just like with Tony Hawk’s latest Pro Skater game you unlock new areas as you progress. According to a press sheet the game will only run in 1080P on Xbox 360 although it doesn’t explicitly state that’s in running natively in that resolution.

For Fifa ‘08 they invited two guys on stage of which one of them was playing the game on a PS3 console while the other one was explaining a couple of interesting things about it. Despite the game running on a Playstation 3, it won’t differ that much from the Xbox 360 version. It’s now also been confirmed that the both versions will run in at 60FPS. While Fifa 07 featured a new system to control the players, it’s been enhanced further. Skill and Signature moves are now introduced of which the latter is only available to special “good players” like Ronaldinho who has his specific moves. You can now also exit an animation while it’s in progress which gives you even more control over how the players behave since you don’t have to wait for an animation to finish anymore. If you’re done with a match you can now upload it online for other people to watch. If you keep sucking at the game there’s offline training available where you get feedback of how you performed and you can try to improve on specific points.

A while ago EA said that their “dream” was to implement 11 versus 11 online play by 2010. Today they said they’re one step closer to this as Fifa ‘08 will feature 5vs5 online play, but it won’t be available out of the box. It will become available later as a free add-on.

• 35% more power than previous engine, 1000 decisions per second
• 15.000 players
• 620 teams
• 30 leagues
• 60 tournaments of which 35 officially licensed

The final big game that had an on-stage demonstration was Rock Band of which we showed you a little footage already yesterday. After talking about a couple of game highlights like competition (online) band mode they quickly moved on to the live demonstration. The game got a pretty big applause from the crowd as the people on stage were pretty good at it. No definite release date has been set for any of the platforms but it’s still supposed to come out later this year in the US and first quarter 2008 in Europe. A Playstation 2 version was also announced for Q1 2008.

For information on Boogie and Smarty Pants head to Nintendic.