Saints Row was one of the first “proper” sandbox game to appear on the home consoles, before the avalanche of them hit shortly afterwards. Developers Volition, Inc were also going to create a Gamecube version, which was then scrapped following the announcement of the Wii. As with the previous two titles, you control the nameless leader of the Third Street Saints gang. Having survived the cliffhanger ending of the original game, as well as defeating rival gangs and corporations left, right and centre during Saints Row 2, the Saints have become national celebrities, complete with their own fashion lines, sodas and other endorsements.

Hands-on demos of the game have been circulating in the US, and many have spoken about the sheer depth the campaign is likely to offer. It is expected that the main campaign itself should last about 20 hours, plus there are plenty of side quests and  other activities, plus I’ve always found the replayability of the first two games to be pretty high. I’ve played through parts of Saints Row 2 just to relive some of the set pieces, and I am sure Saints Row 3 will be no different. The game opens up with a particularly bombastic bank vault mission, which looks like it was pulled right out of the birthing pool following one night stand between the Fast and Furious movies and Oceans Eleven.

A new crime syndicate, known only as The Syndicate (Holy Crackdown 2 flashbacks, Batman…) is now in control of the city of Stilwater, having slimed their way up from the foundations, so the Saints decide to set up shop in the nearby city of Steelport. Three new gangs await you here, The Morning Star, Luchadores, and Deckers, as well as the military who stick their awe in later in the game, by order of the Mayor, not to mention Syndicate folk who pop up like Godfather Whack-a-Moles. The missions, as previous titles have displayed, are both varied and bonkers at all times, seemingly taking inspiration for many of them from some of the best action movies around. One lead designer for the game has quoted both Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thriller Eraser and The Hangover as starting points for some of the laugh out loud missions we can expect from this third instalment.

Gameplay seems to be the aspect of the game that has had the most development since Saints Row 2. The driving mechanics, as with most games, have been middling and average at best, but at least competent. Third time around, the driving seems smoother, with longer, less cluttered streets to drive through in our new home of Steelport City. The over the top nature of the missions continues on with the fighting and interaction, as “nut shots” are rewarded, while you can even drop kick through a car window to get in instead of using the door. Wow. Right down to the weapons we’ve seen so far, Saints Row: The Third will be unmatched in the creativity stakes. I mean any game that has a weapon range that goes from “purple, floppy dildo” to “the manapult”, a device capable of sucking in victims, before flinging them around at will, is likely to be unmatched for the time being.

I don’t even have to go into how good this game looks in demos and trailers, but I will let you be the judge of that. With the all new “Whored Mode” to play through, as well as a playing through the huge campaign with a cast of brilliantly written characters, this game is likely to cause that good kind of upset that is so rarely achieved these days.

The following trailer is rated Mature, and contains scenes of a gimp pulling a chariot, and a bunny firing a rocket launcher. Enjoy!

Blockado Deep Sea

The first two titles in the series, Blockado Jungle and Desert respectively, scored eight points a piece out of ten, while Blockado Mountain, the third title in the series (which I in fact played first) scored a resounding nine out of ten. And with only some minor tweaking required, alongside the continuation of the consistently good work developers Bitfield have already been putting into these titles, there was every chance that Blockado Deep Sea could get a perfect score and be hailed as the second coming of the puzzle messiah.

So you all should know the drill by now, if not go back and read my previous reviews of the original three titles. Blockado is a sliding-gliding-pushing-smushing-treasure-pleasure of a puzzle game, which requires of the player to do nothing more than relinquish a treasure chest out of a level, by navigating it along the horizontal or vertical axis, moving everything else that happens to be in the way. This includes, but is not limited to, standard blocks, ice blocks, spring blocks, magnet blocks, blocks that don’t move at all, tunnel blocks, coloured blocks, pressure activated blocks and… erm… starting blocks? No, wait, ignore that last one… Anyway, as you can guess, over the course of the first three games, the developers established all the different components of their puzzles, ramping up the difficulty a notch or two at every turn. So what’s different in Deep Sea, I hear you ask?

Well absolutely bloody nothing is almost the answer I have to give you. There is one minor change however, and that is the tweaking of the first person viewpoint manoeuvring system. My only major complaint for all three games so far was the hyper-sensitive camera-moving icon, which you could move pixel by pixel into the perfect place for you to view the puzzle before you, only for you to try and remove your thumb and see the whole puzzle twirl about 47 degrees to the left, skewing everything you were trying to achieve. So after much wrangling, and a bit of sweat from the boys at Bitfield, it would appear they’ve adjusted the camera, a bit. Maybe. I can’t be entirely certain, but it definitely seems to react more slowly to greater movements of my thumb on the icon, meaning when I move my thumb half an inch to the left, the level rotates accordingly. Perhaps I have just gotten used to it with time, but I certainly can’t complain as much about it now.

And although there have been no new puzzle elements added to Deep Sea, there have been some previously unexplored combinations of puzzle elements that have made their first appearance here. Like putting the magnets blocks onto ice blocks, so you have blocks that whiz around until they bash into something else, whether you like it or not. This is definitely the most difficult of the four games, but I never truly felt the difficult until the last ten levels of the main puzzle campaign, and even then I was only really stuck when I came to the “Hard” puzzles. You see, each game has a campaign split into four sections, each with ten levels apiece. You solve the first five, then have a choice of solving two “Ordinary” puzzles, before reaching the final puzzle, or take the difficult road and try on two “Hard” puzzles for size. “Ordinary” puzzles allow you to ask the game to assist with their solving, while the “Hard” ones are ruthless in their determination to pulverise your brain into a fine mist.

As with the previous titles, there are plenty of Bonus Puzzles, and extra ones, which can be downloaded or scanned via QR codes, using the camera on your iPhone. Nifty! These help add to the longevity, but many of the Bonus Puzzles this time around were rather similar. I don’t whether they were intended to have such a theme, but it seemed like each puzzle just had a couple of blocks moved around, before the developers had to go off to lunch or something, so they said “Well, that’ll do”. One thing not skimped on, as usual, are the graphics and music that accompany the game. The sound effects, in particular, I must give credit to, there’re some fantastic underwater ambiences, bubbling and gurgling while you play, with an occasional blast of whale song somewhere off into the distance. Seaweed coils and drifts around the field of play effortlessly, and everything fits the deep sea theme to a tee.

So, scores on the door time… Well I don’t think I can give Deep Sea that perfect figure, because it didn’t do anything to move the game as a whole on from Mountain, apart from adding a slight glimmer of difficulty to proceedings. How much difficulty it adds is up to your level of play. For me, having gone back and replayed some 200+ levels of Blockado, getting three stars across the board, I think I have become too accustomed to the current ins and outs of the puzzling elements in the game. I think if there are any more games to come in this franchise, why not take the movie route, and give the series a bit of a reboot? Take away some of the current puzzle solving tools, and give us something fresh and exciting. The perfect score has eluded Bitfield once again, but they can be proud in producing what I class as on of the finest puzzling series’ around for iOS gamers, and you should make your way through this series as I have… Just in the correct order, mind you.

MLG Rating: 9/10
Platform: iOS Release Date: 17/10/2011

Disclosure: Midlife Gamer were provided a digital copy of Blockado Deep Sea for review purposes by the promoter. The title was reviewed over the course of three days on a iPhone. For more information on what our scores mean, plus details of our reviews policy, click here.

A new feature also possible with the app is the ability for gamers to be able to issue unique custom challenges to their friends. This could involve such challenges as a friend to having to survive for a certain amount of time with limited defence capabilities, using only certain types of weaponry, or having to achieve a certain number of headshots in 24 hours on the game’s multiplayer mode.

These custom challenges can be issued for both Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo: Reach, and the rewards for completing these challenges will be credits that can be spent in Halo: Reach‘s progression system.

We received an extra bonus as well, with the full Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary achievement list leaked at roughly the same time as the app announcement. The game will feature 44 achievements, which focus mainly on the main campaign.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary will be available on November 15 in North America and November 18 in Europe for Xbox 360.

The most intriguing gameplay mechanic that has been announced is the addition of a deeper crime and punishment focus from the AI citizens within the game. If you commit a crime in broad daylight, and in front of a witness, they have the ability to go and report you to the nearest constabulary as soon as they can, at which point a bounty is placed upon your head and you become a wanted man/woman/whatever.

The fun, however, comes in the simple fact that, without a witness, there is no crime. Silence the poor soul who is grassing you up and you will get away scot-free. Of course if you kill them in front of another witness then you’re gonna have to kill them too, but you get the idea. So next time you decide to boot a chicken up the backside, or give the back of your hand to some bar wench, thus severing her tiny, golden-locked head from her slender neck, you’re going to have to make damn sure there are no witnesses to this, or at the very least you’ve got you best boots on.

FIRE-DOUKEN!

Ew, you got blood all over my screen...

It’s nice to see a game almost egging the player on to be bad, without having to have those awful, forced moral choice game mechanics, which do no more than make you wonder whether the “good” rewards are going to be any sweeter than the “bad” rewards. There’s even a trophy included in the game for escaping from jail, and now we’ve also got covering up crime and perverting the course of justice to add to that list. No one likes a goody two-shoes, particularly Bethesda, it would seem.

And as well as wanting you to be bad, Bethesda are also throwing down the gauntlet for you to be fast. The Elder Scrolls speed run, organised by Bethesda for two employees of the game to go head-to-head for completion of the main campaign, took place in the past few days. The two results are astounding, not just because they are fast, but because the two players were only 20 seconds apart from each other, with the winner, Sam Bernstein, completing the game in a paltry 2 hours 16 minutes and 10 seconds. That. Is. Nuts! Fear not though, worried consumers, because these guys have spent the better part of three years studying and playing through the various components of this game. All y’all are still gonna have to put a good twenty-thirty hours in for your speed runs, not to mention and extra hundred or so hours if you’re going for full completion.

FIRE-DOUKEN +2

Cold... So very cold... *shivers*

Finally, in the last week we have also gotten our first look at the world map for the game, which shows itself to be just as big, if not bigger, than that of Oblivion. The major difference here is the inclusion of a much larger mountainous region to be explored, right across the continent. We are certain every square inch of this map will be traversable in some way, and many can barely contain themselves for what else we might see before the release of the game on November 11th.

For now, I will leave you with that shot of the world map. If we get any more Skyrim news, you guys will be the first to know!

Here is a list of all the games that are currently on sale to OnLive UK members only. PlayPack subscribers who pay $9.99/month for unlimited access to over 100 different games can also take an additional 30% off the sale price. The Non-PlayPack and PlayPack sale prices are listed below:

• Borderlands – £2.50 (Non-Playpack) or £1.50 (PlayPack Subscribers)
• Borderlands Game of the Year Edition – £5.00 (Non-Playpack) or £3.50 (PlayPack Subscribers)
• Duke Nukem Forever – £7.50 (Non-Playpack) or £5.25 (PlayPack Subscribers)
• Mafia II – £3.75 (Non-Playpack) or £2.62 (PlayPack Subscribers)
• MLB 2K10 – £3.75 (Non-Playpack) or £2.62 (PlayPack Subscribers)
• NBA 2K10 – £2.50 (Non-Playpack) or £1.75 (PlayPack Subscribers)

While OnLive has said previously that they will hold sales for both UK and US gamers, this is the first UK specific sale other than the “First game for £1.00″ sale that the OnLive service was launched with last month. Future sales are expected to be both region specific and service-wide in the future.

So what will be your first OnLive sale purchase be? Cheap Borderlands is calling out to me!

Okay so it isn’t quite the cocaine of the gaming world, but I would rather sit here and play Blocky for the price of a McDonalds meal than dish out good money on any number of titles from the All-You-Can-Eat bucket of gritty, brown space marine-a-thons. Blocky comes from the good people at Think Flow Games, otherwise known as my new BFFs.  It can only be described as a the lovechild of Pacman and Geometry Wars, if the parents had firstly enough an evening of acute RPG action prior to conception. And while you get that image of Ms. Pacman out of your head, I’ll tell you why Blocky is a must-buy to keep you warm on these chilly autumn days.

Blocky is a rock, or more technically, I guess, a block. It matters not, as all you need to do is keep your little block safe from ninjas, swinging spike balls, electric charges and a selection of other enemies. Actually, if I could just get my only real complaint out of the way with now, is that the enemies get a bit samey after a while, with (I think) there being only seven enemies to defend yourself against over the course of the game. Nonetheless, the enemies that are there for you to avoid are all cute and colourful and each have their own way of trying to knock your block off. Literally.

You direct Block around the screen using the left stick, avoiding enemies and picking up power ups as you go along. These include the ability to let you eat ninjas, a magnet to force the metallic enemies out of your way, coins (or moneky) to purchase further power ups and upgrades, and a few other tricks that slow down enemies and destroy small clusters of problematic pests. Getting to the power ups in time is all part of the fun, and sometimes you’ll get cornered and before you know it, they’ve flashed up and flashed right back off again, leaving you with increasing numbers of ninjas and other predators to worry about.

The two modes to play the game in are Retro, which is essentially a one-life, one-chance mode, and Main mode, which is pretty much your campaign of levels to work through. Things start of easy, introducing you to the styles of enemy waves you will meet, and how to despatch them. Some waves require you to just survive and wait out the time limit, or ask you to eat a certain number of enemies, or even push those evil metal nasties into black holes by way of your magnet upgrade. The waves and enemies get nicely mixed up, so you never feel like you are doing the same task too often.

You earn experience points and the aforementioned monetary gains as you progress, and when Blocky levels up you can then increase his four stats, which include useful attributes like moneky magnetism and power-up duration. Every time you gather and use your power ups, more experience points are earned, which then means more ways in which you can make Blocky stronger. Moneky buys you power ups to use when you are stuck in a corner, which you operate by pressing the right trigger button, and then selecting one of the four coloured buttons to pick your desired power up. It’s incredibly simple, yet foolishly addictive.

Other fun unlockables include hats for Blocky to wear, which range from a cute side ponytail and ribbon combo, to a fez, just to add another gloss of charm to the game. Even when things get overwhelming and the lives start dwindling away, the charm and atmosphere this game creates is just perfect for chilled gaming sessions that have a bit of a ‘kick’ to them. The combination of simple RPG elements and good-old fashioned arcade fun, with just a dash of silliness and aesthetic delight, all comes together nicely to provide one of the best XBLIG experiences I’ve had this year, especially for the generous price the game comes at.

Plus, in what other game do you have the ability to both consume and hammer ninjas to death? Exactly…

MLG Rating: 9/10
Platform: Xbox 360 Release Date: 11/10/2011

Disclosure: Midlife Gamer were provided a digital copy of Blocky for review purposes by the promoter. The title was reviewed over the course of one week on an Xbox 360. For more information on what our scores mean, plus details of our reviews policy, click here.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, set for release on November 2nd exclusively for PS3, is undoubtedly going to be one of the best looking games on the PS3, especially with the history of the previous titles being the best of the bunch when they were released in 2007 and 2009 respectively. The latest trailer sees Drake staggering up a huge sand dune, accessorised in this years most fabulous scarf of choice, praying that he is not walking into another mirage. It soon becomes clear that this place is no mirage, and the gunmen and explosions that appear are also no illusion, as Drake is thrown into a desert brawl.

Leg cocked, hand on hip, let's have a fabulous gun fight!

*gasps* Made it! Now where's the hotel?

The third, and potentially final instalment, in the series sees Nathan Drake, with his mentor and lifelong friend, Victor Sullivan, travel the globe in search of the legendary lost city, the Iram of the Pillars. Going away from the jungle environments we are more familiar with from past Uncharted games, this game will see players in the new desert lands from the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a ruined chateau hidden amongst the forests in France. The desert graphics in particular look incredible, with beautiful heat distortions and mirage effects aplenty in some other gameplay trailers and demos. Watching all this is stereoscopic 3D could prove to be tantalising for even the most uncertain third-dimensionalphobes.

That isn’t to say everything is new this time round. There is still plenty of the good ol’ fashioned ducking and diving gun fighting we know all too well from Drake, as well as treasure hunting and those all important huge set pieces. Multiplayer is back too, with both competitive and co-operative gameplay, offering all new experiences on a scale not ever seen in an Uncharted title.

Run-'n-Gun Fun

I was gonna wear an orange headscarf! Take that!

The music in this series has always been another strong point, and as you’ll hear from the trailer below, with the all-new Arabian themes in place of the jungle sounds and effects, it is another rung up the ladder of perfection that this game is climbing.

Naughty Dog are very proud of the storyline and writing in this franchise particularly, and had this to say:

“Fortune hunter Nathan Drake is catapulted headlong into an adventure that takes him on a daring trek into the heart of the Arabian Desert in a search for the fabled ‘Atlantis of the Sands.’ This journey pits him and his mentor Victor Sullivan against the occult treachery of a shadowy clandestine organization and its ruthless leader. When the terrible secrets of this lost city are unearthed, Drake’s quest descends into a desperate bid for survival that strains the limits of his endurance and forces him to confront his deepest fears.”

Check out the trailer below, and check off another day on the calendar countdown to this game’s release.

In this piece I will be incorporating the age old war between the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises, the latter of which has their newest instalment arriving on the scene right after former’s title, as well as my view on the beta, and finally my hands-on impression with the game’s multiplayer mode from Eurogamer, which saw myself and some 30 other Midlife Gamers teaming up across two rounds to duel it out, BF style.

BF vs COD

It’s really difficult to separate the two franchises and crown one as a winner, because for every good point each one has, there’s a bad one to follow. Each series has a huge number of incredibly loyal fans; pre-order and purchase records have been smashed on numerous occasions; the hype that surrounds any release from these two franchises is equivocal to a Justin Bieber cameo on Glee, and let us not forget that both Activision and EA are two of the biggest video game companies in the world today. So what does BF3 have to help put it above and beyond its arch rival?

I touched on hype just a moment ago, and that’s where I think a big difference lies here between BF3 and MW3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and MW2 might have set the bar too high when it comes to the games being bigged up prior to launch. And let us not forget then the somewhat disappointing start MW2 had when it came out of the starting blocks. The game was buggy and needed several quick patches to get everything to how it should be, and there was the overwhelming sense that it all seemed just a little too familiar. It could be that Activision have set the hype bar too high, ahead of the release of MW3, which, I feel, hasn’t been as widely publicised as BF3 has been in recent weeks and months.

There is also the big multiplayer showdown. Many COD fans have been left with a bitter taste in their mouth, following the issues with cheating and imbalance in the multiplayer, particularly for MW2 and Black Ops. Don’t get me wrong, the multiplayer functions of the game are partially why the COD franchise is one of the biggest and most popular shooters in the world. That doesn’t mean it still hasn’t had such major complaints from those in the know, which is doubly problematic for Activision when you consider how critically acclaimed the multiplayer for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was, and still is.

Finally we have to consider that, with the power of the Frostbite 2 engine on it’s side, BF3 could surpass MW3 in the graphics department, not only in how things look on a static basis, but also how smoothly things operate when it comes down to the online multiplayer and massively destructive set-pieces in-game. As much as we gamers and writers hate to admit it, the visual appeal of a game does have a lot of weight to it still, especially in this day and age when just about any game can look pretty good. Only time will tell if these possible advantages will put BF3 out on top.

Beta Blues

Not being a PC owner myself often proves annoying when it comes to situations like this. However, having tracked down a friend of mine with a great PC, we played through the beta together and I got a few hours with it.

First big thing for me, the guns! Oh my, the guns! Is it just me or do they seem to have a lot more kick than they did in BF:BC2? I don’t know if it was just the PC version, but I seem to remember my Eurogamer experience of the Xbox 360 version felt just as weighty as well. I’m looking forward to what else I get to play around with in the actual game, because I didn’t get an huge sense of the destruction that can be caused from some of the more heavy duty weaponry I am expecting to have access to.

Up close and personal, the PC graphics were stunning on a top-of-the-range home-built machine, but I’m not sure how much of a downgrade would occur if the machine was not quite as powerful. There were a couple of minor bugs (some shaking issues when lying down next to obstacles, for one), and one invisible corner that blocked my path on a couple of occasions, but these will certainly be ironed out before the finished product hits the shelves at the end of the month. One thing I will say impressed me is the running in the game, which felt very fluid and, combined with the enhanced graphics and lighting technology, made it feel more like watching a recording of somebody running, as oppose to just me playing a game.

Midlife Gamer Multiplayer Mash-Up

The Midlife Gamer community members present at Eurogamer were allowed to cut into the queue to form two large BF3 groups to each have a fifteen minute play-through of the multiplayer. So, taking up my seat next to Adamski, I got myself ready for what I certain would be fifteen minutes of– oh, so I’m dead already? Erm… Okay.

In fact dying made up a large chunk of my experience with the multiplayer mode. We all started off running around a large park, split into two groups, some of us attacking and some of us defending. There was quite a large chunk of time between dying and coming back onto the field of play, so having died an embarrassing twelve times over the course of my play through, I lost out on about six minutes of gameplay.

Adamski fared much better than I, so I watched someone a little more expereinced in my downtime. The fluidity of the movement seen in the beta was ever present in the multiplayer, with all of us crawling across the field of play like militarised ants. From the park, we soon descended into an underground tube section, where the gameplay became a little more frantic as we were introduced to a myriad of hiding spaces, piles of debris to use for cover, and not to mention a different view on the graphics. Everything got a bit darker, with fluorescent orange lighting showing us the way back onto the over-world and bringing the battle to a ruined city scape.

And so, final thoughts? All I can say is, Call of Duty fans better get their best ammunition prepared, because they’re gonna have a tough fight on their hands.

Austrian game developers, Nordic Games, have today published the first set of new screenshots from “ArcaniA: Fall of Setarrif”, the exciting new stand-alone expansion of ArcaniA which will be available for ArcadiA fans to download on October 25th 2011.

In “ArcaniA: Fall of Setarrif” an ominous, demonic force devastates the Eastern lands of Argaan, heading towards the coastal city of Setarrif. Meanwhile, King Rhobar III mobilises his royal military forces to conquer the last of the rebels. To make matters worse, the route to Setarrif is blocked by a volcanic eruption. Only the most simplistic of history books will describe this series of unfortunate events as a coincidence. The outcome of this tale depends on the nameless hero and his strongest allies…

As you can see from the screens below, the game certainly looks pretty, and these smaller screens don’t even do the justice the full size images do. Expansive scenery, thrilling combat and challenging exploration are all a key to what makes this PC franchise so popular, and why this add-on pack is set to be a big seller from the developers.

The development of the add-on started around mid-2010, although it was planned earlier during the development of the previous title in the series, Arcania: Gothic 4. The stand-alone expansion pack is the next installment of the ArcaniA storyline and will be available for download on October 25th 2011. This is the first game to be released by the recently established Nordic Games, based in Vienna, Austria, and from the mostly positive early reception of the game, is unlikely to be the studio’s last effort.

Here is the trailer released earlier this year for the game.

The first puzzle appears to be a video montage of scenes from previous Assassin’s Creed games, after viewing you are required to arrange various keywords relating to the video you have seen. The first puzzle was a good challenge to get players going, and I have high expectations for further puzzles to come as we draw nearer and nearer to the release of Revelations.

There are a total of five puzzles expected to be released on the site, so potentially one per week between now and release day of the game.

There are numerous rumours flying around as to what this may unlock, and indeed of there are any true rewards for completing all the tasks. Ubisoft have teamed up with other online games sites to offer real prizes separate from the actual bonuses linked into the site, so it is worth checking out.

Maybe they’ll send you your very own “Make Your Own Hookblade Kit” if you complete it? Answers on a postcard, please!

Check out the latest trailer from Ubisoft, which shows off Ezio and his new bombing talents. Explosive weapons can be crafted by Ezio in about 300 different combinations, all of which have different ingredients and desired effects on the target. Some are used for wide spread damage on enemies, and some, such as the Cherry Bomb, are all Ezio needs to provide a quick distraction to allow him to escape from his pursuers. No more hiding in haystacks then?