I’m just pulling together some rambly thoughts about my year in games for the site. Which reminds me that I wrote about one of my faves for Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell over at EG towers, and makes me think I could link to it as an aperitif or something. And I totally can. Lots on Saints Row: The Third and yours truly. I didn’t even get into my apostrophe confusion, which could be another couple of thousand words, but would be less sex obsessed.

Despite its grotesquely high bodycount and the horrible and humiliating ways in which it rises, the utter absurdity of Saints Row: The Third makes it one of the silliest games of this or any other year. In celebration of the ludicrous actions that the inhabitants of Steelport are performing, Volition have added a map with a live feed of actions across the city to the game’s website. Unfortunately, because so many people are playing, it’s mostly updating with run of the mill vehicular manslaughter and lethal blows to the balls. But the far more entertaining stat tracker has captured some frankly alarming information about what’s happened since launch.

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This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

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Having completed Saints Row: The Third, I’m the Earth’s most qualified person to tell you all about it. Having already detailed a great many elements of the game in two recent previews, below I take on the task of explaining why such an excessively immature game is in fact quite so very mature. The game is out tomorrow in the Americas, before a team of dedicated THQ staff begin frantically rowing across the vast ocean of the internet to release it in the UK on Friday. Read on to see Wot I think.>

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