E3: Stranglehold, Blacksite dated

Midway has confirmed to Eurogamer that Stranglehold will be available in Europe on 7th September, followed a week later by Blacksite on the 14th.

The publisher also recently announced at its E3 conference in Santa Monica that a demo for Stranglehold will be available to download on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 next month.

Stranglehold is a third-person action game created internally at Midway with the help of director John Woo. It's based on his Hong Kong action film Hard Boiled (that's bundled as Blu-ray in the PS3 special edition), which puts you in the shoes of a rough-and-tumble cop called Tequila, who is hell-bent on taking a crime syndicate down to, er, Chinatown.

Chow Yun Fat is reprising his roll as the renegade law enforcer, in what's being described as "Max Payne with bells on" by our editor Kristan Reed - there's slow motion balletic gunplay and everything. We got the chance to go hands on with it just the other day, and you can read our first impressions of Stranglehold elsewhere on the site. You might also want to have a peek at the freshly launched website.

Blacksite: Area 51, on the other hand, is a first-person shooter for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC - which deals with issues as complex as insurgencies on US soil, and US foreign policy and its impact on people from different backgrounds. There's a giant octopus monster in it, too.

A demo for it is already on Live, and it shows where creative director Harvey Smith (of Looking Glass and Ion Storm fame) is attempting to go with the game. Head over to our Blacksite gamepage to find our first impressions of this promising title, as well as an interview with Smith himself.