Mafia Wars South Africa Challenge Mission: Fix the Global Cup

Over the past few days, we noticed Counterfeit Tickets in the free gifts section, and it turns out those were all to prepare us for the Mafia Wars South Africa Challenge Mission, where your mafia's mission is to fix the Global Cup. This new mission works much like Mafia Wars Paris and Mafia Wars London Challenge Missions before it -- you have 15 days to complete all three Chapters of the challenge.

Instead of Passports, this challenge requires you to collect Counterfeit tickets, which can be received as gifts and as loot from jobs and fighting. There's also a heat meter, which will only allow you to do jobs a number of times before the cops catch onto your activities (and then you have to wait 8 hours for the meter to drop before getting back to work).

Once you finish each Chapter, you'll add a limited edition reward to your armory. Here are the rewards:

Chapter 1
Goalie
A: 45 D: 58

Chapter 2
Tiebreaker
A: 76 D: 42

Chapter 3
Penalty Kick
A: 110 D: 59

Over the weekend, Mafia Wars South Africa will have double mastery bonus, which means that it'll be much easier to get through these missions. Many (me included) have had trouble finishing the previous Challenge Missions, so it's key to put the work in over this holiday weekend to make sure you fix the World Cup and take home all of that extra loot.

Mafia Wars exclusive Vegas Chips: Get 'em while they're still hot

UPDATE (7/4): The Rack of Chips is an item that can be sent as a Free Gift. Even though the Chips were only supposed to be available on Saturday, July 3, they're still seem to be hanging around today as well. To send you friends a Rack of Chips, click HERE. Happy Fourth of July everybody!

As part of the Mafia Wars 'Must Play Weekend,' the game is rolling out exclusive 'Vegas Chips' today only. From the Coming Soon section in the game:

    Mafia Wars: Las Vegas is almost here , and this Saturday, July 3rd, you'll get a chance to loot exclusive "Vegas Chips". These chips will give you an advantage when Vegas releases, so you'd better collect as many as you can get ahead of your Mafia rivals.

I haven't found any of these just yet, but if you have any tips on where to find them,

Mafia Wars undergoing HUGE changes: A new look, more boss battles

Mafia Wars as we know it is preparing to roll out some MAJOR changes that includes a complete visual overhaul and many new boss fights that will drop game-changing loot, such as new properties and weapons that will give you a permanent boost to your stats.

mafia wars new look
The unofficial word is that only new players currently have access to this overhauled Mafia Wars, which will serve as a testing ground until Zynga rolls out the game to everyone else. There's also lots of discussion on how much Flash this new version of the game will use, and how that will affect the overall performance. I recently restarted Mafia Wars from scratch and while re-playing the first New York chapters, was wondering when/if more bosses would be added to the game. Looks like the answer is 'yes.'

Check out the images in the gallery below to get a taste of what you have to look forward to (all screens courtesy of Mafia Wars master 7eetprox125.) IMAGES COMING SOON.

Gallery: The New Mafia Wars

New Mafia Wars intro movie adds slight storyline to Facebook game

There's an overhauled Mafia Wars (a.k.a. 'New Mafia Wars') circulating Facebook, and if you are a new player (or open a new Facebook account), you can check it out for yourself. I did just that and discovered that the game has a new intro movie that adds a bit of a storyline to all of that clicking we've been doing for the past two years. See for yourself in the video above.

What do you think about the idea of a New Mafia Wars?

Mafia Wars rolls out trigger-happy trailer to promote $25K contest

In addition to blowing up an armored truck, Mafia Wars is giving away $25K as part of a promotion for the recently released Vegas expansion. To promote the promotion, Mafia Wars creator Zynga released this graphic-novel style trailer, where generic mafia members steal a truck from NYC, roadtrip to Vegas, snag more cash, then walk into the sunset with moneybags in hand. There's bullets; there's bloodshed; there's even a babe -- good thing the long arm of the ESRB doesn't extend to Facebook games.

Mafia Wars: Atlantic City coming soon for mobile devices only

Mafia Wars Atlantic City
There will soon be a new location for Mafia Wars players to wreak havoc, Atlantic City, according to a leak caught by Mafia Wars Maniac. However, the new location will only be a city available to mobile phones--not to be confused with Zynga's Mafia Wars game for iPhone, which oddly has little to no connection with the Facebook game.

Atlantic City can only be accessed by going to m.mafiawars.com from a web browser on a mobile device, but the content is currently in beta testing and no launch date has been announced. Fortunately, the leaked promo page in Mafia Wars gives a great amount of detail as to what we'll be enjoying in Atlantic City.

Players Level 18 and above will be able to tackle this city using the same stats and items from their Facebook profile (finally!) as well as use their Las Vegas currency to complete the jobs. There will be an exclusive daily bonus for playing on your mobile device accompanied by two impressive reward items for mastering the location: the Automatic .22 with 105 Attack and 98 Defense and the Bullet 44 OET vehicle (99 Attack, 116 Defense). Bookmark the website on your mobile browser and stay tuned here for when Atlantic City finally goes live.

Mafia Wars Atlantic City pillages Android, Blackberry and webOS

Mafia Wars Atlantic City
While Mafia Wars Atlantic City landed on iPhone browsers some time ago, Zynga recently announced that the new and improved mobile version of the gang busting game has finally arrived on Android, Blackberry and webOS browsers. While iPhone, Blackberry and webOS players can simply type "m.mafiawars.com" (iPhone users can even save it as a web app), Android users have the option to use GetJar to access the new game as well.

By following this link: "http://www.getjar.com/Mafia-Wars" you can specify your Android phone model and download the game. Mafia Wars Atlantic City, which makes liberal use of your mobile browser, was developed using HTML5, TechCrunch reports. And considering Apple's iOS devices do not support Flash, this must be how it works on the iPhone as well. The tech blog also reports that the recently announced Zynga Poker for Android will be here later this week as Live Poker. To get a better idea of what this new mobile edition of Mafia Wars might be like on the other platforms, check out our detailed look at Mafia Wars Atlantic City on the iPhone.

Mafia Wars: Earn a free gift daily through the New Year from official fan page

Zynga is looking to end the year of 2010 with a bang in Mafia Wars, as they have launched a new gifting event in Mafia Wars, that will see Zynga gifting fans of the game on Facebook with a single free gift, once per day, from now until the New Year.

Zynga didn't exactly announce the range of gift types that we'd be receiving, but they did already give us our gift for today - a single Health Point. Sure, this may not seem like a lot, but now, you won't have to spend one of your hard-earned Skill Points to raise your health another point, and can use that Skill Point elsewhere, thanks to this free boost. To be clear, this is a permanent addition to your maximum amount of Health Points in the game, not a simple 1-point refill, making it a bit more worthwhile to claim.

What will tomorrow's gift be? How about the gift after that? Will these be status updates, or in-game items like weapons or vehicles? All of that remains to be seen at this point, but what is clear is how easy it is to earn these new items.

Simply become a fan of the official Mafia Wars fan page on Facebook. From there, you'll see your daily free gift via fan page posts, and can click on links provided to head to the game and claim your free gift. Told you it was easy!