Xbox 360 Previews

With ex-Sony man Phil Harrison on board and fingers in practically every gaming pie (thanks to distribution deals with publishers the world over), and a brand that everyone recognises, Atari has the foundations in place to become great once again. But, most shockingly, it's actually got some great games to back it up. Here are five games Atari were showing off that we reckon you're going to want to play.

Surviving a near extinction level event in an ‘Ark’, you are thawed out by an untimely earthquake to find you’ve been woken too early, and the world is a wasteland populated by mutants, scavengers, and tailors who used to make clothes for Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth storyline.

Beautiful game engines for less than beautiful beasts roaming beautifully grimy corridors. From their birth in 1992, this has been the id way. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake: grim, grimmer, grimmest. However, if up until now their artistic direction was based solely on Event Horizon, then Rage marks an influx of new DVDs onto the id film shelf.

This is running in real-time? On a 360? Right now? What? That’s not typical over-eager preview hyperbole – those were my actual thoughts while id’s Tim Willits and Matt Hooper walked me and a gaggle of press through some early moments in Rage.

I knew it was going to look spectacular. It’s id. It’s the developer that, as they put it, “invented first-person shooters,” and Rage is their Next Big Thing...

Despite our previous story about its multiplayer modes, RAGE is a single player game, through and through. But beyond the fact that it looked a lot like Borderlands with a more realistic art style (post-apocalyptic desert setting, buggies, lots of guns), we didn’t know a lot about how it would really play. Now we do, and sheer variety of things to do surprised us...

I got a chance recently to not only play Rage for over two hours, but also interview president of id Software, Todd Hollenshead. It was interesting to hear the thoughts of a guy who’s seen and been a part of the evolution of the first-person shooter, especially right after I played Rage, which clearly has learned from the very developers who id originally inspired with its own work. The difference between id’s last game, Doom 3, and Rage, shows a developer not afraid...

This is id Software’s first properly new game since 1996. Just think about that. Various versions of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein have marched from id’s Texas offices over the past 12 years, yet the team’s creative muscles haven’t flexed on anything fresh for more than a decade.

The world is a post-apocalyptic dustbowl populated by mutants and proud retro-fitted scavengers with fast, growling cars, deadly makeshift crossbows and upturned woks for hats. You, the unwitting outsider, emerging prematurely from your Armageddon-proof panic room, find you’re somehow better at surviving in this hostile environment than those who’ve been living in it their whole lives.

A lone man struggles to the surface from a vault deep underground, wearing the garb of a long-dead civilization. Earth is an arid wasteland, packed with warring bandit tribes and mutants, as the survivors of a world-wide disaster struggle to stay alive day-to-day. Call us crazy if you like, but we’re sure we’ve been here before...

Ever since we first laid eyes on developer id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic driver/shooter RAGE, we’ve just assumed there would be multiplayer modes. After all, even though we've just posted a hands-on with the single player questline, this is the developer who invented Quake – how could there not be multiplayer?  And we were right about that. What we were wrong about was to further assume what those multiplayer modes would be. Think of any multiplayer mode in any variant of Quake, be it original series, mod or spin-off. Got one? Yeah, that’s not in here...