Have You Played Atari Today?

VGS editors Joe Fielder and Ryan Mac Donald recently came back from a visit to Atari Games, one of the two west coast divisions of Midway Entertainment and current wielder of the Atari name.

And what a day it was. It went something like this:

10:00 -11:30 Playing the San Francisco Rush arcade racer and interviewing its creators.

11:30 -12:30 Lunch with the developers of recently released 3-D arcade fighter, Mace: The Dark Age.

12:30-2:00 Playing Mace: The Dark Age and interviewing its creators.

2:00-3:00 Playing the Nintendo 64 version of Mace: The Dark Age and interviewing its producer.

3:00-4:00 Playing the Nintendo 64 version of San Francisco Rush and interviewing its producer.

4:00-5:00 Playing the PlayStation version of the Area 51 sequel shooter, Maximum Force, and interviewing its producer.

How were the games? The N64 version of Mace was pretty amazing graphically. Even in the current alpha development stage, the stages and characters we saw looked virtually indistinguishable from the arcade counterpart.

Meanwhile, Maximum Force on the PlayStation was as much a visual step up from home versions of Area 51 as the two arcade games were to another. San Francisco Rush on the Nintendo 64 was looking and playing wonderfully at about a 20 percent rev, and plans call for it to have Rumble Pak support, twice as many courses, and a two-player split-screen mode.

On the arcade front, be sure to keep an eye out for our upcoming "Making of" features on both San Francisco Rush and Mace: The Dark Age. Meanwhile, here are videos and a handful of screenshots from two of the games we looked at.