According to a surprised Kmart Gamer, the avatar of all things gaming and Kmart related, the PlayStation 3 version of Dark Souls outsold Rage on the PS3 yesterday, defying expectations, while Rage reigned supreme on the Xbox 360. [Twitter]

I'm still chugging my way through Rage, but so far I've grown quite attached to a game that feels like it comes into its own over the course of its dozen-hour-or-so campaign.

What I'm experiencing now 9 hours in or so is very different from the Xbox 360 game and it's play in those first three hours I wrote about a month ago.

This video attempts to tackle some of what I've experienced in the game in the way of weapons, ammo, enemies, mini-games, driving, shooting and those cluttered settings. The video can't really do the game justice, in particular it doesn't really deal with all of the different sorts of behaviors you'll come across when taking on the myriad of enemies.

Make sure you only watch this video if you're prepared to see an awful lot of the game, though not really any plot points.

Earlier today we posted our walk-through video showing how you to find a little bit of Wolfenstein 3D inside id Software's Rage. Here's a look at how to find Quake in the game.

This time around you don't have to just bump into a wall, you need to track down four buttons, click em and then find a portal. Fortunately, Game Front walks you through it.

I heard yesterday that games journalist Brandon Sheffield gave a tough interview to some of the guys who made Rage, this week's big new first-person shooter.

"Hostile" was the word floating around in my Twitter feed. Pete Hines, marketing man for Rage publisher Bethesda and an overall good sport couched that. He described Sheffield's role in that piece as that of an "almost hostile interviewer."

"Almost hostile"? I had to check, and as I'm wont to do, I took a guess that Sheffield probably asked some good questions, because, well, one man's hostile interview is often my idea of interviews we need more of in this video game reporting world.

You should check out the interview. Though I'll excerpt the tiny bit you need to see to know how this went down....

Sheffield, who, like Hines, I know professionally but have never worked with, starts his interview asking what the unique element in Rage is.

Todd Hollenshead, one of the honchos at Rage dev studio id Software replies, in part, by saying: "When you look at Rage, regardless of what platform you're playing on, it is a game that doesn't look like any other game."

.... to which Sheffield replies: "I don't actually feel like it looks unlike every other game. It does kind of look like Borderlands or Fallout to me. I mean, I'm sure, when you really get into the tech, it looks different. But it does have a similar kind of look and feel."

And they go on from there with input from one of the game's artists, Andy Chang, who talks up some the nuances of Rage's impressive graphical tech.

The comments below the interview are mixed. The top commenter's take: "Wow. Is it just me or was the interviewer being kind of a jerk through the whole thing?"

Another commenter, one whose take is closer to mine: "Okay, seriously people? An interviewer with relevant difficult questions rather than pandering fanboyism is 'being a jerk?'"

I say, bravo both to Sheffield and to the id Software guys for the interview. I want my games journalists to respond to answers that don't match what their eyes see by saying, "yeah, but that's not what I just saw." That's what Sheffield did here. I want my games journalists, as Sheffield did (on page 3 of the interview), to push the developers on their claim that there are meaningful choices in the game, especially if the reporter just played the game for 2 1/2 hours and didn't detect meaningful choices. What do you know? Sheffield pushes and he gets an interesting 398-word answer from the id guys about how, in their shooter, the type of ammo you use is a meaningful choice. That actually is true, but it's also, of course, not at all the kind of "meaningful choices" that are usually implied or inferred when discussing an upcoming game. Sheffield sits down expecting a game that's more open-ended and plays through something that's more or less a narrow channel. Good on him for asking to compare his expectations with what's in the game. And good on id for explaining what the deal is.

The last time I saw or read any hysteria over a supposedly hostile game journalism interview was last June, which, now that I look back, isn't recent enough. How disappointing! That last notorious interview was by Geoff Keighley, who supposedly hammered into Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime during a live E3 interview. One of the gamers on all-seeing message board NeoGAF described that interview as "quite an entertaining and surprisingly confrontational/tense interview. Body language was also interesting." The only thing that bummed me out about that interview is that that chat is similar to so many others that I've had with Fils-Aime and that I've even seen Keighley have.

An example of a tough Keighley question: "Did you guys basically admit this morning that the Wii wasn't successful with core gamers?"

Look, when some of us conduct slightly hostile interviews, we're doing it as a joke. Overall, though, "almost hostile" doesn't sound too bad to me. I expect Sheffield intended to come off as skeptical, while professional. In my eyes, he did.

It's common, when reporting on video games, to have the tables turned. You're shown a game and the developers often then ask what you thought. The inertia of decent manners and the reluctance to make snap judgments can keep any games reporter from failing to give an honest reaction. Gratitude for access to these games can also temper reactions, though it really shouldn't. The seasoned reporter, be they Sheffield or Keighley or whoever else, should be able to resist that, should be able to think on their feet, compare words to actions, hype to reality, and ask good questions without worrying how friendly things will feel when the interview ends. The folks who make games can handle these questions, as the id team and Fils-Aime proved in these tough interviews.

It's easy to complain when game journalists just lay down and let the hype slide from publisher and developer right down to gamers. Good on those reporters who don't bend so much and challenge the course of hype. Here's to more "almost hostile" interviews.

Is your PC version of Rage crashing to the desktop? Do you have an ATI graphics card? Bethesda's Pete Hines tweets that a conflict between ATI's Battlefield 3 beta drivers and Rage might be the cause. Time for a rollback!

Everybody kind of remembers Wolfenstein 3D, I personally remember it as that game I secretly played while my parents were working. This quick walkthrough will show you how to get to the secret Wolfenstein 3D room, an easter egg nestled within the very first mission of the game.

Hopefully, I won't get grounded for playing Rage.

While I haven't had any issues running id Software's Rage on my high-end computer, it seems that there are a number of issues plaguing folks checking out the game on their rigs this morning.

Issues brought up on the Rage support thread in Steam include not being able to set custom settings for video cards, no Vsync options, full game crashes and some issues with certain graphics cards not working.

The top solution seems to be to ensure you have the latest drivers for your video cards, including the RAGE AMD drivers. I captured the video above using Fraps running on a Windows 7 64-bit computer with an Intel Core i7-2600K CPU at 3.4 GHz with 8 GB of memory, and a GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards with the latest drivers. (Yes I play on an old, OOOOOLD non 16:9 ratio monitor.)

Your experience will vary depending on your rig. Have you run into any issues? Better still, have you found any solutions?

[SUPPORT]Rage Issues, Bugs And Fixes Thread [Steam, thanks to Earthserpent89 for the tip]

Yes, I'm remixing lines from Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night", but only because game reviewers' mixed reactions to id Software's Rage have my head spinning.

From the creators of Doom and Quake comes a whole new game with shooting and a one word title, only this time instead of fighting hellish interdimensional beings we're fighting ourselves. Or rather we're fighting what's become of ourselves that were left outside the people-preserving arks set up to save humanity from an asteroid apocalypse. Why can't we have a nice post-apocalypse, where everyone gets together and graciously rebuilds the planet?

Probably because no one can agree on how good or bad Rage is. Lightning-forking words coming right up.

Joystiq
RAGE isn't what you think it is.

In fact, it's easiest to tell you what RAGE isn't right away. It's nothing like Fallout 3. It's nothing like Borderlands. It's not an RPG, though Id and Bethesda have used RPG terminology in describing it. It's not much of an open world. It's not very big. It's not very long.

And unfortunately, it's not the return to prominence that Id fans have been hoping for.

The Telegraph
A few hours in though - once you reach Wellsprings, Rage's first major town - the differences begin to make themselves clear. Rage isn't really the free-roaming RPG it initially suggests it is. All missions, including sidequests, are gathered from one of the two major towns (one per disc - the third disc is the multiplayer) and exploring the world involves driving quickly from the town to a location. Other than finding some vehicle jumps, there's no real incentive to explore Rage's world. It's largely empty, devoid of life save for the occasional bandit vehicle that accosts you, and heading to an area outside of a mission yields no reward.

The Guardian
...how does Rage, the newest triple A release from id compare when stacked up against rival high-fliers in the FPS genre? In a word, "weirdly". Rage looks the part and it plays very well, but it's littered with kinks and quirks that may strike contemporary shooter players as, at best, odd and at worst, horribly out of date. Why, for example, is there no checkpoint system? Why can't players pick up the weapons of their victims when they can loot their bodies? Why, given id Software's legacy with regards to the online deathmatch is there no competitive shooter multiplayer mode? And who thought it was a good idea to place the biggest and best boss battles in the middle of the storyline?

IGN
The group of NPCs that eventually turn out to be plot-essential allies wind up being the most dull, predictable personalities in the game, and no compelling villain ever really emerges. Instead you fight pockets of bandits, crazed mutants and the relatively faceless Authority. They're fun to shoot at, but no significant contextual drama is ever established over the course of Rage's roughly 10 to twelve hour run. The story is propelled by a series of short-term goals that gradually reveal bits of the overall tale and it's difficult to get invested in a world populated by characters that, for all the lifelike animations, feel more like court jesters than endearing characters. In its final moments Rage falters significantly, failing to deliver any kind of satisfying conclusion or encounter. You fight a lot of things in Rage, but it never feels like you're fighting for any reason other than your personal entertainment.

GameTrailers
The main multiplayer component is buggy-based racing and combat for up to four players. This seems surprising coming from a developer like id, but it's given the same care to the vehicle shenanigans as it would have to a more rote shooter suite. There are three primary game types with one asking you to collect falling asteroids and deliver them to moving zones, and another that tasks you with being the first to three consecutive checkpoints to score. You also get the typical deathmatch, and thanks to the ability to upgrade your buggy with new parts and powerups as you gain levels, there's more than enough motivation to return that what can best be described as a gritty Mario Kart.

Team Xbox
So to close out this review of RAGE: While the game doesn't necessarily introduce any kind of ground-breaking gameplay elements, what it does is perform some tried-and-true FPS staples (and some newer concepts too) at a very high level, and hits the mark an overwhelming majority of the time. I am happy to have this game in my collection, and believe that shooter fans the world over would be derelict in their responsibilities as gamers to not give this one a try. It is simply a fun game to play. I had a blast with it, and I hope you do the same as well.

It's not every day you get to play a new id game. If you're not counting iPhone games (and we're not counting iPhone games) or re-releases, the last new title the studio released was Doom 3. And that was in 2004.

So this week's release of post-apocalyptic buggy death simulator RAGE is something to be treasured, whether it ends up a triumph or something...less triumphant.

Given the fact that id has been around for twenty years now, and in that time has released some of the best games ever made, I figured today was as good a time as any to look back on them.

In the gallery above you'll find clips of most of id's games. Some of them all-time classics, some of them games very few of you have played, and others are from the Commander Keen series. Because Commander Keen is awesome.

Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (1990) - The game that started id, John Romero's unauthorised Mario port (using his Dangerous Dave character from a 1988 game) proving that id had the chops to pull off tech (in this case side-scrolling) on a PC nobody thought was possible.

Commander Keen (1990-1991) - One of the best, if not the best platforming series on the PC, id's Commander Keen saw six released in just two years, making the Green Bay Packers famous to millions of gamers outside the US.

Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (1991) - John Romero's Dangerous Dave makes his id debut in another great platformer. Note the shotgun. id will be somewhat preoccupied with it in the future.

Rescue Rover (1991) - If you want to see what Portal would have looked like if it had been released in 1991 (and starred a dog), go play Rescue Rover. It would get a sequel in the same year.

Shadow Knights (1991) - id does Shinobi in yet another platformer, this time with ninjas.

Hovertank 3D (1991) - id get some 3D experience under their belts with Hovertank, which, as you can see, is Wolfenstein. With tanks.

Catacomb 3D (1991) - What the hell were id doing in 1991? Working nine day weeks? Catacomb was another 3D game, this time much more fully-realised, and clearly pointing the way towards....

Wolfenstein 3D (1992) - The game that gave id their big break. One of the most popular PC games of all time, and credited (if unfairly) of birthing the first-person shooter genre. Would get an expansion, Spear of Destiny, a year later.

Doom (1993) - Everything Wolfenstein did, Doom did better.

Doom II (1994) - A year after Doom, hell came to Earth with Doom II, which was bigger, badder and better than the original (if also largely identical, if you know what I mean).

Quake (1996) - Wolfenstein was a technical revolution. So was Doom. Could id's third shooter series continue the tradition? You bet it could. The world's first true 3D shooter was a revelation.

Quake II (1997) - Quake got itself an upgraded sequel a year later. It remains my favourite game of the series.

Quake III (1999) - Quake III tried something different, basically eschewing singleplayer content altogether in favour of a balls-to-the-wall multiplayer focus.

Doom III (2004) - All in all, a...disappointing game. A number of serious flaws, including a ridiculous flashlight mechanic, resulted in the first id game in over ten years to be met with anything less than overwhelming praise.

Rage (2011) - id's first major game release in seven years, its first designed with consoles in mind and its first since Hovertank to feature vehicles. To say it'll be interesting to see how it all comes together is something of an understatmenet.