WWF games have always been a bit hit or miss really. Acclaim's appalling attempts left me feeling...well they didn't leave me feeling anything. I guess you could say they turned me into a wrestling game nihilist. Then THQ released their WCW games which were kind of good, really.

No, they were a breath of fresh air to be exact. Fun is what wrestling is all about , and THQ drove that forward in their gameplay. Taking on a much freer approach to translating real life wrestling to a binary form in utilising a grapple based technique, as opposed to the sub-standard Streetfighter route journeyed by Acclaim.

This opened up a huge amount of moves available to the player and it looked much more realistic too. It also made it easier to play, and this added to the depth of the games. Then something unexpected happened. Acclaim lost their WWF license and THQ snapped it up, dumping WCW in even more doo-doo than it already needed. Anyway, lets not get into that here, things have worked out for the best, and the McMahons have taken another step in their total world domination plan.

Let them get on with it, they have a fantastic sense of humour, and the world will be a much better place when we can all go around 3Ding our bosses through tables. Sorry, I digress. Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, THQ obtained the WWF license and then released the definitive wrestling game so far: WWF Wrestlemania. AKI worked on these games for THQ, and the subsequent WWF No Mercy, and these form the foundation to: WWF Raw. Thought i'd never get there, didn't you?

Anchor, the development team responsible for the late, great Ultimate Fighting Championship for Dreamcast, have taken on the task for THQ and are bringing their own fantastic innovations to the soap operatic WWF console games. The great grapple and counter grapple techniques found in UFC will be tweaked and slotted into RIW to allow for the Japanese to find a greater depth to the gameplay, because they will not be sold on the WWF license alone.

This also allows the rest of us to enjoy more moves and those great moments with a bunch of friends and the frantic reverse, counter-reverse rears its head ad infinitum, leaving the two people involved breathless and red in the face from shouting and swearing at each other. Oh yes, it's happened many a time in those many marathon WWF Wrestlemania all-nighters me and my buddies have pulled, creating a pay per view with the army of bastard mutants we have unleashed onto our N64 with the groundbreaking create-a-wrestler function, emerging red-eyed into the morning to go to the shop to get some munchies. So, with the new system in place, all-nighters will turn into all-nighter-dayers. Hmm...Grammar? Nah.

This isn't the only new thing Anchor are giving the world, as you can see from the screenshots. Beautifully detailed characters and scenery are already in place with photo-realistic wrestlers and really, really nice crowd detailing. Included within this will be the true to life recreated entrances your wrestlers will have (I know you don't watch them more than once, I don't! But we'd feel cheated without them, wouldn't we?) and facial expressions to match.

This will certainly be a graphical achievement, if the gameplay side goes belly-up. Which I very much doubt it will. Couple this with motion capture, and you'll have what looks like the real thing inside your not so little black box. You will be able to go into the crowd and have them move out of your way as you take your bloodshed to different backstage areas too. Perhaps on a downside, initial reports suggest that there will only be a roster of 35 wrestlers to choose from, and this does make a difference.

I know that not a lot of people (me included) use wrestlers like, Rikishi, Mark Henry or Viscera, but they make for a tear-inducingly funny 3-way-fat-man-ladder match with yer mates. You get the idea. They may not be needed all the time, but they are needed at least some time. Kind of like the Undertaker. But there is an up side. The Xbox has a hard drive, right? And it'll be able to connect to the web too, yeah? And there's this cool little feature in the game that lets you create your own wrestler, Ok? I think you get the idea. Someone, or maybe thousands of people will be beavering away, creating every wrestler from Diesel to the Ultimate Warrior, and then some. I think it can be said that at the moment, this looks like a killer title for the improving Xbox, and I can't wait to get my hands on this.

With the success and innovation THQ have bestowed upon us in the past, it's unlikely that they will churn out a dog at this stage in their lifetime. Miss it at your peril. Ps. You might have thought I have left out the Smackdown! Series in my brief history of wrestling games. That's because in my opinion, they're crap. Even though they came from THQ.

Preview By: Alex