Mad Max game canned on Xbox 360 and PS3, other versions dated

Mad Max has had a weird, twisty road returning to the gaming world, but the end is finally in sight. Warner Bros. has announced that Avalanche's open-world Mad Max game will arrive on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and SteamOS on Sept. 1 in North America and Sept. 4 in the UK.

Notably absent from that list are the previously announced Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, which Game Informer reports have been cancelled. (It's a bad year for post-apocalyptic open worlds on last-gen consoles, Techland's Dying Light made a similar switch last year.)

This is just the latest twist in Max's long journey back to gaming after his NES adventure released 25 years ago.

Here's the short version: Circa 2008, God of War 2 director Cory Barlog was working on a videogame tie-in to a new animated Mad Max movie. The following year, that animated movie became the live-action Mad Max: Fury Road, which is coming to theaters this May. In 2010, Barlog started working at Avalanche Studios, the developer of this new Mad Max game. However, reports from Avalanche are mixed as to whether Barlog was working on this new Mad Max project, which, by the way, is unaffiliated with Fury Road. Whether or not this new game has ties to the one Barlog was initially working on is unclear.

If you pre-order this enigma of a game, WB will throw in a car body called "The Ripper," which "packs a powerful V8 engine, upgraded exhaust with custom off-road tires, a ramming grill and a tuned suspension so it can take on a variety of Wasteland surfaces."

Why would you need a bonus car when Max already owns the super-cool Interceptor? It has, according to a plot summary from WB, been stolen by bandits. That's sad, but as the theft leads to Max teaming up with a mechanic who is literally named "Chumbucket"  it's hard for us to feel too bad for him.