Things And Stuff: Thursday News Roundup

Vivendi-Universal Games today announced that Van Helsing, Hugh Jackman's big-screen turn as Bram Stoker's fabled monster hunt, will be making its way to Game Boy Advance on May 14th. We're not quite sure why they didn't mention this when they announced the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game last October, but never mind. VU Games will be hoping that the Van Helsing movie lives up to its billing - "think of it as a sort of Wolverine-done-darker with vampires and crap," our resident film buff offers - and that the games can capitalise on its success this May. On the GBA however it faces some strong competition in the vampire hunting, er, stakes, courtesy of Konami's Castlevania titles. We never get sent GBA games these days so if you want to know if it's any good you'll have to extrapolate from these screenshots.

Firaxis Games has released a 1.20 patch for Civilization III: Conquests, which includes a large number of bug fixes, changes and additions according to the official site's download page for the 20.7MB file. Before you get going it's worth noting that 1.20 does not support save games from previous versions, which is a bit of a shame, but if it's any consolation Firaxis has "implemented [the] 'allow scientific ladders' rule". No? Well, at least we tried.

According to reports, owners of the highly rated Unreal Tournament 2004 are in for a treat this Friday when Epic Games releases a pair of new maps for the game's Onslaught game type, giving fans some new battlefields to squabble over after a couple of weeks getting used to the ones bundled with the game. The new maps are known as ONS-Ascendancy and ONS-Aridoom, and we'll mention them again tomorrow if they've made it out by the time we remember to write this item.