Bits And Bobs: Monday News Roundup

Tecmo has delayed the release of the first chunk of downloadable Ninja Gaiden content - the Hurricane Pack: Volume I - in order to give North American Xbox owners more time to sign up for the second round of the Master Ninja Tournament. The Hurricane Pack will now be released on August 9th to coincide with the start of that, judging by the official website. Of course, the European schedule for the tournament is slightly different - perhaps in light of our later release date, Microsoft is running our first round between August 2nd and September 2nd (full details here). We'll let you know when you can get your hands on the new content as soon as we've seen it with our own ninja eyes; and for more details on what's in the Hurricane Pack, head here.

Capcom's Clover Studio website has been updated with a new trailer for Atsushi Inaba's new PS2 title, Okami, treating us to several minutes of footage from the beautifully designed action game in which players take control of a sun god in the form of a wolf and do... inexplicable things. The movie is about 24MB in size and can be downloaded directly from Clover Studio's website here (right-click and Save As). And whether or not you're interested in the game, we do recommend you take a look, because the visuals are genuinely extraordinary, and it's so much more like watching a comic book come to life than anything this writer can recall seeing before.

O~3 Entertainment has announced that it plans to release Alien Hominid, the first title from developer The Behemoth, on PS2 and GameCube. For anyone wondering what an Alien Hominid is, so were we. Well, apparently it's "a short yellow alien with spherical black beady eyes, three teeth, and a little green gun," and he stars in a game which is "an evolution of classic 2D side-scrolling platform shooters, blending old school play mechanics with stunning hand drawn graphics." According to O~3, the game originally appeared on the Internet in prototype form, something which apparently drew the publisher to the project (it enjoyed something like six million downloads, they say). You can clap your human eyes on some screenshots here.