Things And Stuff: Thursday News Roundup

GameCube owners with a retro fetish will be pleased to hear that they can expect to rub themselves with Intellivision games later whilst cooing in goggly-eyed satisfaction. According to a nice little press release that popped into our inbox overnight, Intellivision Productions is teaming up with Crave and Realtime Associates (who cares) to release Intellivision Lives! on the GameCube for around $19.99 this autumn. The game, which uses an 80s pizza parlour lined with arcade machines for an interface, features some 60 titles including (deep breath) Astrosmash, Baseball, Basketball, Buzz Bombers, Football, Golf, Hockey, Hover Force (gulp), Motocross, Night Stalker, Pinball, Shark! Shark!, Skiing, Snafu, Space Armada (we're not going to make it), Space Battle, Space Hawk, Star Strike, Sub Hunt (air!), Thin Ice, Thunder Castle (help!), Tower of Doom, Vectron, Volleyball and Wrestling. Gasp. The disc will also play host to things like the original Intellivision TV adverts and some documentaries, but sadly no pizza. Although there's no word on a PAL release, we understand from retailers that a PS2 version is due out over here in September; while our yankee friends can already buy the package on both PS2 and Xbox.

As reports this week correctly asserted, Majesco is set to publish Double Fine Productions' Psychonauts worldwide on Xbox - and, as it turns out, on the PC. "I'm really excited to be working with Majesco because I can tell they understand what Psychonauts is all about, and that they believe in giving developers the creative freedom they need to fully realize their ideas," former LucasArts man and still-genius Tim Schafer said this week. The game is due out on both PC and Xbox in 2005.

An enormous package of walkthrough videos for Troika Games' forthcoming Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has been released this week, giving you a chance to see what the game is doing with Valve's coveted Source Engine across a whopping 32 minutes of gameplay footage. The full archive is a whopping 676MB in size, but if you're game, you can get hold of it by clicking on these words. That page also has a host of other Bloodlines movies. You can of course read what we thought about it when we saw the game at an Activision press event last year by clicking... wait for it... here.

For some reason we can't quite muster the enthusiasm to care about, Tecmo and Microsoft have toned down the image of Kasumi on the life-size cushion set to be bundled with the Dead or Alive Ultimate Xbox bundle in Japan this October 7th. Instead of "a revealing swimsuit outfit", we can now apparently expect to see Kasumi decked out in her usual ninja get-up. This is bound to irritate a few people, but if those people haven't figured out how to extract scantily clad women from ye olde interweb by now then there's something wrong with them. Besides the cushion, incidentally, the Japanese DOA Ultimate Xbox bundle will include a blue-ish Xbox, a matching controller, DVD kit, Live starter kit with a year's subscription, and of course a copy of the game.

Sammy's Xbox exclusive fighter Iron Phoenix has apparently been delayed until February 2005 in order "to make it fully compatible with Xbox Live 3.0". The game, in which people with big muscles hit one another and then fall over depending on who did the most hitting in the least time, had been due out by the end of 2004. Um, and obviously it has Xbox Live modes. (And both Asian and Western influences apparently. You know.) We have some screenshots, since you ask, which can be found here.