Nell naked, not Lara
Playboy has to blank out mentions of Tomb Raider and Lara Croft on the cover of its August issue, in the UK, following a ruling last week in the high court. The magazine features nude pictures of model Nell McAndrew, who played Croft for publicity purposes. Core Design (the software house) and Eidos Interactive (the publisher of the series) launched the case to protect Lara's squeaky clean image. However, McAndrew was only the fourth of five women who have played Lara, and there are pictures of them all over the web. The Croft Times at www.cubeit.com/ctimes is a good source of stories and links, though the Nude Raider website has been closed down.
More retro
American toy company Hasbro expects to start launching Atari games in October. Hasbro bought the remains of the pioneering 1970s games company last year, getting rights to more than 75 historic titles including Centipede, Missile Command, Pong and Breakout. (Breakout was written by Steve Wozniak when Steve Jobs was working for Atari, before they co-founded Apple.)
Activision - originally an Atari breakaway - is also getting into the retro gaming market with an Intellivision Classics compilation pack for the Sony PlayStation. The Intellivision games console was a success in the early 1980s.
Pac Most
More news on Billy Mitchell, the 34 year old gamer who scored a perfect 3,333,360 points at PacMan (Gameswatch, July 15). It wasn't an accident. It turns out that Mitchell set the world record score for Donkey Kong when he was 17, and he still holds the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr records. He spent two days trying to get the maximum possible score at PacMan, and the perfect game lasted almost six hours.
Wireplayed out
British Telecom seems to have decided that its Wireplay online gaming system would do better with a smaller publisher. BT is selling the business to Gameplay.com for an unconfirmed £5.5m. Two years ago, Gameplay's Mark Bernstein launched a web-based games system, E-Online, in opposition to Wireplay.
Fly Naboo
Would-be Skywalkers playing the older Star Wars game, Rogue Squadron, can now take the controls of a smart, fast Naboo starfighter, as seen in the new movie. The "cheat codes" have been published on the LucasArts and Nintendo websites. And may the Force be with you.
Poor sports
The Sports Council has dashed Britain's hopes of eventual Olympic success by thwarting an attempt by the organisers of UK PC Games Tournament to register PC gaming as a sport. Indeed, it seems they wouldn't even send them an application form: see www.ThePlayingFields.co.uk
