Mario & Sonic DS: full Olympic line-up

New information has emerged on that gaming partnership which, to our 13-year-old selves, would have seemed as preposterous as telling us that Nirvana were about to release a country and western album. Or that luminous green socks weren't actually very cool at all.

Yes, that's Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, which has just had all of the whopping 20 events the game will feature named.

Here's the full list:

Fencing (Individual epée)
Archery
Shooting (Skeet)
Gymnastics (Trampoline)
Gymnastics (Vault)
Field (High Jump)
Field (Pole Vault)
Field (Long Jump)
Field (Triple Jump)
Field (Javelin Throw)
Field (Hammer Throw)
Rowing (Single Sculls)
Table Tennis (Singles)
Aquatics (100m Freestyle)
Aquatics (4x100m Freestyle)
Track (110m and 400m Hurdles)
Track (4x100m Relay)
Track (100m and 400m)

Sega has also announced there will be 16 playable characters in total – eight from the world of Mario and eight from the world of Sonic. While players will no doubt be leaning towards one camp or another purely based on whether their parents bought them a SNES or Mega Drive all those years ago (we, of course, love both equally), they might be swayed also by the fact each character will have unique attributes. So Mario and Any are good all-rounders, Peach and Tails are more technical, Sonic and Yoshi are fast on their feet and Knuckles and Bowser are all-out powerful.

Details on how the game will play on DS are still scarce, but we can imagine that the sprinting will lend itself well to the good old hammering-two-buttons-as-quickly-as-possible approach, while table tennis would easily be replicated with a touchscreen controlled paddle, for instance.

It's been confirmed the game will include a single-player Mission mode, as well as multiplayer options with some mini-games and Olympic trivia thrown in, too.

Unfortunately, we still have some time to wait before we can skewer that smug blue hedgehog with a mis-thrown javelin that'll show him just who's boss. (Ahem, not that we have any bias either way.) While the Wii version of the game is still scheduled for November, the DS game is now down for a early-ish 2008 release.

That's plenty of time at least to limber up those fingers for what will probably be the most unconventional and fun Olympics-based game ever.