Your daily smörgÄsbord of the very best gaming has to offer.

Enthusiast:

• Guitar Hero: World Tour details revealed at (IGN)

• LittleBigPlanet will have some semblance of story, feature user-policing for adult content (PS3 Fanboy)

• “On September 2nd, shovel talks. You dig. Monsters die,” and Atlus sets you to work building dungeons in Master of the Monster Lair for Nintendo DS (VerticalWire)

• Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat team developing Wii dogfighter based on upcoming Japanese animation The Sky Crawlers (Game|Life)

• The Witcher: Enhanced Edition free update (and premium package) dated September (Official Website via Eurogamer)

• Workaround discovered for Wii’s Twilight Princess homebrew hack (HackMii via Kotaku)

• BioShock PC install limit neutralized, though DRM and disk check remain (2K Forums via Shacknews)

Industry:

• Sony Corp. CEO says top priority is “to restore profitability in our television and game businesses” (Bloomberg via GameSpot)

• UK games lobby says college graduates don’t have the skills for development (BBC via GameDaily)

• SouthPeak Interactive raises 12.9 million (VentureBeat)

• MGS4 propels PS3 to top of Japanese weekly charts while PSP maintains healthy lead over DS (Media Create via Kotaku)

Trendwatch:

• ESRB plugs game leaks after publisher complaints (Next-Gen)

• AARP provides retirees with free online flash games (Business & Games)

Politics: London mayor (partially) blames violent games for rise in knife crime; forgets to condemn games that teach ancient curses (MCVUK)

Virtually Compelling: To celebrate 5th anniversary, Second Life hosts two-week-long Virtual World Fair (BusinessWire)

Hardware: First three benches show NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GTX+ edging out the AMD Radeon HD 4850, for a $30 premium (FiringSquad, LegitReviews, PC Perspective)

Interviewed: BioWare’s Sonic Chronicles project lead Mark Darrah on adapting Sonic, DS development difficulty. Hints at future Wii/PSP projects (Gamasutra)

Rumoriffic: BioWare’s (KOTOR?) MMO due fiscal 2010 (TVG via Eurogamer)

Try This: Turn your Wii Wheel and Wii Balance Board into a wireless PC racing controller. Look out, Logitech (Nintendo Wii Fanboy)

Reluctant would-be importers rejoice! That stronghold of early awareness, the ESRB, has rated several titles our Japanese gaming rivals have enjoyed for years, including the ridiculous platformer BioMiracle Bokutte Upa, side-scrolling shooter Gley Lancer, and Hironobu Sakaguchi’s potent portable RPG Archaic Sealed Heat for the Nintendo DS. Also, City Connection and some more Alex Kidd… Continue Reading

This week, California State Senator Leland Yee defends our children — and his own political stance — by answering YOUR questions. Continue Reading

In this week’s episode, Jesse covers the Video Game Ratings Enforcement Act, Wii Fit’s unabashed honesty, DRM issues with Mass Effect on the PC and E3’s growing lack of exhibitors. Continue Reading

California State Senator Leland Yee has granted GameCyte readers and fellow journalists an open interview. Continue Reading

Several sources are independently reporting that the quirky, beloved SNES role-playing game EarthBound has been rated for Wii by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, and is thus liable to appear on Virtual Console sometime in the near future. Continue Reading

The ESRB and the PTA — or the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and the Parent Teacher Association, for the acronym-challenged — have published a new guide for parents about the digital bogeyman that is video games. The 19-page document is available online, and will soon be distributed to 26,000 PTAs nationwide. Continue Reading

Earlier this week, parts of the web were shocked to hear ESRB president Patricia Vance decree that downloadable content must not “go out of bounds” by introducing new elements that might change the game’s maturity rating. Whether an attack on developers’ free speech or merely a money sink for publishers forced to pull and relabel games that the ESRB would be forced to re-rate, the situation looked rather sticky — but today, Vance clarified her controversial statement. Continue Reading

Over at Escapist Magazine, Brenda Brathwaite wrote a lengthy feature trying to divine the source of the non-gaming population’s antipathy toward video games. She polled a group of forty of her friends who do not play video games about their opinions of games and discovered that the mood was overwhelmingly negative with only two respondents expressing positive feelings about video games. Perhaps the most surprising result was that few of the respondents attributed their ill-will to negative media coverage.

Continue Reading

Jerry Bonner worked for the Entertainment Software Ratings Board for six months; a short period of time, but perhaps long enough to shed some light on the secretive process the board uses to determine how and where new games appear at retail. Continue Reading