GamePro staff

The Entertainment Consumers Association is organizing a rally in on the day the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v. EMA, the case on California's law restricting the sale of violent video games to minors.

The ECA filed one of a number of briefs in support of the EMA. The rally is set for 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, November 2 on the steps of the Supreme Court. Oral arguments should begin at 10 a.m. You may register for the rally here.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment warned players back on September 14 that the ban hammer was hanging over the heads of cheaters. That ban hammer dropped Friday, with Blizzard announcing on Battle.net that more than 5000 players had been banned for violations of its Terms of Use for "cheating and/or using hack programs while playing."

Blizzard took the action, it said, because cheating not only is "undermining the spirit of fair competition," but also because the company claims that the use of hack programs can hamper the performance and stability of Battle.net.

The Entertainment Software Association and the Entertainment Merchants Association today filed a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case against the law banning the sale of violent video games in California.

The court is scheduled to soon hear oral arguments. In the 78-page brief, the ESA and EMA said that new media has always been subjected to attempts at censorship, and the court has always rejected these efforts under the First Amendment.

According to worldwide data compiled from the top three video game bean-counters, NPD (United States), Chart-Track (UK), and Enterbrain (Japan), these are the best-selling games so far this year:

1. Grand Theft Auto IV (6,293,000 copies sold)

A Florida man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to pay US$415,900 in restitution for selling video game systems that were preloaded with more than 75 pirated copies of games, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Kifah Maswadi, age 24, of Oakland, Florida, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He pleaded guilty on June 3 to one count of criminal copyright infringement after he was indicted Jan. 24, the DOJ said.

The Xbox 360 controller has long been criticized for its squishy, inaccurate D-pad, and on Wednesday in Leipzig Microsoft finally revealed a solution--for everywhere but the U.S.

The new green controller will arrive with a more precise directional pad in Europe on October 24, Microsoft reps said last week.

It seemed like a scene from a spy movie -- wandering around back streets, nonchalantly surveying stores and faces, ducking into a small shop, and a swift exchange of cash. The entire transaction took less than two minutes and the object of this game? A device very much sought after by gamers in Japan -- the R4 Revolution for DS.

The R4, nicknamed "Majicon" in Japan, fits into the cartridge slot of Nintendo's popular handheld gaming device and allows games stored on a Micro SD card to be played on the DS. It has a been criticized for encouraging piracy but that, if anything, has only increased gamers' desire for it.

Electronic Arts officials surprised more than a few journalists during their media event last week when they announced two separate partnerships with Epic Games and Suda51's Grasshopper Manufacture.

The EA/Epic Games partnership will see development begin on a action title for PC, Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

Following rumors of a looming Xbox 360 price drop, Sony says those hoping for a PlayStation 3 drop at next week's Games Convention in Germany "will be disappointed."

"It's not going to happen," a SCEA spokesman told Reuters on Friday. "If you're coming for that you'll be disappointed."

Microsoft has provided a few more details on its new Xbox Live Avatar system, including how developers will be able to use them in-game, and how many avatars each Xbox 360 owner will be able to have on their consoles.

Avatars will be made available only for in-game play on ESRB E10+ titles, said Xbox Live GM Eric Kilgore. And, unlike Nintendo's Mii system, the Microsoft avatars will be one per system, at least for now.

Rockstar Games today announced the staggered arrival of GTA IV on PC, as has been the case with every GTA game in the past.

"We are very excited to be releasing the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV," said Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games. "The game looks and plays beautifully on PC, and we can't wait for people to play it."

It might sound more Star Trek: The Next Generation than video games, but Nintendo is apparently looking into the growing field of holographic storage to solve the Wii storage issue.

Holographic storage is a new way of storing data in which that data is contained in a 3-D space, as opposed to on the surface of a disk, as is the case in the PS3 or Xbox 360's HDDs. The technique is pretty cutting edge, but once it becomes mainstream it could be capable of mutli-terabyte storage. That's a lot of copies of WiiWare beer pong.