Shacknews reports that Insomniac have announced a new addition to the Ratchet and Clank series on the PS3, entitled “A Crack in Time”. The title will pick up where Quest for Booty left off. There are no further details at the moment, but assume that it will launch on the PSN for about $15 in the US, and that it will answer some questions you might have been left with at the end of the previous game.

Likely to be another outstanding game, but if it follows the PS3 original closely enough, it might be ruined for me by a spawn-point famine. It’s increasingly frustrating getting three-quarters of the way through a level, only to die, and have to do the whole thing again. It might have been acceptable back in the day, but it’s just archaic now. Let’s hope they fix it, eh?

Nintendo has claimed that they now rule seven seas, working with law enforcement agencies in a number of countries to squash piracy in the form of the R4 memory card. The R4 card allows for unofficial programs to be played on the Nintendo DS, including emulators and pirated games.

According to Nintendo, they’ve now seized 30,000 copyright-infringing piracy devices. Now that’s a lot of booty! Check out the full statement from Nintendo after the jump. Read more…

The Wii Balance Board covers shown above are the work of Amr Racing, and have been in the spotlight as of late, due to their racey nature — which clashes with the overall “family” brand of Nintendo — the company their product is made to skin.

Gameindustry.biz obtained a comment from Nintendo regarding the skins, and the response they recieved was one most of us could have predicted:

“These are not officially licensed products, we always recommend the use of official first or third party Nintendo products to ensure 100 per cent compatibility and reliability with our hardware … We always closely monitor new products entering the market to ensure that they do not infringe on any of our IP.”

Apple has been dealing with third party content on for their iPod (and most recently their iPhone) for some time now. Cell phones in general have been the target of third party skins for as long as I can remember.

Generally speaking, most manufactures seem to take the hands-off, “we can only recommend products stamped with our official approval” approach regarding their existence. However, those products still remain on the market, and many of them do very well. Why is that? Read more…