An interesting interview with Microsoft’s John Schappert is up on Eurogamer. Quite interesting. Amongst others, the corporate official mentions that their little X360 baby sold pretty good in all these years, topping no less than 18 million units. While I do not know if this includes re-stockings caused by the dreaded Ring of Death, Microsoft is happy. Hell, its employees must have reached a simultaneous mass orgasm. To sum things up, here is a little digest of the interview, which can be found here:

Eurogamer: Yo.
John Schappert: HI GUSY

Eurogamer: Soo…. 16%.
John Schappert: Yep.

Eurogamer: How many folks risked their savings to get a glimpse of the shiny ringy thing?
John Schappert: 18 millions, lol.

Eurogamer: kk.
John Schappert: kkthxbai.

The horror... the horror... Microsoft sure got off to an embarrassing start at GDC 2008, where one of their Xbox 360 consoles was viciously killed by the dreaded "Red Ring of Death" - as witnessed and filmed by a BBC technology editor haunting the conference halls in search for victims.

"On Microsoft's own stand at the show one of the demo consoles has a rather familiar problem - the red ring of death. There's no way of knowing if this particular console was manufactured before or after Microsoft identified the problems with the machines. But at the very least it's embarrassing for the company that its own stock of demo machines are still susceptible to the problem."

Ironically, this is happening just several days after Microsoft desperately tried to combat that report about its consoles failing at a rate of 16%. Well, good luck with that now!

Someone is getting either pissed off, or really afraid by the sudden “console” invasion. PC gamers are no longer safe in their apartments, cats and dogs alike are beginning to sense the terror of not being able to randomly press our keyboard buttons exactly in the middle of a raid... More and more producers and publishers are greedily eyeing the console environment, which, let’s face it, has its advantages. Like not having to daily invest millions of yen into new hardware.

That’s why some of the big names in the gaming industry, especially in the PC department (like Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD), decided to announce a strategic alliance at the upcoming Game Developers Conference. This seemingly desperate PC Gaming Alliance is meant to promote our good old hunk of wires, conductors and processors as a TRUE gaming platform. In the face of annihilation. In the presence of a God.

Ah well, best of luck to them. As long as World of Warcraft stays on the PC, they are safe with me.

The poor thing has been rumoured as dying for too long, so Microsoft's Shane Kim finally took pity on it - and its potential fans - by confirming the cancellation of Cryptic Studios' Marvel Comics MMO, in an interview with MTV Multiplayer.

"I'll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision... It's just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions."

In other words, the game sucked fireballs. Besides, you'd have to be insane to launch another MMO game in the next five-to-ten years. With WoW still going strong, what's the point? (yes, I'm gossiping about you, Conan!)