Extremely high failure rates are being suggested for the XBox 360. Last week 360 Gamer reported over 4,469 XBox owners responded to their online survey — and over 62.5% of them have now reported a defective XBox. Over 22% even reported that they’d had more than one console fail on them.

“We didn’t anticipate the popularity of the Wii…” admits a spokesman for Electronic Arts.

A Silicon Valley newspaper created a buzz when its Sunday edition reported on the sagging fortunes of the game developer — and attributed them to the surprise popularity of Nintendo’s Wii.

It’s no secret that the PS3 has been seeing nothing but abysmal sales; it has been behind every other console on the market since launch. Behind the Wii, behind the XBOX 360 and even behind its predecessor, the PS2 (of course the PS2 has a lot of lead time so that’s not a fair comparison) but the PS2 is still selling better than the PS3.

George Harrison, the head of marketing at Nintendo of America recently declared that the company would sell 35 million Wiis in the US by 2011 or 2012.That would make the Wii almost as popular as the best-selling console of all time, the PlayStation 2 (PS2). Sony has sold more than 38 million PS2s in the US since 2000 (115 million worldwide).

There are a lot of video games out there and more are to be released later this year. If you count the last 20 years or so of the console and PC gaming market, there are thousands upon thousands of games. Over time, trends have developed that seemingly creep into just about every game made.

Last week 10-year-old Ezra Chatterton helped design a new quest in World of Warcraft. The Make-a-Wish Foundation had arranged a day-long session with Blizzard Entertainment for Ezra, who is fighting metastatic brain cancer. Since then gamers worldwide have emailed their support — and yesterday an online fund was created to help him with his fight.

There was a large stir yesterday and the day before about some nudity that had worked its way into the Halo 2 port for Vista. It’s not a big deal; it’s even less of a big deal now that we know what it is. What is it you might ask, read the rest of the article and let me tell you right now, it sure is something, what I’m not sure but it’s something all right.

Those of you following the Halo 2 release on Vista will know that it was delayed to give some more development time on the code. During that “development time” it seems that some minor nudity due to an “error” is present in the game.

Last week Sony announced 34 new PS3 games for the upcoming year. This week Nintendo struck back, announcing they’d release 14 new titles within the next seven months.