It was a little stunning to learn last week that at least one disgruntled Xbox 360 owner had decided to skip the regular channels when dealing with a burnt out 360 and instead went straight to Bill Gates. Even more stunning, Gates apparently knocked some heads and got the guy sorted out in record time (24 hours).

While Consumerist reader, and Xbox 360 owner, Jon was delighted with the outcome, it seems Microsoft was not so much. Today they've dropped us a friendly note to remind everyone that Bill really isn't your go-to guy for Red Rings of Death:

We know that Nintendo dominated 2007, with a constant, reliable stream of good news and strong sales. But how did the rest of the competition stack up? We've decided to look back at a full year of sales data from Japanese analyst outlet Media Create, whose sales data we regularly feature in the Simple 2000 Japanese Sales Chart series.

With a license to seemingly print money, Nintendo took 2007 by storm, establishing console and handheld dominance with its two casual friendly game devices. Nintendo DS and Wii dominated software and hardware charts, seeing a steady flow of week to week sales for both platforms, appearing to only weaken when supply was constrained.

Sony's offerings, the PSP, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2, had a solid (if not spectacular) year. The PS3 didn't make any waves, but the PSP did. The PS2, now seven years long in the tooth, still had a bit of life in it.

The Xbox 360? Well, we don't have nice things to say about its Japanese performance, so we'll just let the charts do the talking.

The BBC News had a sit down with Bill Gates at CES recently and instead of asking him their own questions, they asked him their viewers. This gem, the first in the Q&A video, asked Gates about the hardware issues that have plagued the Xbox 360, almost since launch.

We've had a lot of questions from people who weren't really happy with the kind of service they've been getting from Xbox in the last few years... What are you going to do to ensure that new consoles are more reliable than previous versions

Well we certainly had to apologize to our uses about a number of box that had to be replaced. We did that for free for all of those people, we've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the way we handled it. We've got incredible reliability on the new work we've done. Our commitment is that it will be the most reliable video game box out there. People really love the Xbox because of the content, but we've got to make sure that the hardware never stands in the way of that.

Later in the interview he was asked about Vista and the possibility of releasing a version that would be no-frills, but still support game playing.

Microsoft Says Xbox Live Outage Due To Server Strain

Twas the month before Christmas and all through the land,
Not a single retailer had one Wii on hand...

More like the year before Christmas, actually. An entire year where not a day went by that hundreds of electronic and gaming retail employees didn't have to negatively answer the same nagging question. "Do you have any Wiis in stock?" Even though the console sold relatively briskly in the year following its launch, getting your hands on one meant you either won a contest, knew someone who worked for a retailer, shadowed UPS trucks or were just plain lucky.

As the holidays season started heating up, things looked bleak for parents and gamers looking to get their hands on Nintendo's tiny, motion-controlled console. Rumors of chip shortages ran rampant, and I personally was certain that the eBay grey market price for the hot gift item would far meet if not surpass the highest numbers seen during the initial late 2006 release window.

Miraculously that never happened. At the very last moment, in a series of moves that gained them criticism from fans, Nintendo managed to pull together enough supply to curb the often ridiculously inflated eBay demand before it was too late.

There were more than 34 pages of comments and entries for our year-end Shopping Bot contest. And I can see why. Not only were we offering to give someone $2,000 in game-related gear, we're going to do the shopping to pick it up and then ship it out to the lucky winner. And by we I mean me.

I just spent the past hour picking through the posts to find the entries and then used Random.Org to randomly select the winner. Who is listed on the jump page. Cross your fingers:

Reggie Fils-Aime may have referred to it as a raincheck program, but GameStop's official name for their pre-pay Wii program hitting on Dec. 20 is the Wii Certificate Program. There are a couple other things Reggie was a bit off on, according to the details released this morning from GameStop.

The Wii Certificate program will run just one day, Friday, December 21. Customers will be able to go in and hand out the full $250 to reserve a Wii console for pick-up on January 25. Reservations must be made in-person at any GameStop or EB Games location in the U.S., including those in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. The number of reservations available at each store is limited and only one Wii can be reserved per a household.

The certificate itself will be in a custom-designed DVD case featuring a picture of the Wii and Mario. Once the reserved Will arrives customers will receive a telephone call saying it's available for pick-up.

So let me get this straight, you give GameStop your $250 and they get to sit on it for a full month, earning interest, and in return you get an empty DVD case and eventually a Wii? The least they could have done is thrown in a T-Shirt that read: "My Parents Waited Too Long to Shop for Me So All I Got for Christmas was this Shirt and a Lot of Empty Promises. See you in Therapy in Five Years."

Hmmm, maybe that's a bit too long for a slogan.

In many ways, many, many ways eBay is an albatross around the necks' of gamers. This is most evident around the holidays when the demand for consoles and games goes through the roof.

Over the weekend there appeared to be another sell out of Wii consoles. On Friday, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime announced that seven retailers-Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us and Circuit City- would be throwing a lot of Wii consoles out on their shelves over the weekend to try and sate the appetite of games and their families.

But judging by the obvious spike in eBay listings of Wii consoles, I think it's fair to say the only thing sated was greed. From 9 a.m. Eastern Sunday to 9 p.m. Eastern Sunday alone more than 13,500 Wii consoles were listed for sale in the U.S. on eBay. Coincidence? I can't imagine.

Note: These numbers might deviate a little from 100% complete authentic scientific goodness, but the trend is still relevant.

Some good, scratch that, great news for Rock Band fans from Harmonix today. They wrote to tell us that gamers who are experiencing problems with their guitars (or any of the Rock Band instruments) should contact EA's customer support website and they will send out a replacement immediately.

As sometimes happens when new products first go into manufacturing, we discovered an imperfection with the strum bar in an early production run of guitars that were shipped at launch. We've since identified and fixed the issue in all subsequent production runs of the guitars. If users are experiencing a problem with their guitars or any of the Rock Band instruments, they can visit the customer support website ( http://support.ea.com/rockband) and we will send a replacement immediately. Harmonix is dedicated to creating 100% customer satisfaction and to the users who have encountered any hardware issues, we are sorry for the hassle.

Harmonix also took the time to address some of the concerns about the Playstation 3 guitars.

We've seen all the message board posts, discussions and stories regarding the PS3 edition of Rock Band—from issues with guitar compatibility to frustration that stand-alone guitars and drums for Rock Band have not yet hit stores. We want people to know that these issues have our full attention. We are listening and we read everything that is posted on our forums and we're committed to providing the best play experience possible. We're working hard to ensure that we solve these problems as soon as possible. We promise to keep the community updated and, in the meantime, we thank them for their patience.

Excellent. We all make mistakes, it's how a company deals with them that matters and this is exactly how it should be done.

Rock Band Support [EA]

A hacker has knocked GayGamer.net, the only news gathering gay-gaming site, offline with a series of denial of service attacks after flooding the site with threatening emails and hate speech, the site's owner said Sunday.

Flynn De Marco, the site's owner and Kotaku weekend editor, said small waves of denial of service attacks started Wednesday morning, causing occasional timeouts on the site. By Friday the site, working with their host, was able to block the IPs where the DOS attacks seemed to be coming from. Then Friday evening someone began flooding the site's forums and chat room with hate speech, including some death threats, and over-sized images meant to bog down the site, De Marco said. The flood of messages and images all originated from the same IP in Philidelphia, he added.

The site deleted the offensive messages, but the continued DOS attacks lead to the site's host taking GayGamer down until the attacks could be permanently blocked. De Marco hopes to get the site operational by Monday, but is having problems getting a straight answer from their host, GoDaddy.Com.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations a hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

Its sad to see that even in the virtual worlds of gaming and game coverage people decide that the only way they can express themselves is by attacking others. Hit the jump to read GayGamer's official statement on the outage.

WiiConnect24 Breaking Wii Consoles?

Computer and Video Games reports on a rumor that the always on connectivity of the Wii's WiiConnect24 is being blamed for downing some of the consoles.

The site points out that a number "disgruntled gamers" are blaming the service for causing their Wiis to stop working. Hardly scientific, but the site does point out that while the power consumption is miniscual when in the connect mode, the fans aren't running either, so it can warm up. Anecdotally, my Wii gets slightly warm when "off" but never hot at all.

Nintendo Europe dismissed the speculation:

Moore Talks About Red Lights

I spoke with Peter Moore, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Interactive Entertainment Business, Entertainment and Devices Division, for a few minutes a little while ago about today's announcement regarding the extended warranty.

The warranty, which gives all Xbox 360 owners a 3-year safety blanket guarding against the dreaded red ring of death, will cost Microsoft more than $1 billion, but Moore said it was about time they stepped up to the plate.

"It needs to be above and beyond because we haven't done what we need to do to take care of our consumers," Moore told me, adding that three years is quite a long time for a consumer electronic.

Microsoft Expands 360 Warranties

After more than half a year of bad publicity and red-ringing Xbox 360s, Microsoft has again decided to expand their warranty coverage for the console. Now any customer whose console gets three flashing red lights will be covered by a three year warranty from the date of purchase. The warranty will cover both the repair and shipping costs.

Any customer who has previously paid for repairs for that error will be reimbursed. Much more importantly, Microsoft says they have tracked down the issues that have been causing the "unacceptable number of repairs" and have made improvements to the console. Why does this sound like deja vu.

The Truth Behind The Xbox Boys

ESRB Comments on Halo 2's Naked Ass

FTC: Game Industry Stricter Than Movies or Music