Microsoft is expanding the Xbox 360 warranty to 3 years (for people suffering from “red ring” errors) and taking a ~$1.1B charge in FY07. Peter Moore was interviewed by N’Gai Croal on the subject. Rough news, no doubt about it… but hopefully customers will feel that Microsoft is taking proper care of them.

Sony is cutting the price of the PS3 by $100 (this is 99.9% certain, despite repeated denials by the company.) Sony also gets a dose of rough news: Beautiful Katamari was canceled for the PS3, and Madden 08 will run far more smoothly on the 360 than on the PS3. A $100 price cut is not going to fix these (and all the rest of Sony’s) problems.

But the honeymoon continues for Nintendo. Only announcement to catch my eye: EA is implementing something called “Family Play” exclusively for the Wii. Basically, EA Sports titles will enable experienced gamers to play with full (more complex) controls, while inexperienced gamers can use a simplified (wand-only) control system that levels the playfield (so to speak!) Great stuff. I expect to see features of this sort migrate to many games (and all consoles.) Hey — I wonder if a demographic advocate came up with this? Yeah… probably not. :-)

And, as a break from console-centricity, here’s a nice article about Zork (one of ten games recently voted into the Digital Game Canon.)