Microsoft wants you on Xbox LIVE for the weekend with, of course, a view toward forever, and it's prepared to temporarily waive the cover fee to grab your attention.

After years of third-stringing it, Sony's beleaguered PS3 may finally be rallying, according to sales data cited on Sony's US PlayStation blog. The company's American division reports year-over-year October hardware sales lifted nearly 70 percent, and says its online PlayStation storefront clinched record revenues, with downloads up 60 percent over the same period last year.

Before you ask, no, the PS3 isn't getting an Xbox 360-equivalent Facebook interface in today's version 3.10 Facebook-angled firmware release. That's the bad news. The good news, if you're PS3-do-or-die, is that it actually adds a few bits Microsoft's implementation doesn't support yet.

Fire up your Xbox 360 later today and you'll discover your social network just broadened by a factor of two. Microsoft teased Xbox 360 Facebook and Twitter integration at E3 this summer and rolled it out to beta testers several weeks ago, and it's finally available to everyone starting today.

Nintendo says a high-definition upgrade for the Wii remains a distant future endeavor, dismissing criticism that the system needs a visual boost to be creatively competitive.

Modern Warfare 2 is no longer available in Russia for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners, it seems, despite the game hitting store shelves as scheduled early last week. Noticed by fan site Hellforge on Friday, Russian game site GotPS3 claims Russian officials had threatened to ban the game, prompting retailers to yank copies from store shelves and distributors to shut down the outflow of new stock.

Has there ever been video or photo coverage of terrorist violence that hasn't seemed somehow detached from it? All our images of Oklahoma City are post-op shots of a cratered nine-story federal building. Videos of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers are generally from distant vantages. The short clips of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold terrifying fellow high school students with Hi-Point 995 carbines and TECH-DC9 semi-automatic pistols played endlessly by cable news channels are from blurred, black and white security cameras, and Harris and Klebold aren't in most of them.

A hacker eager to reconnect modded Xbox 360s banned by Microsoft in recent days may be on the verge of releasing a workaround. According to 360Mods (by way of DailyTech), user 'c4eva' has shifted gears from developing Lite-on and Hitachi optical drive mods to creating a firmware rev that would allow modded Xbox 360s to bypass Microsoft's online security tests.

Square Enix says Final Fantasy XIII will hit the US on March 9, 2010, an announcement fulfilling the publisher's promise earlier this week to deliver 'important' news on Friday.

Sony's PS3 continued to outpace Microsoft's Xbox 360 in October hardware sales according to US NPD Group data, though Microsoft cleaned up in top 10 software sales, claiming five slots and 44 percent of units total. The Wii took top honors overall, but plummeted in year-over-year comparisons, falling from 803k units in October 2008 to 507k units last month.

Activision's says Modern Warfare 2 raked in an astonishing $310m on its first day of sales, a claim which, if accurate, would make it the biggest and fastest selling entertainment launch in history, annihilating sales records in every other medium.