The new Xbox Series X is hard to come by in stores, but it will be free for some lucky youngsters at the four Bay Area UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital locations.

Hayward native, former professional wrestler, and generally very highly regarded human being Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson put out a press release last week, announced via the Xbox website, that he was giving free Xbox consoles to 50,000 kids at children’s hospitals across the country. The sharp eyes at KPIX noticed an interesting local detail — the Bay Area’s UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital is one of the children's hospitals getting the Xboxes, so The Rock will rock some local kids’ holiday season pretty hard.  

This is the just-released new Xbox console called the Xbox Series X, and these brave hospitalized youngsters got the new video game console before it was available to the public. These things are apparently in very short supply as coronavirus has affected the retail and production chain. PC Magazine says that the console is “out of stock at all the major retailers” and that “you’ll have to go to eBay, where third-party merchants are hawking the hardware for at least twice the normal pricing.” Walmart says they’ll be selling them online only as of Black Friday, so these kids are getting something pretty rare and special.

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Yes, there are clearly several different levels of marketing “synergy” at work here. But the end result is a nice thing, as video games are understandably an important coping mechanism for children in hospitals.

“Me, as being an avid gamer, I just remember the nights when I would stay up all night long, and I would just get my ass kicked playing games,” Johnson says in the video above.

Honestly, The Rock, is that how we talk to kids these days?

Fans of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may know that he and his family all tested positive for COVID-19 in September. But he is now out of quarantine and appears in good health.

Related: The Rock Is In Town Shooting 'Ballers' And Greeting Fans, Should Be Easy To Spot [SFist]

Image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 10: Dwayne Johnson speaks during a Hand and Footprint ceremony honoring Kevin Hart at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on December 10, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jean Baptiste Lacroix/Getty Images)

What's your favorite thing about them?
Collaborating with fantastic illustrators and artists to give people worthy alternatives to the cookie-cutter commercial widgets that permeate our culture.

What's on your holiday wish list?
Please sir, may I have some more Peace on Earth. But until that comes, an Xbox 360 would be nice, but I’m still happy playing through Marvel Ultimate Alliance on a borrowed Playstation.

What are you giving this year?
Video games, anime, comics, colorful shirts, and books of course.

Of course Microsoft is not an empire that will fall quickly. We doubt Ray Ozzie will pull a Nero and set the Redmond campus alight or feed open-source advocates to lions (that's Steve Ballmer's job, after all). But the company is already showing signs of weakness -- Scoble was only one of many, many employees who are no longer satisfied by their compensation packages. The core business of the company, Windows, hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and the promised Windows Vista will demand top-flight hardware that few machines today can muster. The enterprise (or business sales) cash cow is bound to see more aggressive competition from open-source and web-based solutions, their Xbox division is still a money-loser, and DRM-crippled consumer devices powered by Windows Media haven't exactly caught fire in the marketplace.

In the interest of narcissistic disclosure, our past and present have been aided and abetted by Microsoft money since our mother joined the team back in the 80s. She joined the company when it employed all of 3,000 people, and left after it had grown by an order of magnitude to start her own company. Like Scoble and Gates, though, it was partly for personal reasons, and hers included a distaste for the changes to corporate culture -- the very changes that many pundits blame today for the lack of innovation at the company. Layer upon layer of middle management, the stifling of competition through acquisition and intimidation, an unwillingness to work with standards groups and open up the dialog with the larger software development community.

The company could reinvent itself after Gates' departure, certainly, but we don't see it as likely. It has spent much of the last ten years protecting its status as a near monopoly instead of investing in new ways of doing business and developing new technologies. With Apple offering an alternative for Intel-based systems and free, open-source systems driving most of the world's servers, some have predicted that Vista may be the last version of Windows -- ever. And it will be a lot harder to cram their crappy, bloated applications down our throats when they begin to lose near absolute control over the desktop market.

So yeah, we're biting the hand that fed us, but in an effort to escape the confines of the cage. We won't be sad when we get to tell the next generation scary stories about a giant, unfeeling monstrosity of a company that would do anything, above or below the law, to make ghastly profits. Welcome back to the Bay Area, Robert, we're glad you got out while the gettin' was good. As for you Mr. Gates, we hope your charitable efforts restore some of the good karma you'll need in order to avoid being reincarnated as a Word Macro Virus.

Of course, we're still scouring the internets for any hint of game news. There's plenty of coverage all over the place, in particular GameSpot's media blitz and Joystiq's ongoing blog updates, dealing with the horrors of E3 so we don't have to. But what if you're only casually interested in videogames, and you don't care about all the lights and noise and information overload? Well, we cover the internet coverage so you don't have to. Here are our highlights:

Console Wars
Both the Sony Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii were fully unveiled to the public. The general consensus is that Wii won. Nintendo played up its motion-sensing remote controller, which now includes a speaker. Its first-party games such as and Super Mario Galaxy will use the remote to simulate shooting arrows, swinging swords, fishing, and hopping over boss monsters and eating mushrooms.

The PS3, on the other hand, will be extremely expensive and larger and heavier than the original Xbox. Much like the Xbox 360's release, the PS3 will come in two varieties: the outrageous $499 for a stripped down version, and the no-way-you've-got-to-be-kidding $599 for the version that people actually want. The biggest difference between the two versions is hard drive size: 20GB versus 60GB. Also notable is that the 20GB version has no HDMI output, support for other memory cards, or wireless internet.

More after the jump. Image of The Staples Center the burned-out husk of a ruined city from Metal Gear Solid 4 on Konami's website.

Kaleidoscope
We may not have the Xbox 360's awesome home media center capabilities, but we may not even need them, if Apple rumor site Think Secret's speculation is correct. They're claiming that Apple will announce a new Mac mini-based home media center at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco this January. The new unit will be one of the first Intel-based Macs to be released, they say, and will be in a form factor similar to the existing mini but adding a built-in dock for the iPod. On the software side, it will include Apple's FrontRow software that's currently bundled with the iMac G5, and some as-yet-unseen digital video recording software that their "sources" call a "TiVo-killer."

The release of such a machine would make perfect sense for Apple, as just about everything they've done over the past year has led up to this — new iPod models, the Mac mini itself, positioning the new iMac as a media center, setting up iTunes to deliver video content. And end users have been making homebrew media centers out of the Mac mini ever since it was first released. As far as we can tell, the only reason Apple wouldn't announce a mini-based DVR is because it makes too much sense.

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