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going going gone

breaking the door, breaking the door!

So as we enjoy the annual gorgefest that is Thanksgiving weekend there are a good chunk of us out there who will be burning off some of those calories battling the crowds looking for deals. How does that translate in the gaming world?

As we highlighted in a recent  post, the marketing machines have all slowed down to a crawl now that all the big-budget releases have hit the shelves (sorry Tony Hawk: Ride!). So as we with the websites start to spend our collective keyboards looking back at 2009 and picking our games of the year, consumers can look forward to the next few weeks of “crazy” deals that retailers far and wide will be offering in an attempt to move some of this year’s top titles. How crazy? Well, it’s not Dr. Frankenstein trying to reanimate an 8-ft corpse with electricity crazy but it is impressive and somewhat comical to see what stores consider deals and what they’ll do to try and move some of this merchandise. All this in a year when videogames as a whole have dropped in sales and the signs of the recession finally made its way to the seemingly recession proof industry.

Everyone from Target, to Wal-Mart to Toys R Us is serving up their own slice of the gaming pie with deals ranging from markdowns on new releases (a $40 game instead of a $60 deal — $20 bucks is not a crazy deal by any measure but hey it’s still 2o bucks) to the crazy bundle deals. Bundle deals like buy an Xbox Elite and 6 games for $300 — now that’s a deal except you don’t choose the games. The 6 games alone would cost you half the price of the console but the bigger question is, would you buy these six games anyway and will it be enough to get you to spend $300 on a new console rather than just $40 plus tax on a game? Maybe the uninformed present or the gaming nube but us gamers are a little wiser to those kind of deals.

It would seem that both last year and this year, in our current economic situation, the keyword is deal and if it doesn’t really sound like one then too bad retailer. On the plus side you have proof positive from the Modern Warfare 2 sales that people are willing to spend money on a game but does that scenario play out in holiday shopping? On the down side this may be a situation where because consoles and games are such high end items anyway that the gift givers may opt for the gift card which means the recipients may or may not choose to buy game stuff. The classic “I don’t know what he owns” utterance means a gift card is an easy out. But that means all these doorbuster deals are moot.

As to whether this holiday shopping season will salvage the sales slump will be determined in a month or so but for now retailers are certainly doing their part to make it happen.

Okay so maybe we’re just a little excited over here at SOS about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 but can you blame us? Think back to the first game’s release, how well it did, how well it continued to do into the next year even when game sales were slagging. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was rocking up the charts and pulling in the cash. And well … it was and still is one of the best FPS war games ever made.

So what’s doing as fans and hardcore COD gamers get ready to snap up Infinity Ward’s and Activision’s latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2? (COD:MW2)

Over in the Xbox Live marketplace you can now download the full game of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and they’ve set up a whole section of Live dedicated to all things MW2. It would seem they’re excited too. Retailer Gamestop has posted a list of every store in the country that will have a midnight opening to sell the game.

But wait there’s more!

They’re offering a sweepstakes that is sure to please any gamer willing to take the time to enter. It’s called surprize attack (get it — sur-prize attack? Wargame… Bueller, Bueller).  Anyway, if you pre-order Modern Warfare 2, you can play for your chance to win a Hummer H2, Polaris snowmobile, Ducati motorcycle and tons of other cool prizes inspired by the game. That’s right, you can win stuff you see in the game (assumedly not any of the weapons — that would be crazy and wrong)

Best Buy is also following suit with a listing of all their midnight opening stores as well but all they have in the way of cool stuff is a $10 gift card. For no apparent reason, they’re still pushing a Tekken 6 sweepstakes. They are though selling all the various versions of MW2.

Oh and the release calendar for next week has COD:MW2’s biggest competition as –  people not having money to buy any version of the game. As far as other games, it’s not that there aren’t other games being released, it’s just no one cares. No surprise that Left for Dead 2 wisely releases the following week otherwise it probably would have been left for dead on the shelves.

So there you have it, all the hullabaloo you can cram into four days is being crammed. Thankfully we haven’t seen the marketing machine’s ugly head pop up offering us things like Modern Warfare themed energy drinks, keychains and messenger bags. No this time around the excitement is thoroughly justified, the hype is set at the proper level and as we mentioned before, it would be amazing if after all this we don’t get what we’ve been eagerly waiting for.

If you happen to see a post next week that looks like the ramblings of a crazy person gushing with love and admiration about a videogame, you won’t need to guess what it’s about.