Ride the griiiiddd!!

Today Amazon released their Holiday Toy List, a flash-based GUI toy search that can be categorized by age group, interest, and price range.

For big kids like me, the Toys R Us “Big Book” was always the de facto standard of holiday toy catalogues. However, recently on Twitter I came across a comment that mentioned how the ‘biggest toy book ever’ is only 80 pages this year.

The Amazon Toy List app is gigantic, and it sort of puts you ‘hovering’ over an endless landscape of toys. You can zoom in and out, scroll left and right, and generally just surf the map of available holiday gifts. It’s pretty damned cool.

  

 

 

I want the pink one!

Since we upgraded to a PS3 here at ICHQ, the sturdy old PS2 has been relegated to a box in the basement. We spent many happy hours with our PS2 though – games like Final Fantasy X, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, and Grandia 3 gave us a lot of great gaming memories.

I think back – those games are still totally viable. They still look great, they still play great, and there are tons more. The Playstation 2 library is gigantic – over 2400 games by some estimates. New games are being released today. Now, Sony is pushing the PS2 as a “budget” gaming platform for the 2008 holiday season.

This is great move on Sony’s part – here they have a platform with zero R&D cost, that can be built very cheaply, and publishers are still releasing new games for it. Gamasutra quotes SCEA sales and marketing VP Ian Jackson as saying “In a tight economy, (it) is a great value proposition for the consumer.”

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