Black Friday Deals Start Early at Amazon

Amazon is starting their Black Friday video games dealsoff early this year.

Every couple of hours there is a new deal. Right now Batman: Arkham Asylum for 360is $14.99 brand new. But that deal only lasts for 2-3 hours, then a new deal starts. We thought some of our readers might like knowing about some of these deals.

I'm hoping to pick up some games I never had a chance to play and maybe a few Christmas gifts for family. I'm also checking the TV section every couple of hours because I'm wavering on buying a new HD TV. If the deal is good enough I must just pull the trigger.

Anyone know other websites or stores with video game or TV Black Friday deals?

Browsable PC Games

When we first added all PC and Mac games to our database, we couldn't fit them on a single page. 7,500+ games was just too many. Today we finished some changes allowing you to browse all the PC games on one page. If we did our job, it should work smoothly without bogging down your browser.

We also adjusted the way that filtering works on the console pages. When you select a genre from the drop down, you get a new page which you can bookmark. This is pretty handy if you like to check in on the most expensive RPG games for the PC, for example.

Let us know in the comments if you experience any problems.

Christmas Gift Ideas for Game Collectors

Buying Christmas gifts for game collectors can be tricky. They usually own all the easy to find games for their favorite systems. Maybe your lucky and the collector on your list is starting to collect a new console and has a huge list of games they need, but more often then not their collection is almost complete.

I hear from collectors all the time "I only need 6 more games to have the complete NES collection". So what do you get for these collectors? Here are a few ebay auctions up for sale right now that I'm pretty sure they don't own:

1992 Campus Challenge

A video game collector has listed his copy of Nintendo Campus Challenge 1992 on ebay. The game is one of three known to exist and is for the Super Nintendo.

The opening bid is $15,000 which definitely sounds like a lot but the 1991 Campus Challenge for NES recently sold for $20K. So this gift is almost too cheap to pass up.

Pepsi Invaders

If $15,000 is a bit out of your price range maybe you can afford something for $1,500 instead. Pepsi Invaders for Atari 2600 is up for sale now.

Pepsi Invaders was made by Coke and given away at a Coke sales convention. Only 125 were ever made.

Caltron 6-in-1

Not as rare as the other two, Caltron 6-in-1 is selling for $9.99 right now and will probably close at around $150-200. That's 1-100th the price of Campus Challenge 92.

Caltron 6-in-1 is an unlicensed game with six games on the cartridge. All of them are notoriously bad though so don't expect the collector to play it very long.

Whatever your budget is give the gift of game collecting this year - buy a rare game for a loved one.

New Chart Design

Today we've changed the charting component we display on game pages. The new chart looks like this:

You'll notice that the dots for each data point are gone. We removed them to make the chart less cluttered for games with long price histories. You can still move your mouse around the chart to see the price for each data point. As you hover, dots appear indicating which month you've selected. The price for that month is displayed in the upper-right corner:

These new charts should load quite a bit faster than the old charts, on average. Hopefully you'll spend less time waiting and more time enjoying the chart.

The new chart also does a better job scaling the vertical axis. This allows the chart line to occupy more screen real estate and shows better definition on price variations. The horizontal axis is divided by year making it easier to spot seasonal trends. For instance, Mario Kart 64 above consistently sees a small price increase in September with a larger increase in December.

You can also zoom in and out of the new charts by clicking the zoom links in the upper left.

By default, we show you all the data we have. If you only care about prices in the last year, you can show only those ones. For now, we don't provide additional price detail when you zoom in. We'd really like to support that, but haven't implemented it yet.

Some of you may notice that this new charting component uses Flash just like the old one. If you have an iPad, you're probably disappointed. We considered using a chart component based on HTML 5 and JavaScript, but couldn't find any with the features we needed.

What do you think of the new charts? Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

How Big Is the Game Category on Ebay? Infographic

Have you ever wondered how many video games sell on eBay during the course of a day? Or what the most expensive game ever sold was? Or maybe how many copies of Super Mario 3 have sold since eBay was founded? (The answers are: 19,012 games per day; Stadium Events for $41,000; and 12,091 Mario 3's since founding)

We asked eBay to answer some of our readers' questions about the video game category on eBay. All the answers are compiled below in a handy infographic.

Ebay Video Game Infographic

See Bigger Version Here

We want to give a huge "THANK YOU" to all the video game category managers on eBay who worked with us to gather all this information. All the data in the infographic comes directly from them.

What do you think the most interesting statistic is from the infographic? Let us know in the comments below.