In case you don’t know, Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving when all of the big stores have sales in order to try to suck people into them to kick-start the holiday shopping season.

Best Buy is having an $18.99 sale featuring:

• Amped 3
• Condemned
• NBA Live ’06
• Rockstar Games Presents: Table Tennis
• The Outfit (apparently you can score this one for only $9.99 if you buy it in-store before noon)

Circuit City offers a different set at $16.99:

• Full Auto
• Gun
• Perfect Dark Zero
• Quake 4
• Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

Good luck surviving the trip to the store though.

Granted Ridge Racer 7 is different then Ridge Racer 6, it still uses a lot of the same assets and tracks. Generally the 360 version looks noticeably better with better AA and AF as well as better water and lighting. Pretty interesting considering the Xbox 360 game is a year older. This is not really all that surprising though, considering the 360 has a more flexible memory architecture as well as a better GPU.

In other news, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, had some unkind things to say about the Sony/PS3 in a recent interview with the Red Herring.

I think Sony shot themselves in the foot… there is a high probability [they] will fail. The price point is probably unsustainable. For years and years Sony has been a very difficult company to deal with from a developer standpoint. They could get away with their arrogance and capriciousness because they had an installed base. They have also historically had horrible software tools. You compare that to the Xbox 360 with really great authoring tools [and] additional revenue streams from Xbox live… a first party developer would be an idiot to develop for Sony first and not the 360. People don’t buy hardware, they buy software.

Ouch. A shining endorsement of the 360 and a stunning condemnation of the PS3 from one of the founding fathers of gaming.

Well, I have played through the first few acts of the game. So far the game is absolutely excellent. The combat is very fluid and tactical. The controls take a bit of getting used to though. I died a ton during the beginning of the game when I was trying to learn the controls and get a feel for the combat. But once you get a sense of how to (and how not to) play the game, it’s a ton of fun. The graphics are simply amazing and by far the best of any game on any platform. What’s even more impressive is that the frame rate is pretty much rock solid with no slow down. The storyline isn’t as good as one might have hoped, but its good enough to make you like the other characters in your squad and care about completing your objectives. The combat dialog is great and the voice acting is pretty good. Believe the hype everyone, its well deserved. Expect to see a review in the coming weeks.

In other news, during a recent interview with Gamepro, Cliffy B mentioned that they only scratched the surface of what the Xbox 360 is capable of:

Having worked on Xbox 360, from a technology standpoint, how much more do you think the system can be pushed with future games?

I think there’s plenty of room to push and experiment when it comes to physics and AI and real-time lighting. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with gameplay as well as the 360. There’s far more potential down the road to do more stuff. As amazing as I think Gears is, and my gut tells me I still love playing it, I think we have a really incredible experience; I think we’ll definitely push it further if we get around to dong a new version in the future.

To read the whole interview, go here.

Some of you might remember the previous BestBuy.com incident where I ordered Oblivion for Xbox 360 and got a copy of some soccer game for the PS2 and then wasn’t allowed to switch it for what I ordered. That sucked a lot, but this is even worse.

Two days ago I was calling around to stores to see if any of them had Gears of War in stock. When I called my local Best Buy the woman that answered the phone told me that the store did not have them, and that she couldn’t guarantee that they would have them in at all this week. Then she told me that she could have the warehouse ship it to me for free overnight and that I would have it by tomorrow in the afternoon. Seeing as Circuit City probably wouldn’t have it in by the next day I decided to not use my 15% of coupon and just have her overnight it to me.

So the next day I wait and nothing comes. So I figure it might just take two days to ship (one day for them to send it out and another for it to arrive). Well the next day comes along and I still don’t have it. I go online to track the order with the order number she gave me. It asks for my order number, my last name and my phone number. I enter that all in and it tells me my phone number is incorrect. So now I can’t even log in to check the status of my package. Chances are she entered the info I gave her over the phone wrong or something. If she could not type in my phone number right, who knows what else she messed up entering. So now I am not sure if I will end up getting it at all.

What sucks is that if I were not waiting for this stupid package that should have arrived yesterday I could just go out and buy the game from somewhere else.