Inq. of the Week: Holiday Gift?

I now have learned, after a long ordeal, that the holiday shopping season now begins the weekend before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to use a Best Buy coupon that was valid only last weekend to purchase my Wii, but that failed for a few reasons. And Toys R Us was the busiest I’ve ever seen one, and this was an out of the way store in Delaware.

But we still have Thanksgiving coming up, and the even more important commercial holiday of Black Friday. Formerly I dreaded this day as it meant long hours starting early in the morning, battling customers, and intense competetion. Now, I don’t even have to go to work that day.

What I’m trying to ask with all this in a roundabout way is… What do you want as a gift for this holiday season? (more rambling and my picks after the jump)

I have the distinction of having my birthday less than a week before Christmas, and so I only have to generate one list each year, and usually, one present gets set aside from Christmas as a Birthday gift. I also have a variety of esoteric gaming tastes that makes me difficult to shop for. Of course I do the Amazon wishlist thing, but I also make a Funagain list for boardgames. Anything more difficult to purchase than that… I’ll wait to use gift certificates/money on.

But if I had free reign to purchase any products, I’d ask for a Nintendo Wii and the new Essen release boardgame Space Dealer. You should know all about the Wii by now, but Space Dealer got great reviews at Essen, and is exactly my type of game. It’s a board game, but it’s realtime- your playing pieces are two sand timers that you place on what you want to produce. You don’t get the production until the sand timer runs out. Yes- it’s a truly real time strategy board game… and it’s a eurogame! But it’s not yet out in a widely released English edition, and thus again, I am unable to give money in return for receiving a product I want… yet.

For something widely available… I own every other Simpsons season they’ve released, so you’d better believe I want Season 9. This season features the no longer aired WTC episode, and the episode where Homer steals a “nuke-u-lar” sub. The latter episode features my favorite sequence in all of Simpsons-dom, where the Soviet Union returns. Great stuff.

Oh, and we’ll be doing a series of Critical Hit gift guides this year for stuff that you might not know about that’s scattered throughout the internet. DVDs, T-shirts, and Boardgames are already planned, and depending on how much stuff we find, there may be other categories as well.