I dunno. It is called Black Friday for a very good reason. (if you work retail, this is the kind of day that makes you want to kill yourself)

It's all going to depend on stock and what people are shopping for. Most people will be shopping for DVDs, CDs, TVs, stereos, and stuff like that. And most kids want consoles. I'd say you should be ok on the Orange Box, but I don't know about the RAM. Usually when hardware is on sale for really cheap people buy it up pretty quickly, and often retailers don't stock that much of it. Local small-time PC shop repair people love to buy this stuff up as much and as fast as they can.

I was looking at some Black Friday stuff for Best Buy. There's some pretty good deals to be had.

Seagate 7,200RPM 320GB SATA internal HDD - $59.99 http://bfads.net/Seagate-320GB-35-Internal-SATA-Hard-Drive-at-Best-Buy

100 pack of Dynex 16X DVD-Rs -$6.99 http://bfads.net/Dynex-100Pack-DVDR-Discs-at-Best-Bu

1 1GB 5300 DD2desktop RAM (probably PNY, but doesn't say) - $27.99 http://bfads.net/1GB-PC5300-DDR2-Desktop-Memory-at-Best-Buy

Bioshock - $24.99 http://bfads.net/BioShock-PC-at-Best-Buy

HL2: Orange Box - $24.99 http://bfads.net/Half-Life-2-Orange-Box-PC-at-Best-Buy

Guild Wars: Prophecies - $9.99 http://bfads.net/Guild-Wars-PC-at-Best-Buy

At CompUSA:

500W power supply - $16.99 (9pm-midnight only) http://bfads.net/500Watt-ATX-Cooler-Master-eXtreme-Power-Supply-at-CompUSA

So, anyone else know of any good deals this Black Friday? (Black Friday, in case you don't know, is the Friday after Thanksgiving. It's a hellish day for major retailers. Hence the name)

For RTS: Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes.

For RPG: Neverwinter Nights 2 (even if you don't like the OC, there's a bunch of modules for it and more being made. Plus there's a new expansion out), Oblivion (it is kind of FPSish though), or go to some classics like Bladur's Gate 2, KoTOT 1&2.

For Adventure: Sam & Max.

If you want to try another MORPG: Guild Wars:Prophecies will be on sale at Best Buy on the 23th&24th for $9.99

Too bad you're burned out on FPS. Quake Wars is a lot of fun.

The real question is why no developers are making games for macs.captalchol

That's incorrect. Quake IV was on Mac. Carmack also has said that Rage will be available for Mac, as it is OpenGL just like nearly all of iDs other games. Starcraft II will probably come to Mac. (edit) Starcraft II is coming to Mac. And Quake Wars will be on Mac in December (edit)

True, not many people own Macs. Primarily, most smaller softhouses don't port to Mac because it is time consuming (and thus costly) to port from Direct3D to OpenGL, and there isn't a large userbase on the Mac. However, some devs still do port because of their love for the Mac or because they are deeply involved with developing OpenGL (like Carmack).

[QUOTE="Fr0st3d"]MS or an other company should work on a gaming only os... that would be cool mrbojangles25

That would be awesome. An OS that turns off ALL background apps before launching a game? Could work.

*oh ya, and it has to support all old games, including DOS.

I've been saying this for quite some time, and people act like I'm insane. Imagine having a Sony PlayStation X OS. You just got done emailing your grandma, sorting your calendar, worked a bit on your paper, and decided to Skype your friend to see if he wants to play some Gran Turismo 6 online. You click to start the PSxOS and Windows shuts down, PSxOS boots and you're playing your game with the vast amjority of system resources available. When you're done, you're given the choice to log back into Windows or turn turn off the computer.

People have tried to counter with: "yeah, but Sony makes money by selling PS console hardware." Do they? They took a major hit with the hardware pricing for the PS3. Why couldn't Sony just adapt and make gaming computers? They already make VIAOs, so they have a computer build operation. People also ask how would Sony and Nintendo be able to compete with MS? Simple. Whoever has the better OS bundle that delivers the best game experience. Duh. Exclusive titles would be another thing.

I really pine for the day that all of these different formats just work on one machine, a standard computer. The ability to mess around on Photoshop, do some emails, and then load up a Playstation game would be awesome. It's much easier to make a PC like a console than it is to make a console like a PC.

I ues PC only beacuse of games. I heard that unlike PC, Mac is a better system that have "a lot less" bugs, crashes and so much problems like I have know with Vista... I only heard it throung...NitayClouda

Don't believe the hype. When I installed Panther (10.3.1) onto my old G4, Safari would frequently crash, Quicktime would crash. the system would frequently freeze, and I wasn't able to install anything 3rd party or else it would crash (talking about mpkg install packages). Once I updated, things were fine, but weird stuff still happens occasionally.

Also, there are a lot of pet peeves I have with Apple. Mainly with Quicktime. And Safari. Even Safari3 beta doesn't have anti-phishing. What's up with that!? I've foudn that I only really use 1/2 of the apps from Apple. The rest are 3rd party.

As for gaming, I do that on my Hackintosh. On my Hackintosh I have an XP boot and a Tiger boot. When I want to do work (Adobe CS3) or just surf the internet and email people, I boot OS X. When I want to play Quake IV, Guild Wars, FarCry, Fable, GTA:SA, Jade Empire, etc. I boot up XP. Also there really isn't much of a performance difference between CS3 on a XP and OS X. Just about the only thing that I feel OS X does better is compiling big, intensive PDFs from InDesign.

From a workplace perspective, I enjoy OS X much more. I like the dock. It makes retrieving and running apps much easier than Windows Start Menu. I also like Dashboard and Eposé. Special characters are much easier to impliment (hold down option and press a key or option+shift and a key) as oppossed to Windows stupid-as-hell unicode format (I don't want to remember 18 different 4 digit codes thank you.). http://home.earthlink.net/~awinkelried/keyboard_shortcuts.html (--- to see what I mean.

Anyways, the real problem with Vista is not Microsoft, but shoddy drivers. The wide variety of hardware combinations that are capable makes writing these drivers a problem. A Mac doesn't have to deal with this, as it is a hardware specific OS. In otherwords, you can't just take out your video card, buy a new one on Newegg, and slap it in. You must have a video card that is compliant with the OS. Even some DVD drives aren't compliant, so you need to make sure you have compliant hardware. Which is how Appple makes most of their money. The force users to pay throught the nose for hardware.

And then there's support... When something doesn't work, they just say "oh, that's odd. It should work. It's a Mac. It just works." Well, no crap, tardfarmer, but it's not working. Between the overpriced hardware, the elitist attitudes, the micromanagement pay system (iPhoto, Quicktime, iTunes, and a nuch of other stuff are limited edition. you must register and pay more for the full editions), and the OS lockout (there's tons of problems with legacy support. Apple's solution: just buy the upgrade. How about you morons just bother doing some legacy support!?) there's plenty to not be happy about in Mac-land.

However, it does have it's perks, as does Vista. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don't believe the hype.

Well, I'm still using XP, but I'll probably switch over to Vista soon. I've heard that a lot of problems have cleared up and I use ATI anyways. Many of the problems people faced were due to NVidia not being on top of their drivers, which has been a problem for the past 3 years or so. (when Quake IV came out, many NVidia users couldn't play it because of shoddy drivers making the game crash. And not even on Vista. On XP)

Regarding Linux and OSX for gaming, both use OpenGL. Xp & Vista use DirectX. OpenGL is open source and DirectX is owned by MS. Ergo, it would cost money to implement DirectX onto a Linux distro, even if MS would consider selling the rights (which I doubt they would). Also, another poster mentioned Blizzard and EA games on OSX. You forgot to mention iD's games. Everything they do is OpenGL and usually gets ported over to the Mac.

Personally, I use Tiger (OSX.4) on my Hackintosh for work and various things. I use XP for gaming, and gaming only. When I get Vista, it will be for gaming, and gaming only as well.

[QUOTE="monco59"]

You're preaching to the converted.

Also, linkified for the "lazies".

HydroMat

i know this is offtopic but one of the links next to that article had this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7095134.stm

roffle's!! xD

I wonder if he's a bi-cyclist... A ha ha ha ha!

Thank you, folks. I'll be here all week.