For the longest time leaked Black Friday ads have been a part of the bargain hunting game.

Sure you can wait until Thanksgiving to look at the ads, but who wants to fight off tryptophan to look for the best deal?

The practice of posting ads online has long been a thorn in retailers' sides, and some of them even continue to fight the leaks, but others are embracing the Internet and releasing their ads for all to see.

Just like Staples did last week, Meijer officially released its Black Friday ad for all to see.

The Midwest retailer has several deals that might actually be worth standing in line for, especially since the limited quantities are high compared to what we normally see.

Another day, another Black Friday ad leaked and viewable online for your Black Friday planning pleasure.

This time Kmart's 40 page Black Friday ad has leaked, revealing exactly which toys, electronics and other goods will be getting special Black Friday pricing.

Invoking their famous Blue Light Specials, Kmart is celebrating the day of shopping with "Blue Friday" deals from 6-11 a.m.

If you love to play video games but you haven't already purchased a Nintendo Wii then you better wait a few more days.

Nintendo announced today that its popular Nintendo Wii console will be $50 cheaper starting on Sunday.

The release also confirmed that when the latest Mario Bros game, "The New Super Mario Bros." comes out for the Wii in November that fans will get to play as the Mario Bros at the same time; a first for the series.

By dropping the Wii down to $199 Nintendo isn't just making it cheaper to get your motion sensing gaming on, it's matching the recent price drops to the Xbox 360 and the new slimmer Sony PlayStation 3.

Last month Microsoft cut the price of its top end Xbox 360, the Elite, to $299 which is even cheaper thanks to a $50 rebate which is valid until Oct. 6. The new PS3 slim which launched earlier this month is $299; a drop of $100.

This leaves the current prices of game consoles at:

• Nintendo Wii - $199
• Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 3 Slim - $299
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite $249 after rebate
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade - $199

One thing to remember when buying a new console is that if you're buying for a Christmas present you may want to wait a few weeks until Holiday Bundles come out. In the past these bundles have included two games, albeit older ones, for the same price as the consoles.

The only console that you may want to buy sooner than that is the Xbox 360 since the bundled games, Pure and Lego Batman, can be purchased used for less than the $50 rebate.

With the passing of July 4th, we are over halfway to Christmas, which means retailers are gearing up for the merriest of seasons by rolling out Christmas in July specials.

While some stores will try to woo you with 10 %off and flashy animations, Toys R Us is slashing prices soo much, you'd think Santa himself had underwritten the sale. Even if you hate the fact that Christmas decorations are already on sale and develop a nervous tic if you hear Christmas music before October; these sales make Black Friday seem like just another shopping day.

From July 19 through the 25 you can score these impressive sales in store or online at ToysRUs.com:

• The Hannah Montana Malibu Beach house is only $79.99; that's $100 off retail and $80 cheaper than Amazon!
• Guitar Hero: World Tour Super Bundle for Wii or Xbox 360 for $99.99; $90 off retail and $30 cheaper than the lowest price online plus you get a $10 gift card.
• 50% off Milton Bradley Games.
• $40 off of Power Wheels Barbie or Kawasaki Lil' Trail Rider.

Parents and gamers coming of age may be in for a break later this year, as it is rumored that both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 will have price cuts. Technology site Ars Technica claims that both Sony and Microsoft will drop their prices in order to better compete with the Nintendo Wii, later this year.

While there are always rumors about price drops in the video game market, Joystiq.com points out that the Mole at Ars Technica has a solid reputation in knowing what's going on in the industry.

On top of the Mole's past performance, history shows that it's time for another price drop, and a significant one at that. The Xbox 360 has already seen three price drops, which have given it an edge over the pricier PlayStation 3; but it hasn't yet reached the halfway price point that its predecessor, the Xbox, did by the fourth year of its release.

Given Microsoft's focus on digital downloads, I'd venture a guess that Microsoft will try to offer an Xbox 360 with hard drive for $199 -- half of what it cost when it launched in 2005. The Mole also predicts that Sony will be introducing a new, slimmer PlayStation 3, which will also cost less, although it's harder to estimate exactly how much less.

Who doesn't like getting something for free? I certainly l do. So do a lot of folks. That's why there's no end to the number of contests people can enter online. It seems like every other day I get emails notifying me that I've won some sweepstakes or another. I've even been the "lucky winner" of sweepstakes and contests from places as remote as Ireland and China (even though I've never been to any of those places and sure haven't entered any of their sweepstakes).

Of course I'm not alone. Millions of people have received the same emails, which are generally scams to dupe people out of their money. I ignore those emails, but many people don't.

There are a lot of legitimate contests and sweepstakes sponsored by all kinds of companies and organizations. About.com has a comprehensive listing of contests. I've also won a couple freebies in the past. That's why when I saw an ad on Facebook that said "Win a Wii Fit," I clicked on it to see if it was legit.

What do you get for the video-game-obsessed constitutional monarch who has everything? The Queen of England now has another toy to play with, something we commoners can't get even if we had the money: a gold-plated Nintendo Wii.

Publisher THQ gave the Wii to the royal family, along with a copy of BIG Family Games.

"The Royal Family is arguably the most important family in the country, so we felt that they had to have a copy of the new game," said THQ product manager Danielle Robinson on 1up.com, a gaming website. "But we thought that Her Majesty the Queen wouldn't want to play on any old console, so an extra-special gold one was commissioned. We hope that she and the rest of the Royal Family enjoy the game," Robinson said.

Queen Elizabeth became a Wii fan at Christmas, when her grandson, Prince William, received one as a gift from his girlfriend. The queen enjoys Wii bowling. She's become a notorious gadget freak: She got her first mobile phone in 2001 and has regularly upgraded to one with the latest features; she set up her own e-mail account years ago; she got an iPod in 2005 that can store more than 100,000 tunes (and received another iPod this year, a gift from President and Mrs. Obama); and last June she added a BlackBerry to her techno treasure trove.

If we learned anything from the Bernie Madoff scandal, it's that people have to learn to take control of their own financial futures. That doesn't mean you have to become an expert in p/e ratios and dollar-cost averaging - you can just look at the products you know and love and get investment ideas from there. WeSeed's Jennifer Openshaw tells how you can get tips from your phone, your favorite video games, or the solar panels on your neighbor's house.

I am the benchmark. By the time a consumer electronic product makes it into my hands, you know it's become a cultural icon. And so it is with the Wii.

Because I'm not playing. I don't care about TV, video games, electronics or being at all hooked-in to today's world. I'd heard of Wii, of course. But I wasn't interested. At. All. I didn't care how many accolades I read, how much hype was thrown at me. I would not have anything to do with Nintendo's Wii.

As is always the case with these things, however, it's the younger generation that bring us along, kicking and screaming.

My kids got their first taste of Wii at friends' house (everyone else seems to have one already.) And by the time our neighbor brought hers over for the kids to play, you'd have thought she'd offered them free Disneyland passes for life. After watching them play Wii bowling for an hour, I let myself be talked into trying it myself. And normally I don't even like bowling.

Playing video games used to be a fun excuse for sitting on the couch, relaxing and doing much of nothing. Then came along the Nintendo Wii, and its healthy counterpart, the Wii Fit, and video games were sedentary no more.

Losing fat, or lowering your body mass index (BMI) while exercising on the Wii Fit's balance board is supposed to be easy if you're less inclined to go outside or to the gym. Moving around on the small pad may not look like much of a workout, but anyone who has even tried the Nintendo Wii without the Fit, knows that Nintendo has figured out how to make it fun while keeping your heart rate up.

The board measures a user's weight and center of gravity in about 40 different activities such as hula hoop, yoga, snowboarding and pushups, and balance games, strength training and aerobics. The user's "fitness age" can be tracked.

The base system retails for $89.99, and you already have to have a Nintendo Wii to hook the Fit up to. But they can be difficult to find in stores. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, for example, the Wii game console was the most popular product sold on eBay -- 3,017 sold for an average price of $349, according to the New York Times. The Wii Fit was also popular, with 1,305 units sold for an average of $143.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently released a study regarding the power usage of consoles. During the course of the study it found that gamers who leave their consoles powered on all the time spend more than $100 a year to leave their game console idle.

At first glance this appeared to be a damning study, especially if the NRDC defined "on" as a console left in standby mode; however the actual definition of "on" for this study was leaving the console completely up and running.

The cost of leaving your console on all the time varies, but no matter which console you choose, never turning it off is costly. Leaving your PS3 on all the time will cost between $130 and $160 depending on which version you have, compared to under $15 if it is turned off when it's not being played. Similarly the Xbox 360 costs between $100 and $140 if left on all the time but under $14 if turned off when you're done. The Wii is the most power efficient; only costing $10 if left on all the time, compared to $3 if turned off when it isn't in use. Leaving it on is still wasting $7, however.

The holidays are quickly approaching, and with them so is the need for a bigger memory card. Thankfully Kingston has come to the rescue, offering a 2 GB SD card for $6 with free shipping to boot. This is an excellent deal on a memory card and would be the perfect stocking stuffer for the budding photographer in your family. It would also make a great companion to the cheap digital picture frames that are predicted to be on sale on Black Friday!

A 2 GB SD card can hold somewhere in the range of 1,000 pictures depending on the quality you choose, providing more than enough space to capture all of your favorite holiday events, even those you'd rather forget, such as uncle Frank's gut busting turkey dinner! SD cards can also be used to save games on the Nintendo Wii which while overrated in some areas, has the most consumer friendly game save media.

Generally a 2 GB SD card from a name brand company such as Kingston will cost you at least $15 in a brick and mortar store or $11 plus shipping from another online store. Any time you can pick up three for the price of one qualifies as a good deal in my book!

via hotdlz

The Wii is a pretty amazing piece of technology. Not only has it brought casual gamers of all ages together, but it did it in a way which disillusioned many hardcore gamers frustrated by the lack of many features we have come to expect from the current crop of video game consoles. For lack of a better analogy, the Wii is a lot like sex -- the more people you have to play with, the better, and, well, playing by yourself just feels...wrong.

Toss in the fact that online play is about as much fun as smacking your shins with a splintered 2x4, due to the lack of voice chat and the inability to create a friends list which spans all games, and you'll begin to see where I am coming from. Nintendo reasons that it doesn't support these features in order to make the system more family friendly, but its competitors have managed to provide these features while giving parents the ability to limit the use of voice chat. These factors have turned me off of the Wii even as it sits there taunting me with its pulsating blue light.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Overrated people, places and things!

The final push over the edge into overrated for me comes from the lack of quality control, which has led to a slew of gimmicky games worth less than the plastic case they come in. Even Nintendo Fanboys admit that the lack of Nintendo's Seal of Quality has lead to an abundance of crap for the Wii. Unfortunately, other than Guitar Hero, games for the Wii without Mario or Luigi have, as a whole, been a disappointment. For every Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers, there are hundreds of games which could barely pass for a lame web game.

Sure, playing the Wii is fun and it has even inspired three kids to get off their couch and lose weight. However, the novelty of swinging around a Wii 'mote to play a game wears off about the time your last party guest heads home. As a gamer who owns a Wii, I can't help but notice that the Wii seems to get the majority of its use when I haul it to a friend's or to my grandparents for Christmas. As a whole, the Wii is lacking in games, online support and single player fun, leading me to the conclusion that it is overrated.