Seasoned Black Friday shoppers know that the best way to save during this all-important shopping day is to plot out a course of action ahead of time. That means knowing what you want and where to get it -- at the lowest possible price, of course.

Such planning entails scouring the Black Friday ads and comparing prices and selection. To help ease the load, WalletPop has done some of the legwork for you. We've combed through the ads that have been released so far and dug up the best deals on everything from high-definition TVs and Blu-ray players to tools and sweaters.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, video games are the third most desired product this holiday season, and electronics retailers aren't the only ones angling to capture sales. Toys R Us is launching layaway, trade-ins and even more sales on video game hardware.

Toys R Us has been introducing new deals at a furious pace leading up to Black Friday, and beginning Friday, Nov. 18, the chain is expanding its layaway program to video game hardware (except in Maryland). Placing a product on layaway requires a deposit of 20% of the total, including taxes and a $10 service charge. Items must be paid for in full by Dec. 6.

The retailer began taking trade-ins of video game software in October, and will now accept hardware, as well. Bring gaming devices to a Toys R Us store and have the hardware scanned at the service desk to determine value. Accept the offer and you'll be issued a gift card for the value that can be redeemed immediately in store or online.

The Best Buy Black Friday ad has leaked out and offers price cuts on many items including appliances (sorry no $3 toasters) and other electronics like video games, HDTVs and laptops.

Most often, when searching for Black Friday deals, you don't think to look at major appliances. But this year Best Buy has 20-50% off many appliances, including a new Samsung washer and dryer set at half price. Other appliance discounts include refrigerators, Dyson vacuums and more.

Another Black Friday bargain at Best Buy is video games, specifically just released games and console bundles.

Recently nearly $2 million in grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation were awarded to nine research teams working on strengthening the evidence that playing games - video games that is - is good for your health.

The awards, which come from the Foundation's Health Games Research national program based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be used to research how gaming supports the development and use of digital interactive games to improve players' health.

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.

In what may be a first time ever occurrence, the town board of Amherst, New York has derailed the game license for its local Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant. Evidently, there is some question about how to properly let a kid be a kid in Amherst.

An unexpected 3-3 vote deadlocked the license process for the Amherst Chuck E. Cheese's. A rather tangled discussion then followed the voting. Specifically at issue was council member Shelly Schratz's concern that the kid-oriented theme restaurant was making excessively violent video games too easily accessible for very young children. Concerns were also aired regarding an apparently high number of police responses to the popular birthday party location.

The video game market is often called recession proof. It's escapist product at a good value, but I'm sensing a slowdown even in this safe haven.

Gaming, like the movies, provides good cost-effective entertainment. Many hours of it. Too many, some parents might say. Gamestop's performance in the last year certainly supports that, but there are a lot of things that can muck it up.

The company itself has a laundry list of them attached to earnings documents. Twenty six by my count as filed with the SEC as part of Gamestop's 10K, or annual financial report. The reasons range from fluctuations in tax or interest rates to changes among suppliers and the retail landscape. It's these last two that could have an effect on the market.

Just today, Take-Two Interactive said that it's delaying the release of BioShock 2, a popular game. This mostly hits Take-Two's earnings, but every little ripple in the business can effect retail sales. An even bigger issue, however, will be increased retail competition.

Gamestop has a robust used video game business. Restrictions in this category can negatively impact sales, says the company's financial reports. And now, Best Buy is gunning to make that statement true, getting into second-hand sales at its stores. That's 23% of sales and nearly half of Gamestop's profits.

A third-party vendor on Amazon.com was offering shoppers a chance to buy "RapeLay", an obscure Japanese computer game -- but Amazon.com pulled the item. A spokesman said that "We determined that we did not want to be selling this particular item."

Why not? Giant Bomb reports that RapeLay is a "molestation simulation that allows you to terrorize a woman and her two teenage daughters, with events ranging from groping on a train to gang rape and forced abortions".

Hmm... That seems like it could be deemed offensive by some people. SomethingAwful.com reviewed the game and reported that "It is a soulless, high-resolution rendering of rape. With nearly photo-realistic giant bedrooms and crying children that can get pregnant if you ejaculate inside of them."

Wow. Some British politicians are up in arms and looking to pass legislation to ban games like this, but I think that's probably overstating its influence. Of course the game is twisted and appallingly despicable -- but it's also not even close to being a mass market game and don't worry: Your kids won't be able to buy it at the mall. It's a game that no one ever would have heard of until it ended up on Amazon because of a third-party vendor --- and was taken down once Amazon noticed it.

That should be the end of the story. Anything else is giving this monstrosity more attention than it deserves. How much do you want to bet that the media outcry over the game has sent its sales soaring?

It is written: In the mid-'70s, there was Pong. The single-screen, back-and-forth tennis match seems laughably crude to us now, but put yourself in the mind of, say, a caveman looking at the miracle of fire for the first time. The notion of a video-based game was so novel, and its promise so exciting, that Americans latched onto the concept, fascinated to see how it would evolve.

It would evolve, we discovered soon enough, into in-home gaming systems. Atari was the first to get there on a wide scale, and our fingers have been wrapped around controllers ever since.

In the beginning, there were no "gamers." There were drinkers who were game for anything. They watched the technology slowly develop through coin-operated versions at bars and restaurants until October 1977, when Atari finally came out with its $200 VCS (Video Computer System) for home use. The very word--"computer"--was ritzy. By 1980, when the 16-color, living-room version of the arcade smash Space Invaders was released, the game console, now renamed the Atari 2600, exploded.

Atari delivered its full 4kbs worth of fun. That fake woodgrain trim! Those cheap black plastic paddles with the inadvertently attachable wheels! Those "joystick blisters" worn into the base of every 13-year-old thumb in the country after a long session of "Missile Command"! The characters that flickered if more than one appeared onscreen at once!

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.

Just when you thought you'd heard it all, IBM executive David Laux tells the BBC that video gamers make good employees. "We have found across the board, if you look at different categories of games, they all have the ability to develop unique skills."

It gets worse: "That's from the casual games which improve memorisation and the ability to discern details, to console games and shooter games that develop rapid decision making and to role playing games like the World of Warcraft that are very unique in producing leadership skills." (emphasis added)

Now color me unconvinced, but I strongly reject the notion that sitting alone in your underwear eating Hot Pockets and drinking Jolt has anything to do with business -- even it is combined with controlling a cluster of pixels designed to look like an imaginary creature bearing an axe you can use to buffet an Adlin Pridedrift.

On the other hand, an employer that can find someone lame enough to spend days cramped in his room without showering or talking to friends and develop a way to channel that energy into work might have an extremely productive employee on its hands.

But World of Warcraft as the breeding ground for the leaders of tomorrow? I doubt it.

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.

November is one of the biggest months for video game releases as publishers try to make their way onto holiday wish lists with big titles such as Gears of War 2, Mirrors Edge, Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms, Little big Planet and many many more. Even picky gamers can easily spend $300-$400 to snap up just the highest rated games, let alone any of the casual games set to invade store shelves in the next two months. With so many releases it is no wonder that the GeekDad at WIRED came up with 5 ways to stretch your gaming dollar this fall.

GeekDad offers the following 5 ways to save money on games this holiday season.

1. Know your release dates and what games you can wait to buy.
   
2. Read reviews to avoid the crud that many developers shovel out this time of year.
3. Play the demo; nothing helps you separate the wheat from the chaff quicker than hands on time.
4. Trade in and or buy used games, even new release used games are $5 cheaper.
   
5. Join a gaming community, which exist solely to help others find cheap video game deals.
   

These are some excellent ideas for saving on games. I've already prioritized my game purchases for the rest of the year, planning to pick up Mirrors Edge on launch day while waiting until after the holidays to snag a used copy of Gears of War 2. With the prevalence of demos and reviews these days there is no excuse for making an uninformed game purchase, even as a gift. While we are talking about gifts, let me be one of the first to say, "there is no shame in giving a used game as a gift, after all, used games play the same as new ones!"