Xboxist

What's on Your Christmas Shopping List This Year?

Dear Santa, we promise that we've been good little children all year long. We brought water to that homeless guy in Fallout 3 for positive karma, we played well with our teammates in Left4Dead 2, and we kept the fanboy bashing to a minimum. So, when you make your highly improbable circumplanetary voyage on December 24th, we hope that you won't forget us, nestled in our beds, DualShock controllers in hand. But just to avoid any mix-ups, we've made things extra simple by providing you with a list of the things we want. Hopefully your elves have mastered the dexterity needed to produce Japanese technology, because there's a lot of it on here. Now, since Christmas day is soon approaching, let's get started, shall we?

PSP Go

It's overpriced, completely unnecessary and highly desirable: in short, it's the perfect Christmas gift. Sony's PSP go features a sliding screen which conceals newly-designed controls. The device is smaler and lighter than even the so-called "slim and lite" PSP 3000. It will fit in a shirt pocket, so that we can whip it out and play when the boss isn't looking. Although we've already got tons of PSP units sitting around the office, the Go offers something new: the ability to completely free ourselves from that clunky old UMD format and store our games digitally on the device itself. That convenience has to be worth the higher price tag, we recon, although we did manage to find a lower price online. You can grab the White PSP Go for $229 here, ten bucks cheaper than the black version.

Samsung / Sony Vaio Netbook

Small and ultra-portable netbooks are a hot item this holiday shopping season. If you care about styling and you want to get your hands on the latest operating system, Sony's Vaio netbook just oozes sophistication and comes equipped with a mobile version of Windows 7. If you are more of a pragmatic type and you just want raw performance, the Samsung Go N310 is arguably the best netbook on offer this year. Recently reduced to $345 USD, the Samsung comes with Windows XP home edition and a monstrous 9 hour battery life.

Assassin's Creed 2

We enjoyed the first game, but not quite enough to spring for the sequel in a period crowded with other great games. That's why we've put this one on our list: we know we want to play it eventually, perhaps when things calm down a bit in January. From the videos and reviews that we've seen, it looks like Assassin's Creed 2 delivers in just about every place that the first game let us down. New missions, more freedom, better visuals and more way to assassinate people. What better way to spread that Christmas cheer than by playing a 16th century Venetian assassin? Oh, and it has already been reduced to $49.99 on Amazon.

DJ Hero with Turntable

Here's another game we've been meaning to pick up but haven't because we're broke. We never really got into the Guitar Hero craze, mainly because we're not huge fans of 20th century old-timer music. But here is a take on the music-rhythm genre we could definitely get into. The song list features some of our favorite artists from Daft Punk to David Guetta. At first the prospect of paying full price for the peripheral DJ turntable turned us off, so to speak. But now the whole package has been reduced to $88 for the game and controller. Not a bad price to put a smile on a music lover's face come Christmas morning.

Microsoft Zune HD

This little gadget really caught the world by surprise. Many doubted that Microsoft could make a portable media player that was actually desirable, after the mis-conceived early Zune failed to set the world on fire. But indeed they have, and the Zune HD feature set remains unmatched among most other personal media players. We especially like the ability to output high definition 720p video directly to our flat screen TV using HDMI. You can grab the 32 gb version here for the sale price of $267.99 USD.

We decided to stop ourselves at five items, because we don't want to seem greedy. Christmas is all about the giving, after all. Adding up the price for all of our picks, including the cheaper Samsung Netbook, the total bill of sale comes to a mere $979.98. We sure hope that the economic recession hasn't yet hit the North Pole. You probably have your own Christmas shopping list, and we'd like to see it. In the comments below, tell us what you would put in your letter to Santa (for under $1000).