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Just a few hours after Nintendo, Sony has prepared a Black Friday sales statement of its own. SCEA's Patrick Seybold wrote in a press release: "PlayStation 3 demand was at an all time high with the system selling more than 440,000 units for the week ending 11/29/09." While shy of Wii's numbers, the figure is quite impressive, considering that's more than the number of systems sold in the entire month of October -- the same month that the PS3-exclusive Uncharted 2 came out.

Retailers offered a number of PS3 bundles during the holiday weekend, adding a number of free games and movies to the system's standard $299 price tag. That, coupled with an ad campaign that totally doesn't creep us out, certainly helped Sony's fortunes this year.

Perhaps you've been playing an online session of LittleBigPlanet and seen a Sackboy (or Sackgirl) with his (or her) head stuck inside of a turkey. You're probably curious as to how this bold fashion statement came to pass. Were they searching for a lost meat thermometer? Had they been the victim of a cruel practical joke? Were they afflicted with the rare, but deadly Meleagris Oblongatus virus?

As it turns out, the real source of these turkeyheaded individuals isn't really that scintillating. Media Molecule handed them out free of charge last Thanksgiving -- and, according to a recent post on PlayStation.Blog, the offer stands this year as well. Hop onto LBP to get your fowl chapeau from the LittleBigStore, but act quick -- it'll only be available for "a limited time."

Once again, Cryptic Studios is giving you a great excuse not to spend time with friends and family over a holiday weekend. The developer's superheroic MMO, Champions Online, will be free-to-play from November 26–30 as a promotion for the game's second free content expansion since its launch in September.

The free update, which is titled Nemesis Confrontation and launches November 24, will include new costumes and perks, and tasks players with escaping from a hostile intergalactic prison -- a mission made much more difficult by the facility's unfriendly inhabitants, seen above. You'll also face off against the Shadow Destroyer (the party responsible for your hero's unrequested detention) and even your user-generated Nemesis. Sounds like a pretty dangerous calling -- but nowhere near as perilous as the crushing throng of Black Friday shoppers that awaits you at your local mall.

[Via Big Download]

It's rare we quote someone extensively for a post, but we thought this update from PlayStation Home's Locust_Star speaks for itself:

"In celebration of the impending Turkey Day, users will approach the giant stone turkey in Central Plaza and, of course, pledge their allegiance to the almighty Meleagris Gallopavo by stating 'Gobble gobble' and/or other assorted turkey-isms ... You will be given a chance to chase a bunch of wily turkeys around Central Plaza. If you can manage to catch them all, you will unlock some truly hilarious rewards that are sure to make you an object of envy amongst your peers."

Yeah, the PS3 really can do everything.

Behold what the Wii can do when it's actually available to shoppers. During last year's Thanksgiving holiday week, the console shifted 350,000 units in the U.S., even though shortages were pretty major at the time. With more Wiis in stores this year, that number jumped to 800,000. In a single freakin' week. To put that in perspective, Nintendo sold 803,000 Wiis in the whole of October. Italics. Yikes.

Satoru Iwata broke the happy news in an interview with Reuters, adding that "When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wishlist. But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list. Fortunately for us a lot of shoppers put our products at the top of their list." That's a pretty sizeable "nyah!" to the competition.

[Via Joystiq]

To those of you who celebrate it, happy Thanksgiving! And happy Thursday to everybody else! We'll be running a reduced shedule today, but we'll still be there, in the form of a few posts and also in your hearts (perhaps). Anyway, let's talk Turkey Day, and more specifically what role gaming will take in your Thanksgiving celebrations. As this is a time for families and togetherness, the Wii is probably the ideal Thanksgiving console. What will you be playing between mouthfuls of turkey and cranberry sauce?

Morning folks, and a happy Thanksgiving, y'all! Today, rather than dedicate this space to talking about some DS-related minutiae, we're leaving it open for discussion about your Thanksgiving plans, and how the DS slots into your Turkey Day schedule. Do you plan to spend a quiet moment getting further through Chrono Trigger? Converting Granny to Brain Age? Playing a spot of wireless Mario Kart DS with cousins?

Maybe you don't plan to pick up your beloved handheld at all. To which we say: hey, Thanksgiving is a time for coming together, and that extends to people and their DSes as well! Er, probably. I don't know, I'm British. This is all one big mystery to me.

By the way, we'll still be posting today, so if you do get bored at any point, feel free to poke your head in. Have a grand day, everybody!

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the states, which means that unless Lara Croft and Nathan Drake have a love child and proceed to shoot up a shopping mall, you're probably not going to hear a whole lot from us today. Even Ludwig, a South African, likes to pretend he's sharing in the festivities with a little faux-turkey he makes every year from hut roof shavings and leopard paws.

But we wanted to have a place for you, the Joystiq Biomass, to commune with each other and share what you're thankful for in gaming this year. It can be a developer, a favorite game, a new mechanic, anything: It's your choice. Heck, we don't even care if you're bursting to give thanks for something non-gaming, as long as we're all together.

(Oh, and sorry about ending the headline with a preposition. Hopefully next year you'll be able to give thanks for better Joystiq writers.)

[Update: Hey, how's about you do me a solid and not be total trolls if you're posting here. Please? For me?]

Thanksgiving this year will include both turkey and time travel, a magical cocktail made possible by Square Enix. The company said that it'll ship its DS throwback to SNES favorite Chrono Trigger in North America on November 25, just two days before families sit down for the annual feast.

Giving players plenty to keep them busy while fighting off the adverse effects of tryptophan, Chrono Trigger's DS debut promises new dungeons, touchable controls and an arena mode. Additionally, as the RPG keeps with the original's pixelated sense of style, Square Enix has all but ensured that Thanksgiving 2008 will play out much the same way as it did some thirteen years prior, as we ignore seldom seen family members in favor of the more interesting trio of Crono, Lucca and Frog.

Add the Sterns to the great family bands of popular culture. Put us on a flashing marquee like the Osmonds, Jacksons, and von Trapps that came before. With a rotating lineup of three generations, a band dog who curls up next to the drummer, and enough hijinks for a Monkees plot, we've toured across the country from San Francisco to Boston. It doesn't matter to us if our fame is virtual and our fans digital; Rock Band was a hit at our annual Thanksgiving gathering.

Before I left the West Coast, I loaded up a dedicated carry-on with an Xbox 360, Wii, and the full complement of power supplies, video cables, and controllers. I made it through airport security without any problems. (And on the flight home, I wondered how many Rock Band kits the TSA had been screening.)

Like last year, the Wii was still popular. But we mostly stuck with Wii Sports. Even casual gamers have a glut of titles to wade through; we never opened Zack and Wiki and only briefly tried EA Playground and Rayman Rabbids 2.

Instead, Rock Band filled most of our game time. While I thought it'd be fun to try with my family, I never expected it to be "this year's Wii" as my sister said. Disguised as a rhythm game, Rock Band is a sleeper family hit. Every day, we joked about "getting the band back together" before assembling that evening's players.

It seems that Black Friday was very, very, very good to Nintendo, as both the DS Lite and the Wii performed quite impressively in the U.S. over the holiday week.

Nintendo has announced that it sold 653,000 DS Lites over the week of November 18-24, setting a new record for the portable, for Nintendo, and for the entire industry. The number of units moved is record-breaking, exceeding the industry's previous record, also held by Nintendo with the Game Boy Advance's sales during Thanksgiving 2005.

The Wii also performed quite admirably, selling 350,000 units, a number topped only by the console's launch week. No word on how these sales figures compare to Sony or Microsoft's, but it's not like it's a competition or anything, right?

Update: Specified sales figures as pertaining to the U.S., and clarified the record as industry-wide.

Read -- Nintendo Sales Go Through the Roof During Thanksgiving Week [GameDaily]
Read -- Nintendo Has Its Biggest Week Of Sales... Ever [Game|Life]

"Did you bring that Mario game? Your father really wants to try it ... what is that?"

"A plastic drum set, mom," I reply. "We're going to pretend to be rock and roll stars as a family and then I'm going to write about it for work." She stares intrigued for two, maybe three nanoseconds before uttering, "Cool ... How about Wii Bowling? Can we play that?"

Inspired by last year's Nintendo Wii family tests (and just hopeful to get more playtime in), I decided to pack up my copy of Rock Band for Xbox 360 (a daunting task, rest assured) and take it to my parent's house for Thanksgiving.

Much like the child above, we found ourselves completely ravaging all parts of our turkey, dining on its meat and eventually collapsing in our chair. It probably didn't help that we had some wine with dinner, since the two made us incredibly drowsy. We still can barely move, as we type this post out by using a long stick and slapping it against our keyboard while we lay on the couch. We're not sure if we're going to be able to move until Sunday, at least.

What about all of you who celebrated the holiday with us? How are you holding up? And, for our International readers who don't celebrate, what will you be playing this weekend

Aren't you glad you don't have to ford rivers and worry about death-prone oxen to make it home for a turkey feast? Check out the highlights for today:

Joystiquery
Joystiq Holidaze: explaining the PS3 SKUs
Joystiq Holidaze: explaining the Xbox 360 SKUs
Reminder: Win a $5K gaming PC from Falcon Northwest
Today's most Olympic video: Mario & Sonic at the Olympics review
X3F Week in Review: November 16, 2007 - November 22, 2007

News
Call of Duty 4 not HD: only 600p, claim pixel counters
Sin & Punishment's Saki cameos in Smash Bros. Brawl
Freeverse discusses porting Marathon 2 to XBLA
Popcap's Bookworm now available on mobile phones
AGEIA to give UT3 modders a physical with PhysX mod kit
Poor sales of Space Giraffe make Jeff Minter sad

Rumors & Speculation
Sony exec flirts with PlayStation phone ... again

Culture & Community
MapleStory holds in-game Black Friday sales
Yahtzee travels to America, visits Valve
1UP talks turkey games
Selfless crazies play Desert Bus for charity