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

With today being a holiday, we wondered if you were bringing the Wii into the mix? The strategic thing would be to bust out the console and get your game on before stuffing yourself with mashed potatoes, turkey and cranberry sauce, though. We would never dare tell you how to live. But, that is if you in fact plan on actually playing the console with family and friends.

MapleStory is one of those "free" online worlds that earns its keep by charging users for in-game items (the same business model practiced by Habbo Hotel). So it's nice to hear that Nexon, the Korean company behind the MMO, is starting a tradition of offering Black Friday sales on the world's most popular items.

The sales will run from this Friday (you know, Black Friday), through Sunday, but only for short intervals at a time. In addition, special, rare items will be sold each day for one hour only. Check out the entire Black Friday sales schedule after the break. Happy Turkey Day, Maple citizens.

We asked you to tell us what you were thankful for yesterday for our three-pack giveaway, so it's only right that we commemorate this turkey holiday with our own shout-outs!

• Eric: I am thankful for those blue shells that helped me win so many races against people who're much better at Mario Kart than me.
• Alisha: I am thankful for whips ... I mean, awesome, portable dual-screen Castlevania games. With whips. Because whips are awesome.
• David: I'm thankful for having a portable device I can turn on to ignore people in front of me I don't want to talk to. Tetris music drowns out all.
• JC: I'm thankful for Brain Age, because photoshopped Brain Age screenshots are a well that will never run dry.
• Candace: I'm thankful for the crew of Ouendan, without whom we would have long ago succumbed to a giant rat, meteor collision, and alien attack. I'm NOT thankful, however, for the habit it's given me of yelling out "Ouendan!!!" during job interviews when they don't go well.
• Chris: I'm thankful for every last one of those life-saving straight tetraminoes that got me out of a pickle. And for Animal Crossing, and its ability to drag me away from the gray, depressing mundanities of my real life on a daily basis. *Sniff* Also, it teaches me about dinosaurs and stuff.

Last, but never least, we have to thank you, kind reader. Coming here everyday to see what we're rambling on about, you've been a pal and a confidante. What we're trying to say is, thank you for being a friend.

Aside from stuffing our faces with 7,000 calories worth of food on Thanksgiving, we Americans are supposed to reflect on what we're most thankful for. While things like LOLcatz and coffee definitely make the list (oh right, and our families and friends, we guess), we wanted to show a little appreciation for the Wii as well. The Nintendo Wii Fanboy staff was thus asked what about the Wii we are most thankful for. The following is what happens when you have a staff with the collective maturity level of 37% (calculated by science).