before i forget - i won this fight (at the bottom) - no work is going to be done on my camry. if the door falls off, then i'll worry about it.

i finally made the next-generation plunge last sunday. i bought a xbox 360, a second wireless controller, and tiger woods 07. i was hoping to play tiger for a while, and then move on to fifa (comes out on tuesday) and then, you know, feel it out from there. i hooked the system up on sunday night, but my sister and a friend of hers were in town so i didn't play any tiger at all. i played some of the frogger demo off of xbox live. i set up my computer to stream music to the 360. i downloaded a few movie trailers and tv clips off of xbox live. i was fucking impressed.

i rolled in to work monday counting down the minutes until i could go home and play tiger. of course while at work, i hit up my normal video game-related reading, and stumbled across this post over on joystiq - that sale is still going, by the way. now, i haven't been inside a toys 'r us since i was... i don't know, like 10. i knew that they were struggling and that a few of their stores had closed recently, what with wal-mart and all.

but holy god i didn't realize how bad it was.

the toys 'r us i went to in woburn looks on the verge of being shut down. walking up to the place, i saw a couple of men walking out with two kids in their sunday best and a bag in tow. of course, it was monday, and i thought to myself that these are the kind of out of touch or possibly nostalgic people that shop at toys 'r us.

inside the store is miserable. the floors are the same as any other store of this type, but clearly haven't been cleaned in years. the emptiness was overwhelming, as was the smell of new toys (you know the smell, yeah?) that were probably never going to get bought. the whole experience was incredibly depressing. i browsed their video game selection, noting that some newer titles were noticeably absent (namely splinter cell: da). i settled on nba 2k7, fight night round 3, and elder scrolls IV: oblivion. i got out of there as fast as possible.

toy stores are dead. long live wal-mart.

i think i need to go back there after thanksgiving, when business should be closer to humming... but maybe i should never go to toys 'r us again. after all, best buy is the new toy store, right?

... right?