Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers pre-order details

Pre-orders are now available for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, according to word from Square Enix this week. GameStop is offering $5.00 off the game at the time of purchase (details here), Amazon.com is giving a themed, limited edition 2010 calendar (details here), and Best Buy is offering an exclusive soundtrack sampler to its pre-order customers. (details here). Doesn’t seem all that exciting to me, but whatever makes your world spin around.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers ships in late Dec. for the Wii.

Tales of Monkey Island now on Amazon

Telltale Games announced that its Tales of Monkey Island games are now available at Amazon’s new channel as the first episodic series available for the company’s recently launched Game Download Store. Each chapter of Tales of Monkey Island will cost $8.95, beginning with the first two chapters available for immediate download at www.amazon.com/GameDownloads in the United States. This also represents the first time that the Tales of Monkey Island episodes for PC have been available for purchase as individual episodes, says Telltale.

Learn more about the series by checking out www.telltalegames.com.

Amazon’s Release Day Shipments of Ghostbusters Games

Ghostbusters fans maybe interested to know that Amazon.com is release-date-delivery for both the Exclusive Slimer and the Standard editions of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, due out June 16. This means that you won’t have to wait a day or two to play the game after it is released.

Honoring the film’s 25th anniversary, Amazon is also offering the exclusive Slimer Edition of the game on Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360. Bundle-only extras include everything a Ghostbusters addict would need including a ten inch tall Slimer statue created by movie sculptor Steve Johnson, Ghostbusters the Video Game “Minimates” created by Diamond Comics, Ghostbusters Gamer Graffix Skins (removable stickers to decorate your console of choice) and Ecto1 keychain with lights and sound.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is available from for preorder from Amazon.com now. check out the extras below:

Amazon Joins the Secondhand Game Market

If you’re done playing with the latest video game you picked up a week or two ago and it’s just sitting around collecting dust, there’s been no shortage of what to do with ‘em as of late. You could can lend them out to friends (or if it’s a copy of Castlevania: Judgment, your enemies), you could donate the game to charity, or you could always just head on down to the local GameStop and cash it in towards another game. Of course, if you can’t just bring yourself to actually get up off the couch and drive somewhere, there’s now another player in the secondhand market: Amazon.

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Amazon’s Casual Controversy

There’s no nice way to say it: casual game publishers and developers doing business with Amazon.com are a little bit pissed off. The frustration is over a promotion that is selling casual games from various publishers for $9.99 each. At the Casual Connect Conference this week in Hamburg, Germany, many publishers voiced their disdain at the price point, and some pulled their products from amazon.com.

The company purchased casual games portal Reflexive back in October of 2008, so no one was surprised when it decided to launch its own casual games program portal site wide. What they were surprised about was that some of their games - many of which are priced much higher than $10, could sell for less than they price-point they have set.

Casual game developers are of the mindset that once the price is down it stays down and it also makes it harder to sell games at retailers like Wal-Mart when consumers can pick up the same product online for half the price. Somme developers, like PopCap Games and iWin, have gone so far as to pull their products from Amazon’s online catalog.

While casual games portals have been around for awhile this is new ground for the big players like Amazon and Apple. Casual game creators want in on the action but they expect these new spaces to be fair to them.

Source: VentureBeat

Amazon’s Cyber Monday Specials

I am not sure if Amazon.com is trying to cut the throats of traditional retail or not this holiday shopping season, but the online retailer is certainly offering some great deals on video games. On Monday, December 1 until 11:59pm Pacific Time, consumers will be able to take part in a number of great Cyber Monday deals, which I have listed in their entirety after the jump. Supplies are limited, so get them while you can.

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Amazon.com’s Holiday Sales Blitz

Amazon.com is having a massive sale starting Friday as it attempts to get some of that lucrative holiday shopping money that may be in short supply during this normally brisk selling season. More importantly, the company is hoping to cash in on people looking to purchase games with a massive amount of specials.
Some of these sales are limited to Black Friday, while others will run for several days - either until the sale ends or the company runs out of the stock it’s trying to move. It’s an interesting move that has the potential to keep some shoppers at home making those all-important holiday purchases from the comfort of their computers. A full listing of what Amazon has planned after the break.

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