Amazon Reports Record Xmas Season, Top Game Picks

Internet retailer Amazon.com has reported a record 2005 holiday season shopping period, with over 108 million items ordered worldwide, and top demand, on Dec. 12th, seeing the retailer take 41 orders per second. According to Amazon, video games were still popular this holiday season (though it didn't specifically discuss percentage differences compared to 2004's Xmas period), and topping the company's worldwide list of most ordered games were Mario Party 7 for Gamecube, Sid Meier's Civilization IV for PCs, and Microsoft's Age of Empires 3 for PCs. In addition, according to the retailer, top sales in video game hardware were the Game Boy Advance SP in Pearl Blue, the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) Value Pack, and the Electric Blue Nintendo DS. Microsoft's newly launched Xbox 360 was predictably missing from the list, thanks to still enormous pent-up demand for the hardware, twinned with gradually easing major supply problems. "To our customers around the world--thank you," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "We are grateful to our customers for shopping with us this holiday season and we wish everyone a happy new year."