This is probably been at the GameStop DEAR GOD DON’T YOU WANT TO PREORDER SOMETHING counter for a while now… it’s a very nice Activity Book featuring a AAA lineup of E-rated games. High quality paper, lots of nice full color character art. The actual puzzles are pretty lousy and the interior cover looks like a low-res screenshot of GameStop’s website (complete with blue underlined “links”), but overall it’s a great timekiller for the little gamer in your life. The activities feature predictable E-rated suspects like Pokemon, Wall-E and Mario Kart… but also manage to go a tad obscure by including games such as Boom Blox, Harvest Moon and Samba de Amigo. It’s all to promote gamestop.com/playground, “a fun and safe website for kids entertainment.”

But here’s the mcguffin: the book details a national (US only) mail-in contest with a pretty sweet prize: a $500 GameStop Gift Card. Four runner-ups each win a $100 GameStop Gift Card. All you have to do is come up with a activity for a future activity book (which may or may not be printed), based on an E-rated game. Not a bad payoff for stuffing some Pikachu stickers in an envelope and calling it a matching game. Entries must be postmarked by September 12, 2008, so hurry it up!

There’s no shame in participating even if you lack children.