So Christmas has come and gone if you had your heart set on a Wii or PlayStation 3, you're most likely out of luck. Even if your parents can afford them and feel your worth hundreds of dollars of their love, they're probably not going to be able to find one anywhere except on eBay for at least $300 over the retail price. But before you go crying into your Special K, (either the cereal or ketamine) you might want to check out a couple of titles that will at least ensure your holiday will be a violent one.

Now, if you're already a fan of shooters, you're probably already familiar with both the SOCOM and Call of Duty series, but with each coming out with new titles recently, I thought it a little comparison was in order.

On the surface, both SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Combined Assault and Call of Duty 3, seem similar enough. Technically, SOCOM is a third-person shooter, (while Call of Duty 3 is a first-person shooter) but you'll have to wear your night vision goggles so often, you still have to play most of the game in a first-person perspective. Also, the main objective of both of the games is to run around with heavy artillery and kill off all the baddies in other countries. But there, for the most part, is where the similarities end.

In Sony Computer Entertainment America's SOCOM, you are Specter, the elite Navy SEAL commander you play in most of the SOCOM titles. You lead your team into various covert operations to stop the terrorist plot germinating in Adjikistan, a fictitious country somewhere in the Middle East that's the setting for both it and the accompanying PlayStation Portable game SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Fireteam Bravo 2. The game even makes the odd reference to the missions of this PSP title as if convince you need to buy it too if you want the full Adjikistan gaming experience. In Activision's Call of Duty 3, you play various American, Canadian, British and Polish campaigns in 1944 France. You know that whole Normandy thing, with the beaches. You fight the forces of that short one-testicled German guy with the bad part in his hair. I think his name started with an “H.” Heidelberg? No. Hippocrates? No. The Hamilton Philharmonic Youth Orchestra?... Oh well, it'll come to me at some point.

The graphics and sounds are far superior in Call of Duty 3. More attention is paid to the look of the setting and the characters look more realistic than in SOCOM. The cut scenes are also more developed and better integrated into the gameplay. Whereas SOCOM mainly has cut scenes at the beginning or end of a mission, Call of Duty 3 has story bits within the missions as well, which are sometimes partially playable. For example, near the start of the game as Private Nicholls of U.S. 29th Infantry Division, you're riding on the back of a military truck and listen in on the conversations of the other soldiers. You can look around as another soldier runs up and tries to jump on because he's late. Then enemy gunfire causes the truck flip to over. Surviving the crash, you and the other soldiers hop over a wall and are right in the midst of the action. This fluidity of storytelling and gaming adds a little depth to the experience..

But what really separates these games is the gameplay itself. In SOCOM, you command an elite group of SEALs but there are only four of you and you have to be mindful of that. You can send your guys ahead to clear out buildings and what not, but if your teammates are all killed off, you fail the mission. You can choose to carry medical packs to heal yourself and team but there only a limited number so you need to use them sparingly. In Call of Duty 3, you play a grunt in a sprawling unit whose members can die left and right as long as you keep yourself alive. This essentially means not getting hit too many times in a row. If you can find a place to hide, your health will quickly go back up. This leads to far more of a run-and-shoot scenario than SOCOM, especially considering you can't seem to kill your squad. The game makes it difficult to shoot guys in your squad, but even if you do mange to shoot one, he'll just shrug it off.

In SOCOM, if you shoot a member of your team, they will die or at least get injured and then usually one of the other team members will gun you down for your traitorous actions. So you have to be careful where and when to shoot. For me, this made the game the more interesting of the two to play. As Specter, your objectives are slightly more complex than Call of Duty 3. Or at least it feels that way, because you can't always just run up and kill someone, because you're only four people not a platoon and have limited resources. There's some more stealth involved, especially when you're freeing hostages and have to lead them to an extraction point without getting them killed. I mean it's not Splinter Cell or anything but there's a little more to it than just target practice. Also, the individual missions are more self-contained so you feel more of an accomplishment finishing them.

In Call of Duty 3, you're given orders and follow a large group of people. Occasionally, you might be forced to take the first step, but then the others will run ahead and take care of many of the enemies before you get there. Though, not always. Sometimes, they'll somehow manage to get to a rendezvous point through a barrage of machine gunfire coming from several different directions, but you'll have to kill all the Nazis to get to meet up with them.

SOCOM has some more severe problems with its team AI. In previous versions of SOCOM, you could order your team to move to checkpoints or even lead you to them, but now you can only tell them to move to where the crosshairs of your gun is pointed. So often when you tell them to go upstairs and clear a room, they'll move to the foot of the stairs and tell you that's it all clear. Then the bad guys upstairs will see you and engage. Or sometimes, they just don't move at all.

What's even more annoying is that like in previous SOCOMs, the characters have a bad habit of getting stuck on the environment. They'll run into a bush or wall or some such thing and get caught there and won't respond to orders. Although I imagine a Navy SEAL, with all the bulky equipment he'd be carrying, could conceivably get snagged by shrubbery, looking at the graphic of the guy running in place, it's clearly not intentional. Usually the only way to free them is to run into them over and over until you can push them away from whatever is obstructing their path. Of course, sometimes it happens to the terrorists too, which make them easy targets.

In Call of Duty 3, I didn't find any similar glitches, but, frankly, overall I still prefer SOCOM. This is mainly because of the access to a sniper rifle. Not that there aren't sniper rifles in Call of Duty 3, but it's my weapon of choice and I can choose it for Specter every single mission. Then I can send my team into clear buildings and hide in the grass and pick them off through the windows and when they come out on the balconies to shoot at my men. Of course, some might call this kind of gameplay cowardly, but I'll have picked them off before they could say it to my face.

So if you're looking for an all-out melee, then Call of Duty 3 is your game. If you want something that's somewhat stealth mission-based, then you might want to give SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Combined Assault a whirl. Hitler. That's it. In Call of Duty 3, you fight the forces of Archie Hitler! Wait...