Don’t ask Alex Curnes how many boxes of the hottest gaming console his store will put on the shelves Tuesday morning.

Or if they’ll even make it that far.

“I can’t talk about numbers, but that being said, we expect this to sell fairly well,” Curnes, a video game product specialist for Best Buy in Lawrence, says with an understated bent. “It’s a big thing. From a die-hard gamer’s perspective, the graphics are incredible. The processing speeds are incredible.

“It’s comparable, if not better than, some of the PCs on the market. From a digital-media sense, you have camera connectivity, you have MP3 connectivity, you have all of that. It’s perfect, right out of the box.”

Such perfection has a name: Xbox 360, by Microsoft. Best Buy will be selling its allotment – perhaps a few dozen – beginning at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Price: $299.99.

“We’re expecting a lot of people, quite a long line,” Curnes says. “It should be a whole lot of fun, though.”

Driving the demand: Microsoft’s bold push to attract 1 billion gamers to its next-generation console, which can handle more than the latest version of “Halo” or “Project Gotham Racing 3.”

“What makes it so cool is the connectivity,” Curnes says. “Just about anything can be hooked up to this – that includes the Apple iPod. You can plug a digital camera into it. Through Xbox Live, you can do video conferencing. So the possibilities of what you can do with the actual system are absolutely limitless.”

Smellkiller Classic

Jo Haehl doesn’t pretend to understand how it works, but she figures the German makers of a small, stainless steel disc know a thing or two about the sweet smell of : nothing.

The Smellkiller Classic, pictured above and available for $32 at Weaver’s Department Store, breaks down foul odors simply by coming in contact with water. Letting the disc rest in a small pool of water – held in the black dish that’s provided – eliminates room odors within a few hours.

“Or you can use it like you would a bar of soap,” says Haehl, department head for The Home Shop at Weaver’s. “You hold it under running water and it will take onion-, garlic-type smells off your hands. We’ve sold them to several people, including a surgeon’s office, and they swear by them. It’s for their biohazard room, and when they opened the door it was just a horrible smell. But the nurses swear this has taken care of it.”

Weaver’s gets Smellkiller deliveries each week, she says, and they’re all gone by the time the next box arrives.

20Q Challenge

The Toy Store, which just moved into a bigger place downtown, is focused on games, toys and other items for the younger set.

But the most popular item in the place – 20Q, an electronic, interactive question-and-answer game – is appropriate for a much wider audience.

“It’s good for just about any age,” says Margaret Warner, store owner. “It comes in hand-held and a tabletop variety, so you can do it yourself or in a group setting.”

The draw: A player simply thinks of something, and the game then asks the player 20 questions to help the game determine what the “something” is.

“Maybe your idea is a red dog,” she says. “The game doesn’t know what you’re thinking. It’ll ask you questions, and within 20 questions it will know exactly what was on your mind. It will guess. It’s absolutely fun and silly to play this game. People wonder: How did it know?”

Warner wonders how she keeps it in stock, though she still had plenty on the rack – the hand-held for $19.99, and the tabletop “Challenge” for $44.99 – last week.

“It’s not predictable; it’s fun and whimsical,” she says, referring to the game, not her frequent order forms. “It’s fun every time you play.”

Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2

Trivial Pursuit’s latest incarnation – Pop Culture 2 – is proving quite the rage at SuperTarget along south Iowa Street, and the store’s executive team leader for flow has a pretty good idea why he has to keep bringing in more and more boxes.

“It’s a huge hit for the college kids,” Greg Mansfield says. “We’ll sell a lot of those.”

Mansfield knows from experience. He’s played the game, known as the ’90s edition, and found himself plenty caught up in the visual clues.

“It’s a DVD game, and it’s really cool because people can put it in a DVD player and play it off their TV set,” Mansfield says. “It’s an actual Trivial Pursuit game, but it’ll show pictures of movies or different shows. It might show a hot commercial. It might show a scene in ‘Top Gun’ and say, ‘What’s the next thing that came out of this person’s mouth?’

“Usually, you can’t remember the next word.”

The game sells for $33.99.

Pioneer Elite PRO-1130HD

Having already sold his half dozen Pioneer Elite PRO-1130HD plasma TVs, John Kiefer fears he might have set the price too low.

Even at $5,995.

“It’s not an inexpensive television,” reports Kiefer, owner of Kief’s Audio/Video, 2429 Iowa. “It’s a $10,000 unit : so we’re pretty good. It’s the hottest ticket this year. I hope we get plenty more. We’ve got more coming, and I just hope we get them.”

Kiefer gets technical when he tries to explain the set’s popularity – something about “high-def XGA resolution” and being able to handle blacks and reds better than any other set – but the evidence of brisk demand are evident in the questions he’s asked every day.

“The No. 1 thing people want to talk about is plasma television,” Kiefer says. “And this is the best picture in a 50-inch TV that you can buy, period.”