Despite still selling over 100,000 units in its eighth week on sale, New Super Mario Bros. for DS has been superceded at the top of the Japanese sales charts for the second time, this time by Konami’s perennially popular Power Pro baseball title for PS2, with sales of almost 152,000 units.
Overall, it was a strong week in sales for the Japanese market, with a number of new entries and the Nintendo DS’s dominance of the top ten reduced to “just” six titles. Atlus’ role-playing sequel Persona 3 was the second highest new entry with 116,000 copies sold - well ahead of the fifth Japanese home console entry in the Ape Escape franchise, which sold 57,000 copies.
Nintendo will be relatively pleased with the debut of the adventure-like Project Hacker – which has drawn comparisons with previous DS title Another Code (aka Trace Memory) – at 37,000 copies. But Sony will likely not be as satisfied with the performance of LocoRoco, which despite a significant marketing push has not got off to particularly notable start and now seems doomed to the same underwhelming sales reception as it received in Europe, selling 32,000 copies in Japan thus far.
Hardware sales were slightly up on the previous week, with the Nintendo DS selling 152,679 units (including 11,821 of the original version of the hardware), with the PSP up to a total of 35,283 units sold. The PlayStation 2 recorded 23,927 sales and the Game Boy Advance family of consoles 4,228. After a brief rise in numbers, the Xbox 360 has fallen back into its previous sales stupor with 1,105 unit sales – just ahead of the GameCube at 928 units.
