The Games News

The newest chapter of the Final Fantasy saga secures another first place in overall sales in Japan in traditional low-sales period.

Square Enix can boast about possibly the largest fanbase in the world, based mostly around the highly successfull (and addictive) Final Fantasy series, and to a lesser extent around the Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts series. And surely such a large crowd will buy your game if there is any “Final Fantasy” snippet in the title.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on the DS follows the successes of Final Fantasy Tactics PSP and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy PSP in May, and September respectively, debuting on the first place in the japanese sales charts at 142,000 units units. This is a commercial success, if you take into consideration the following games in the charts: #2 Ar Tonelico 2 for the PS2 and World Soccer Winning Eleven DS.

The latest iteration of most famous Italian except maybe The Godfather is finally here!

And it was about time, following Shigeru Miyamoto’s promise at Game Developers Conference 2007 that we would be able to play it this year. This is a game we all have been expecting, drooling over trailers and demo gameplay videos over the web; it’s reception was so successfull that one editor from 1Up.com said “this is the best example of how to use a Wii”, while another editor, this time from IGN stated that “the game was perfect”. But that remains to be seen.

By the end of the week, Super Mario Galaxy should be available in Japan, with rest-of-the-world releases scheduled for 12 November and 16 November, in America and Europe respectively.

On a personal note, coming from Miyamoto, this should prove a good game design leson, if not a great game.

Nintendo UK officials claim that the Wii is the fastest console ever to achieve over a million units sold in the UK.

The company quoted data acquired from Chart-Trak in stating that the Wii has passed the million mark in just thirty-eight weeks. Additional, non-public data from Chart-Trak also underlines the fact that the Wii has held a whooping 68 percent of the entire home console market in the UK, while its little brother, the Nintendo DS broke all records with a share of 86 percent of the handheld console market in the UK.

David Yarnton, Nintendo UK General Manager, has also stated that this is a testament to the accesibility and appeal of the Nintendo consoles, as even in traditional low videogames sales periods, the non-stop demand for the Wii helped achieve this record.

Comparing the Wii with its main competitors that have already passed that mark, the PS2 achieved 1 million units in fifty weeks, and the Xbox360 was even slower, reaching the milestone in sixty weeks.

Once upon a time, Nintendo was the king of the console and their only competition was lowly Sega. Then, two newcomers came into the picture: one an underdog with a long shot to succeed and the other a monopolizing company trying to grab yet another corner of the technological market. These two companies literally tore apart Sega and left Nintendo at the starting line trying to figure out why they had been knocked off of the right track.

Five years since Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft brought their next-generation systems onto the market, Nintendo is getting ready to release what just might be their ticket back into the VIP room of video games. The Nintendo Wii plans to not just launch Nintendo back into the spotlight, but to leave Microsoft and Sony in their dust. The key to Nintendo’s domination will be the success of the motion-controlled Wiimote and Nunchuck. If gamers enjoy these enough, all Nintendo will have to is sit back and watch the cash roll in.

According to the reports, the long waited Super Mario Bros DS has sold 480,000 units on its debut, making it the fastest selling DS title ever. It shouldn’t come as a surprise as it can be considered as a marriage between the best names in their respective categories, Nintendo DS in the console category and Super Mario Bros in the gaming category.
Super Mario Bros boasts amazing graphics, which accompanies its 2D game play, which when coupled with the dual screen of the Nintendo DS, makes it simply irresistible. This time around, Mario has 3 others with him for company, Yoshi, Luigi and Wario. There are more levels to complete the game. For example one can play the game without actually having to complete all levels, which means replaying would just be fun. One of the new features of the Super Mario Bros DS are the minigames, in which you basically use the touch-screen feature of the DS. The DS also allows 2 players to wirelessly link with each other and play in the multi-player mode.
The notorius game, Super Mario Bros lives on in today’s world - where games are synonymous with extreme graphics - to actually prove that classics are very much alive.