Yoshi’s Island DS Swallows Japanese Charts

Although released at the end of last year in the West, the delayed launch of Yoshi’s Island DS has given Nintendo their biggest new release of the year so far in Japan. The game sold over 303,000 units in its first week, confirming the franchise in Nintendo’s top tier of titles. The only other new entry of the week in the top ten was role-playing and beat ‘em-up hybrid Kenka Banchou 2: Full Throttle for PlayStation 2 from Spike, which sold through 42,000 units, just under 3,000 more in its debut week compared to its 'sleeper mini-hit' predecessor. Existing titles in the top ten continued to perform well, with Monster Hunter Portable 2nd for PSP moving up one place thanks to around 93,000 sales, despite selling almost 45,000 less copies than the previous week. However, once again it has proven very much the exception to the rule for PSP software sales, with not a single other PSP title in the top fifty this week. Level 5's Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village for the Nintendo DS also continued to perform well, with the game moving up two places to Numbeer 3, and selling over 11,000 more copies than the previous week. Apart from Gundam Musou, last week’s number one, the only other PlayStation 3 title in the top fifty is Sega’s Power Smash 3 (aka Virtua Tennis 3) at number nineteen. There are no Xbox 360 titles in the top fifty, while Hajimete no Wii has become the second million-selling Wii title this week, after Wii Sports. In keeping with the lack of new software releases hardware sales were also subdued this week, with the Nintendo DS down slightly to 108,631 units. Although sales were down by almost 10,000, the PSP still managed to keep ahead of the Wii at 56,175 versus 44,495 units. PlayStation 3 sales fell to 32,115, with the PlayStation 2 down to 14,585 units sold. The Xbox 360 remained almost static at 3,333 units sold, ahead of the Game Boy Advance family of consoles at 1,504 and the GameCube at 240.

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