Europe Gets Three New DSi XL Colors As Worldwide Sales Surpass 3.6M

Nintendo announced today plans to release new yellow, green and blue versions of its large-screened portable DSi XL system in Europe on October 8th. The release comes as the DSi XL has sold 3.6 million units worldwide through June of this year, Nintendo said. The new figures bring total sales of the Nintendo DS line, including the original unit as well as the DS Lite, DSi and XL redesigns, to 132 million units through June. Aside from the newly colored cases, the new DSi XL units will be identical to those previously released, right down to the inclusion of pre-loaded software A Little Bit of...Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: Arts Edition and Dictionary 6 in 1 with Camera Function. The announcement follows the release of three similarly colored DSi XLs in Japan in June, and the release of a "midnight blue" DSi XL in the U.S. in July. While the Japanese colored releases accompanied a price drop for the larger system, and the price of the American DSi XL recently dropped by $20, the price of the DSi XL has not come down since its March launch in Europe. The Japanese release of a black version of the Wii last August saw weekly sales for the system spike to four times the previous week's level, though the concurrent release of Capcom's Monster Hunter 3 may have had something to do with that. Newly colored versions of portable systems have been a Nintendo tradition since the March 1995 release of seven newly colored editions of the original Game Boy, labeled under the "Play It Loud!" branding. Since then, every Nintendo portable has seen a wide variety of newly colored cases sometime after the initial release of one or two colors.