In-Car GBA System
Source: Nintendo Insider

Nintendo will be showcasing a portable CD, DVD and Gameboy Advance player, for portable gaming and in-car entertainment. This presentation wil be held in a few short hours at the CES. The device, pictured below (image courtesy of Nintendo Insider), looks like a portable DVD player which can be attached to the roof of a car, and detached for portability.



This device also boasts infrared connectivity (for wireless headphones), and the ability to be connected with the vehicle's network for driver control. Stay tuned for more annoucements as the unveiling draws nearer.

By the way, many apologies for the recent lack of updates. There have been some problems and I haven't been able to post new entries on this blog. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you'll stay for the more frequent updates I will post from now on.

Absolute Domination

Bluelight has posted another impressive set of Japanese sales statistics. These latest numbers show stunning performances by both the DS and Gamecube. Here are last week's figures:

Nintendo DS 597,628
PSP 161,332
PS2 97,475
GameCube 36,646
GBA SP 35,764
Game Boy Micro19,261
XBox360 5,674
Game Boy Advance 906
Xbox 141

Numbers are represented in a pie chart below:



Here are the top 10 titles in the software department:
1. PS2 - Kingdom Hearts II - 727,591
2. NDS - Animal Crossing: Wild World- 416,132
3. NDS - Mario Kart DS- 302,742
4. PS2 - Naruto: Narutimate Hero 3 - 216,966
5. NDS - Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon Blue - 157,786
6. GBA - Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon Red - 156,181
7. NDS - Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop - 156,181
8. PS2 - Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence - 103,894 (NEW)
9. GCN - Mario Party 7 - 100,130
10. NDS - Brain Training for Adults - 93,240

In the handheld Nintendo verses Sony department, Ninty currently holds 80% of the total market, with the DS in clear lead over competition and Nintendo's other handhelds. Pie chart below:



The following can be concluded:
- DS sales have gone insane thanks to newly released Wi-Fi titles Animal Crossing and Mario Kart.
- Gamecube makes a comeback with numbers that haven't been reached for a whole year.
- GBA SP takes a large lead over GB Micro.
- DS sold about 3.7 times the PSP, 6 times the PS2, 120 times the Xbox 360, and over 4238 times the Xbox.
- DS pwned all.

Pure Pwnage

The latest Japanese hardware numbers are in, thanks to Bluelight's post on Digital Share forums. As you'll no doubt be aware, this week's statistics are particularly interesting, as both the Xbox 360 console and Mario Kart DS received their first full week of sales. Surprisingly the 360 hardly even scratched competition, despite being a next generation console. More surprisingly, the Gamecube even managed to double the 360's sales. And even MORE surprisingly, the Nintendo DS sold FORTY SEVEN TIMES (47x) more than the 360. Here are the hardware (console) sales:

Nintendo DS - 408,770
PSP - 95,689
PS2 - 55,342
Game Boy Advance SP - 19,098
GameCube - 17,849
Game Boy Micro - 14,432
Xbox360 - 8,623
Game Boy Advance - 416
Xbox - 182

These numbers are represented in a pie chart below:



The release of Mario Kart DS last week has boosted (pun?) Ninty's handheld sales by more than 100,000 units. Taking a look at the handheld, Nintendo verses Sony department, the total numbers are 442716 to 95689 units respectively. Here's how they look when placed into another pie chart:

Game Doctor For SNES



This nifty gadget is the main reason the SNES was my all time favourite Nintendo console. Basically, it "piggybacks" the SNES by plugging into its game cartridge, and allows the user to run SNES games off floppy disks. Drawbacks include loading times, but once a game is loaded it is saved into the GD's RAM, and can be stored along with other loaded games, the number depending on the RAM available. Using floppys to play SNES games can save you a tonne of money, as they cost significantly lower than buying cartridge games (as in free, if you download ROMs off the net, but being illegal it shouldn't be even considered :D).

This makes virtually every SNES game ever produced available, and floppys can easily be updated with newer titles once an old game has been finished. The test below is from http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/backup/bung/bungsf7.html:

Its unique feature is that it is able to have multiplegames loaded simultaneously into its memory, which stay there even with SNESpower off! No need to load floppies over and over again! It also has an onscreenmenu system which is controlled through the SNES controllers. The menu systemfeatures self testing (Memory, BRAM, ROM, and disk drive), file management, etc.It has many features including slow motion, real time save, Gold Finger cheatcode system and superior error handling. It cantransfer games from disks, computer, CDROM (optional), or memory. Other featuresinclude: 32 Mbit or 64 Mbit RAM, self test, menus in English, Chinese, orJapanese...

I was too young back then to really make use of this device, but it's given me countless hours of enjoyment none-the-less :P.

Hardware And Software Totals

Nintendo has recently released some total (since launch) sales of their hardware consoles, and top 5 gaming franchises. In first place is the Gameboy Advance, which includes the original, SP and Micro versions. The GBA has sold a whopping 70.04 million units worldwide since its launch in 2001 (that's around 70,040,000 units). Second place is taken by the Gamecube, at 19.31 million units, and closely followed by the Nintendo DS, at 8.83 million. Keep in mind that the GBA received a headstart of 3 years worth of sales before the DS was launched, and Gamecube was out since late 2001 to early 2002.

In terms of software, the GBA has sold 296.12 million units of software (games and accessaries) worldwide since its launch. The Gamecube has sold 165.91, and DS 28.3 million. That's pretty impressive, a large portion of these figures must have been from the Pokemon games :D.

Below are Nintendo's all time top 5 franchises, you can probably guess what they are anyway:

1. Mario 184 million units
2. Pokemon 143 million units
3. Zelda 47 million units
4. Donkey Kong 43 million units
5. Metroid 11 million units

I guess first place would've gone to Pokemon, if it weren't for the Mario range receiving a 10 year head start, though they've all sold a decent amount.

On an unrelated topic, I've been messing around with the tools in Photoshop for about an hour yesterday, trying to whip up a decent Nintendo wallpaper for my desktop. What came out isn't great but I'm satisfied, and tohught I might share the wallpaper too. Here it is, click on the image for the 1024 by 768 version :).

Why Sales Statistics?

I've been asked this a few times, and thought I might point it out. Hardware statistics, are one aspect of the PSP that annoys a Sony fanboy the most. I regularly post these statistics to provide gamers the truth, what is really happening in the console market.

Statistics are solid information, different to marketing and console hype. They represent each console's popularity and the interests of the gaming community. Sony loyalists can boast all they want about the PSP's superior hardware, or multimedia capabilities, but one look at some hardware statistics shows Sony's portable in last place, whether it's Japan, Australia or the States.

Sony reserves a large amount of their profits into marketing their consoles and games. With the help of the media and retailers, they convince people into thinking their consoles are more popular than they really are, especially with the PSP. Take a trip to EB Games, or Games Wizards, and you'll see what I mean. Huge flashy ads hang outside the stores, boxes are stacked high, and wall-fulls of shelves are taken up by PSP games and accessaries. If you're in there looking for a particular DS game, you would probably find about a dozen or so DS game boxes, piled in a corner you wouldn't normally notice.

Alright, maybe that was a little exaggerated, but there certainly is an obvious difference. Same deal with the GBA, despite being the topselling console of the world, has little more room than the UMD movies on PSP. The uneducated gaming community are tricked into thinking the PSP as the dominant handheld.

Nintendo Domination System?

This week's hardware numbers for Japanese console sales are in, and due to the release of the second Wi-Fi DS game (Mario Kart DS), the sudden changes in sales numbers are worth noting. Here are the latest handheld console sales:

Nintendo DS 299,328
PlayStation Portable 86,403
PlayStation 2 45,893
Xbox 360 43,970
GameCube 12,212
Game Boy Advance SP 10,456
Game Boy Micro 8,326
Game Boy Advance 396
Xbox 164

It is the first times for several months the Gamecube sales have managed to hit the 12,000 unit mark, nice to see. The Xbox 360 launched in Japan at the beginning of this week, and it has grabbed a healthy share of console sales, though no enough to dominate the home console industry (still a little behind PS2). It's also the first time the Micro's dropped behind the GBA SP in sales, with a small difference of ~2000 units.

Here are the numbers for handheld sales, representated in a pie chart:




You'll see that Nintendo DS sales have really gone bezerk in the last 7 days, this was thanks to the release of Mario Kart. Sales have increased by over 100,000 units compared to the previous week (check my last stat post). Currently, Nintendo are dominating about 79% of the handheld market, and Sony have the other 21%. The gap has widened by a fairly impressive margin since last week. Hopefully this rise will continue into the start of 2006, and be further boosted by the launch of the (long awaited) Metroid Prime.

Here is a quick look at console performances in the States:

1.) GBA / Game Boy micro - 819,733 (+194%)
2.) PlayStation 2 - 535,000 (+112%)
3.) Nintendo DS - 369,012 (+172%)
4.) PSP - 353,434 (unknown)
5.) Xbox 360 - 325,902 (NEW)
6.) GameCube - 272,000 (+166%)
7.) Xbox - 197,000 (+ 79%)

Ha! The Xbox 360 was beaten by 4 consoles, despite it's new release! Just goes to prove that you can't relay on marketing for console performance, only the actualy sales numbers. The Gamecube's overtaken Xbox, guess that's not a suprise thanks to 360. Xbox is officially coming last in console wars in the States, and MS doesn't seem to be performing very well at all. The 360 and Xbox's total sales still can't top the GBA's, or even PS2 for that matter.

Btw, I have removed comment verification, hopefully that will encourage more viewers to comment :).

Calling For MKDS Pros

Heh, there hasn't been any Nintendo news today, I've checked IGN, Gamespot, Nintendoinsider, Revo-Europe, Aussie-nintendo, GoNintendo and several Ninty blogs, and none have posted anything interesting for the past 24 hours.

Anyway, who here has playing Wi-Fi Mario Kart DS? For those who have, who has a fairly decent record to show off? well, my current stats are 153 wins and 13 losses, with a triple star ranking :P. I've since been finding it hard to get into a 4 player race, as half the MKDSers who run into me leave before the race starts. The rivals room isn't all that reliable as several noobs (excuse me) still manage to get searched up.

I am hereby proposing a challenge for any viewers of this blog, to add my friend code and verse a few games :). My code is 133203 986406, please comment here with your own so I can add you.

By the way, this blog receives about 105 viewers daily, but hardly any visitors post comments. Kudos to those of you who do, but may I encourage the others to have their say? Any reply would be really appreciated, I would just like to see this place be a little more active, thanks.

Japan Last Week

Source: http://www.m-create.com/eng/e_ranking.html, text directly from source.



Sales of the top 100 titles totaled 1,203,066 units, 83.27% of last week's total and 155.35% of the weekly average. Though lacking last week's vigor, this week also saw a large number of new titles boost the market, and as with last week, total sales surpassed 1 million units.

Twenty-seven new releases took spots in the top 100, accounting for 47.87% of total sales. Top-ranked "Resident Evil 4" sold approximately 243,000 units. The title was released about 10 months after the GC version, which was launched in January of this year, and it appears to have gotten off to a strong start in its first week, surpassing results for the GC version. (At this point in time, the GC version has sold a total of approximately 220,000 units.) "Monster Hunter Portable" in third place sold approximately 114,000 units. The title had an absorption rate of more than 80% and sold out at a series of stores. There were a notably large number of purchases of the game together with the PSP hardware, and the title became a bigger hit than expected.

Meanwhile, sales of existing titles jumped from approximately 458,000 units to 627,000 units partially due to the effects of titles launched last week such as "Animal Crossing: Wild World." This week's strong performance was supported by rich lineups in both the new title and the existing title markets.

Nintendo Players Dot Com



A member of Digital Share forums, thegetupkid86, presents a brad new one stop online Nintendo resource. On completion, this site will include everything Nintendo, from the latest rumours, to game reviews and sales statistics. With a team of staff who are all Nintendo gamers, the site will receive fast and consistent updates with all sorts of Ninty news.

I would like to recommend each and every one of you to look to nintendoplayers.com in the future, for comprehensive Nintendo information. For now please feel free to join the NP forums, there is a link to them from the main page (or add /forum to the url).

I have been accepted as a staff for posting news, so (hopefully, if all goes well) I'll be able to assist in the latest presentations of Nintendo talk. I'll continue contributions to this blog, though, and again I'd just like to thank all of you who have visited this blog :).