Every Saturday, we document sales charts from the UK and other European countries, and every week, there's one game that appears in the UK top ten without fail: Dr. Kawashima'sBrain Training. The sheer longevity of Brain Training's stay in the charts is genuinely exceptional, with this week marking the game's 100th consecutive week in the British charts.
Nippon Ichi announced that it had five DS games in the pipeline back in February, at least threeofwhich have been revealed since.
Amongst those five was an unnamed "management sim," and NIS has now revealed The Combini DS: Otona no Keiei Ryoku Training (The Combini DS: Adult's Management Power Training), a game that focuses on the smooth running of a convenience store.
Although the game's title hints at a piece of training software for store management wannabes, there are also town-building elements present here, with the success of your store influencing the growth and wellbeing of your town. You'll also have to deal with rival stores competing for your business, and maybe get a chance to bully your minimum wage employees about. There'll be no paid overtime or crafty cigarette breaks in the stockroom in our virtual store!
Head to the checkout past the post break for more screens.
You know things are going badly for sales of DS games in Europe when Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games doesn't get a look-in in most European charts.
The launch of numerous big titles in the last few weeks (Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit, and now Grand Theft Auto IV) has seen more and more software for the handheld slide ominously down the charts, and this week only the two Brain Training games register consistently high positions.
So hey, we figure that the DS needs a hero to save it. Somebody who's smart and savvy. Somebody who won't stand down, even in the face of immeasurable odds. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with Apollo Justice, ace attorney and star of next week's DS releases. Series continuity be damned, we want a high position for this! Spin past the break for lots of European chartage.
Back in March, Dutch website Nintendo Only claimed that Europe would be receiving a trio of new DS Lite colors on May 1st, including the (previously Japan-only) Ice Blue model, a mysterious green version, and the quite gorgeousJapan Post red DS Lite.
Alas, May 1st came and passed without incident, but now the exact same models mentioned by Nintendo Only have appeared in the database of a German retailer ("hellblau" is "light blue," while the others are obvious), complete with listings for red, green, and turquoise (?) styli. Oh, and there also appears to be serial numbers -- serial numbers make everything look more official.
Suddenly, this same speculation is looking far more credible, and we're way too excited again. Skip past the break for the full listings.
IGN has a bunch of new screens up for Line Rider 2: Unbound, including some basic shots of the game's playback editor.
It's clear that the site has also had some hands-on time with the game -- we know this because an IGN bod has scrawled out the letters "IGN" for their rider to coast along. Predictable, yes, but it's more original than the anatomically wonky genitalia that most of you us will draw upon first getting the title. As we saw in recent footage, Line Rider 2 looks like it will be sticking to the original Flash game fairly faithfully, so it's only reasonable to assume that we'll be experimenting with the same childish drawings in the DS version.
Sketch out a line and slide past the break for more shots.
As the clock ticks ever closer to E3, Nintendo continues to deny that a DS redesign is in the works. The only problem? They keep denying it, and that arouses the suspicions of naturally suspicious people -- naturally suspicious people like us.
The company has already swatted away claims made by Enterbrain president Hirokazu Hamamura (not once, buttwice), and has now issued another denial to GamesRadar, stating that "everything reported online is pure speculation and rumor," and that "a new model will be brought to the market when we can not offer new ideas with the current model." According to the firm, there's plenty of ideas left to "enrich the lives of people who own a Nintendo DS."
Call us conspiracy theory nutjobs all you like, but there's actually a ton of very good reasons to believe a DS Lite follow-up is coming. Sales of the DS hardware are dropping in Japan as the PSP romps ahead (after getting a redesign itself), DS piracy is becoming increasingly widespread, and hey, Nintendo redesigns stuff. It's what the company does.
Tecmo's announcement that Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff would be a "classic 2D game" cheered us no end. Too often for our liking, developers seem desperate to recreate the kind of 3D games we'd find on beefier home consoles, and the results are rarely pretty. This blogger recently got around to trying out Brothers in Arms (on the advice that the game was a technical marvel), and found it to be a mess of treacly frame rates and choppy visuals. If World War II had moved at this pace, we'd still be fighting.
Occasionally, however, 3D on the DS does work, and quite splendidly in some instances. It may sound odd, but I still consider Nintendogs to be one of the best uses of 3D on the platform, simply because it wouldn't have been a tenth as engaging in 2D. How about you, dear reader? What do you consider to be the finest 3D offerings on our humble handheld?
We've got fingers, toes, and pretty much everything else crossed for an English language version of Kunitori Zunou Battle Nobunaga no Yabou (Domination Battle of the Brains: Nobunaga's Ambition).
It's not that we're massively enamored by the Dynasty Warriors-style art or anything (we're really not, actually), but any game which lets us indulge in long, beard-stroking periods of deliberation while mentally picturing ourselves as great military daimyo commanding vast armies in feudal Japan will be lapped up around these parts. Oh yeah, and some of us could really do with being weaned off of other strategy titles.
Going by the latest screens, we're confident that this will boast a lovely, hard-centered strategic core for us to sink our teeth into and generally obsess about, so let's see it in the west, Koei!
More ER than Scrubs, THE Gekai (The Surgeon) takes a far more serious approach to surgery than Trauma Center. It might be worth a closer look come June, but for now we're far more interested in THE Shouboutai (The Firefighting Crew), partially because there's nothing quite like it on the DS (there should be more games about firefighting anyway, given that it oozes with the potential for drama and heroism), and also because our addled memories still fondly recall Burning Rangers on the Saturn. Actually, Burning Rangers is the main reason we're interested in this. Okay, the only reason. We wouldn't count on D3's firefighters carrying jet-packs, mind.
Head to our new galleries for the fresh screenage, though don't be expecting either of these to make the journey west.
When we recently discussed the two distinct visual styles sported by Genmu no Tou to Tsurugi no Okite, we had to do so using static images. Static images are all well and good, but absolutely fail to show off Genmu no Tou's impressive frame rate. Whether you choose cel-shaded or wireframe graphics, progressing through the death-filled corridors of Success Corp.'s dungeon crawler looks as smooth as butter.
We have one request though, Success: next time, let's see some of the game's 80+ monsters.
We're losing count of howmanytimes we've brought you news of Master of Illusion being offered at a lower price, and now it's cheap again! Newegg.com has the quirky (and rather decent) magic trainer on sale for $15.99, plus $2.99 postage.
We know that this has been even cheaper in the past, but we also know that magic continues to be serious business. So buy Master of Illusion today, and no longer will your bungled card tricks be greeted by awkward, slightly pitiful silences at dinner parties; indeed, we expect you all to be sawing siblings in half by the end of the week.
As our rudimentary French extends to asking for directions and words that aren't suitable for a family site such as this one, we haven't a clue what's being said here by the Bioware bods who are working on Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. We'd like to think that they're desperately trying to justify the inclusion of Big the Cat, or maybe laying into allthegames that have tarnished Sonic's good name these past few years.
Whatever they're gassing about, we advise you keep watching, because the video contains the first glimpses of Sonic Chronicles in action, including some of those Ouendan-style battle mechanics that we're looking forward to trying out. There's not very much to see, but it's all we have, and it looks pretty great. For more footage of beardy Canadian men speaking French and writing on whiteboards interspersed with very short snippets of Sonic Chronicles, hit the break.
Everybody's favorite scaremongering rag the Daily Mail is at it again. Regular Mail scribe and middle England mom Rosie Millard has written about how a Nintendo DS "turned my delightful, curious and funny children into argumentative demons full of aggression." In the 1,000-word article, Millard laments that her blissful domestic existence was disrupted by her offspring squabbling over the console, and knows exactly where the blame lies: the "hideous" DS.
So far, so predictable, but whereas we'd usually be irked by something like this, we actually found most of it amusing. For example, Millard unwittingly admits to purchasing pirated games ("The pale blue, £150 Nintendo finally arrived last November, fresh from Hong Kong, crammed with a 'bundle' of 20 games including Brain Trainer, Fifa 08, and Nintendogs"), while some of the language used is so ridiculously over the top and inflated that we couldn't help but smirk -- apparently, the DS encouraged a "mood [...] of anger, confrontation, pain and frustration." Eyes. Rolling.
Our advice, Rosie? Get a Wii -- they're lots of fun, and more suited to social gaming than the DS. As far-fetched as it seems, maybe you'll even crack a smile and have a go.
For a continent that gave the world tiramisu, Audrey Tautou, and the Renaissance, Europe sure does disappoint us at times. Yep, it's another week of gray, predictable drudgery when it comes to sales of DS software.
All you truly need to know is that More Mario & Dr. Kawashima's Olympics Training sold really, really well, and almost everything we care about didn't. Except for Animal Crossing: Wild World, which popped in to the German top ten, and Mario Kart DS, which secured eighth place in Ireland, and fifth in Germany. So maybe the world isn't all that rubbish, after all. And if you really believe that, we advise you go and rent Eurotrip.
Some of the details released yesterday about Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff didn't sound terribly old school to us (see: stylus control and internet play), but Tecmo wants us to know that the game's roots won't be forgotten in its DS rebirth.
Rather than take the "janky 3D" direction chosen by other football games on the DS -- hello, Madden -- a Tecmo spokesperson assured MTV's Multiplayer blog that Kickoff would be a "classic 2D game." Score! We're already envisioning this as Tecmo Bowl with Super Dodgeball Brawlers-style visuals, and that makes us go all tingly inside.
Also keeping with tradition (though arguably in a less appealing way), the title won't come with licensed NFL teams, thanks to the fact that EA recently secured the rights to those until the end of 2012. This means the game will instead come with 32 teams with names that "fit with the original spirit of Tecmo Bowl," which can then be customized within the game.
Nippon Ichi 
You know things are going badly for sales of DS games in Europe when 
IGN has a bunch of new screens up for 
Tecmo's 
The 
For a continent that gave the world tiramisu, Audrey Tautou, and the Renaissance, Europe sure does disappoint us at times. Yep, it's another week of gray, predictable drudgery when it comes to 
