The Wii's Nintendo Channel, then. It's enjoyed a somewhat shaky start if you ask us, particularly where DS demos are concerned. Although we love occasionally receiving bite-size portions of games such as Arkanoid, most demos are ... well, to be frank, they're old. Not just regular old, either, but Jesus and his pet triceratops trekking across the ravaged plains of Pangaea old.
The situation is especially grim in Europe, where Tetris DS (original release date: April 2006) has just joined a list that includes (amongst others) the ancient likes of Big Brain Academy, Brain Training, Mario Kart DS, 42 All-Time Classics, and Sight Training. Needless to say, we've only downloaded a small handful of games since the service debuted. To us, a demo of Brain Training is about as useful as a plasticine climbing frame.
Then again, maybe we're being overly critical, grumbly bastards. Maybe some of you good people actually get quite a lot of use out of the service. So we thought we'd throw this issue open to you, our beloved readers, and ask: how often do you use the Nintendo Channel demos?
Two DS games debuted in the top ten this week (Endless Frontier: Super Robot Wars OG Saga and the cutesy spatial puzzler Empty Space Training), but otherwise, DS software had a relatively lackluster performance. Only twelve titles ended up in the top thirty, which is low for Nintendo's handheld. As for hardware, the DS is getting comfortable in third place behind the PSP and Wii:
PSP: 71,986 (7,537)
Wii: 50,851 (1,804)
Nintendo DS: 38,355 (951)
PlayStation 3: 9,169 (98)
PlayStation 2: 7,203 (14)
Xbox 360: 1,959 (12)
Front Mission 2089: Border of Madness is another game that premiered last week, taking twelfth in the charts. If it follows the path of games like Let's Make a Pro Baseball Team! and Glory of Herakles, though, it's likely to drop soon. As for English of the Dead, the game didn't debut in the top fifty, and according to Famitsu it only sold 1,500 copies in its first week.
Click on past the break to see the other software numbers and rankings from 5/29 to 6/1.
Training, training, training. That's all us Europeans and Aussies want, right? Day in, day out, there we are, blurting "blue" into our handhelds like obedient farmyard animals, and being told that we're doing it wrong and that we're thuddingly simple. We know this happens, because the sales charts tell us so, and now the first DS demos on the local Nintendo Channel (released on all PAL consoles today) reflect the self-improvement obsession that has swept many PAL countries.
So, instead of getting demos of totally rad, new games such as Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword (which is what the U.S. got), we get four training games (only one of which came out this year) from the seven titles available, and adverts for Nintendogs and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. The only bright spot? A couple of tracks from Mario Kart DS, and a Picross demo, but those are hardly fresh titles.
We're not usually the types to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there's a stunning lack of variety on display here, Nintendo. Hit the break for the infuriatingly vanilla list.
After a somewhat stalwart week, DS software recovered nicely and once again dominated the charts. Even though the same amount of games appeared in the top thirty (fifteen in total), they ranked higher on average than they did in the previous week. Good software sales also gave DS hardware a little boost:
PSP: 64,449 (6,087)
Wii: 49,047 (7,475)
Nintendo DS: 37,404 (2,499)
PlayStation 3: 9.071 (1,370)
PlayStation 2: 7,189 (167)
Xbox 360: 1,947 (473)
Four new games debuted in the top thirty, including Sega's Let's Make a Pro Baseball Team!, which nabbed the first place spot from Monster Hunter. The other three games were Glory of Herakles, Scarlet Fragment, and Tea Dogs Room 3. Herakles (or Hercules, if you prefer) is the title that sparks our interest the most, as it's an interesting RPG published by Nintendo. Even so, it's first week sales were (unfortunately) subpar, yet good enough to land it in the top ten.
Check out the sales numbers and rankings for yourself after the break.
Update: The staff have left the Game Night chat. There were a lot of folks still in there, getting their game on. Hit up the chat if you want to see who's around. Otherwise, we hope to see you next week!
Hi, how're you? Good? Wonderful, good to hear. Say, what are you up to this evening? Well, you see, around 7pm Eastern, the staff here at DS Fanboy, as well as a bunch of readers, get together to enjoy the best Wi-Fi title available. Tetris, Mario Kart DS and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin are just a few of the titles we like to rock. Won't you join us? You should! It's surprisingly simple to get involved, actually. All you have to do is come back to the site at 7:01pm tonight, where you'll find this very post at the top of the page. It'll contain a link into our chat room, which you click and that's it. We told you it was simple!
Hey, you! No, not the guy on the next screen along with the muffin -- you. That's right. You a European? You are? Great! So let's hear it: why have we just checked the latest European charts and found that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney charted absolutely nowhere? If yours truly can summon up the the effort to scour the high street give his credit card details to an online retailer, you can do the same! No wonder Capcom seems to be thinking twice about releasing Trials and Tribulations here.
We realized today that we don't know Japan as well as we thought we did. With our reasoning, a new Gundam game + the popularity of the DS = cha-ching. While the debuting Emblem of Gundam had decent sales for its first week, though, taking the twelfth spot isn't all that impressive -- especially since there was only one new release cluttering up the top ten.
On the other hand, We're Fossil Diggers, Pokemon Ranger, and the Taiko Drum Master DS sequel continued to shine, giving the DS a nice piece of top ten representation. Batonnage managed to reach the half-million mark, while the other two games neared 100,000 copies sold.
For hardware, DS numbers went up since last week, but the handheld is still convincingly behind the PSP and Wii in recent sales. If you want to see the numbers, though, just click past the break. You can check out the software listings there, too.
This weekend, we had to do something that made us feel horrible, but in the end, was for the best. Like that scene in Old Yeller, we had to put down one of our DS carts (Mario Kart DS, oddly enough). You see, all of the inserting and ejecting of the cartridge with our DS caused something to get loose in there and now the cart cannot be read by the system.
It got us to wondering about this happening to others, namely you all, who probably play their DS a lot more than we're able to. So have you played a game so much this has happened? Have you never heard of this happening? What's your oldest DS game?
Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of DS lovers.
After a gray, unrelenting winter (for most of us in the unglamorous northern bits, anyway), the clocks went forward for Europe earlier this week, which we suppose means we're now fully immersed in spring (hence the daffodils, you see -- we really think longand hard about those pictures). Fittingly, the European sales charts are full of the joys of spring themselves!
Wait, no, hold on, we're lying again. Must stop lying. In reality, they're still pretty much unchanged from last week, with the one notable exception being Magic Made Fun (known as Master of Illusion in the U.S.) which debuted on the continent this week, where it reached 8th in Germany, and 7th in Spain -- we expected a little more from this sorcery sim, considering its catch-all appeal.
One of the biggest challenges of being a Nintendo blogger is finding new ways of telling your readers that the DS is popular in various regions of the world. We could take the easy route here and resort to writing about hot cakes and/or printing money, but no, we're just going to give it to you straight: in Europe, the DS is really, really popular.
We're not quite talking Japan levels of popularity here -- that would be insane. But it's doing jolly well, regardless. According to a swaggering Nintendo of Europe, the little handheld that could has sold through more than 20 million units in the region, as of the beginning of January.
It's a depressing fact that cheating will always be a part of online gaming, regardless of your platform of choice. For some time, those of weak moral fiber have been able to grant themselves infinite energy, infinite ammo, and the ability to levitate in Metroid Prime: Hunters (encouragingly, Nintendo claims it is now taking measures to prevent this), while the whole Mario Kart DS/snaking debate has rumbled on for some time (though we know of at least one Nintendo representative who would argue that the method isn't actually cheating, and we're sure many of you would concur).
Today, we'd like to hear about some of your own experiences of cheating opponents. Which games do you find attract the most online cheats, and have any of you indulged in this dark art yourselves?
Two DS games debuted in the top ten this week (
7,537)
6,087)
We realized today that we don't know Japan as well as we thought we did. With our reasoning, a new 
This weekend, we had to do something that made us feel horrible, but in the end, was for the best. Like that scene in Old Yeller, we had to put down one of our DS carts (Mario Kart DS, oddly enough). You see, all of the inserting and ejecting of the cartridge with our DS caused something to get loose in there and now the cart cannot be read by the system.
Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of DS lovers.
One of the biggest challenges of being a Nintendo blogger is finding new ways of telling your readers that the DS is popular in various regions of the world. We could take the easy route here and resort to writing about hot cakes and/or printing money, but no, we're just going to give it to you straight: in Europe, the DS is really, really popular.
