Japan Charts: DS dominates with eight top ten places

Nintendo has recorded yet another hugely impressive week for the DS in Japan, with games for the handheld console capturing eight of the top ten places in the chart and 390,000 further hardware units sold.

The latest in the company's Brain Training series, DS Training for Adults: Work Your Brain 2, was the top selling game for the week, debuting with a massive 415,000 sales, while Animal Crossing: Wild World racked up a further 205,000 sales at number two, and Mario Kart DS sold another 169,000 units at number three.

Last week's number one, Square Enix' PS2 action RPG Kingdom Hearts II, dropped three places to number four but still managed a perfectly creditable tally, with over 150,000 copies sold during the week, while the only other PS2 title in the chart was another Square Enix game, new entry Front Mission 5, which sold 146,000 units and came in at number six.

The only other new entry in the chart was Nintendo's DS RPG title Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, which sold 136,000 units and came in at number seven in this week's ranking.

In total, Nintendo had seven titles in the top ten, all of them for the DS; one further DS title, Bandai's Tamagotchi Connection, charted at number nine, and Square Enix' two PS2 titles complete this week's chart.

Looking briefly outside the top ten, Dead or Alive 4 came in at number 13 in the chart, selling just under 61,000 units - making it into certainly the fastest selling Xbox 360 title yet, but not providing the boost to hardware sales that Microsoft might have hoped for.

Confounding the expectations of some market watchers who believed that the low sales of the Xbox 360 at launch in Japan were down to gamers waiting for DOA4, the console shifted 12,300 units during the week - twice the number that it did in the previous week, but still less than the GameCube, which sold marginally more at 12,579, and the Game Boy Advance handhelds, which sold 27,679.

The 390,000 sales racked up by the DS are hugely impressive, especially coming in the wake of the 600,000 units sold in the previous week, and 300,000 the week before that - but the number might have been even higher of the console hadn't sold out at retailers around the country.

The system continues to build its lead on the Sony PSP, which sold 110,000 units in the same week. The PlayStation 2 sold 79,000 units.