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   A number of reports from the past few days have shed a peculiar light on Japan's current gaming trends, regarding both hardware and software sales. Whereas a couple of weeks ago Microsoft made it to the top 10 with Gears of War, their Xbox 360 hit has completely vanished from the top 50 by now. Just as strange is that the only PS3 title currently in the top 50 is Enchanted Arms (at #29), but that's still nothing compared to the spectacular debut of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game's PS2 version was finally released in Japan last week and, against all odds, it sold over 227,000 copies, thus shooting its way straight to #1!

   Other than that, the top 20 is clearly dominated by 14 DS games, with just a couple of Wii titles making it to the top 10 (Wii Sports and Wii Play, go figure). Another weird thing is that there's no trace of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in this top, even though Nintendo's top Wii game is still selling like crazy in North America and Europe. For further reference, you can view the entire Japanese top 20 on GI.biz.

   And speaking of which, the British specialist website also has another story now, in which they outline Nintendo Wii's staggering dominance over Sony's PlayStation 3, in terms of units sold in Japan last month. Althogh their headline boldly reads "Four Wii units sold for every PlayStation 3 in Japan", this only refers to the week of January 22-28 (over 80,000 Wiis vs. 20,000 PS3s, based on figures estimated by Media Create). For the entire month of January 2007, the sales ration is less than 3:1 for Wii vs. PS3 (around 405,000 Wiis vs. 148,000 PS3s), and just over 2:1 for the total time the two console have been available in Japan.

   If you read these figures backwards, you can clearly see that Nintendo's Wii console is gaining more market share against Sony's PlayStation 3, with each passing week. So GG Nintendo!