14 DAY TRIAL // As the sales numbers for the entire lineup of gaming consoles sink on the Japanese market, the PlayStation Portable handheld from Sony is still managing to hang on to the top spot, albeit by a greatly diminished margin. The reason for the overall drop is the post holiday season blues, which retail often faces and the lack of big new videogame releases.
The old PSP-3000 version of the gaming handheld has managed to move 71,186 units to players, which is less than half what it did in the previous seven-day period.
Second place is held by the Nintendo Wii home console, which went from over 76,000 units to just 57,349 sold in one week, while the PlayStation 3 from Sony managed to hang on to third place as it also slid down in spectacular fashion in terms of overall sales, reaching 35,156 from 61,591.
The highest rated Nintendo DS version is the LL, which has a bigger screen, managing to move 30,418 consoles in seven days, followed by the DSi with 27,292 and the now old DS Lite with 6,574. Towards the bottom of the hardware chart, both the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 2 managed to post better numbers than the newer PSP Go, the new Sony handheld featuring no UMD drive and a non-removable battery.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, from Square Enix, succeeded in selling another 177,000 units in one week, leading the videogame chart by a severely smaller margin than in its first week, when it moved close to 450,000 copies.
New Super Mario Bros. keeps close in second spot, with 139,000 units sold. The first new entry in the videogame chart is Resident Evil: The Darkside Chrocnicles from Capcom for the Nintendo Wii, which shipped 73,000 and is followed by Tomodachi Collection and Wii Fit Plus, each pushed one place down in the top.