Japan Gaming Guide

Japanese site gamespark has ended the year with a list of the top 20 Xbox live arcade games. The rankings are based on the ever-popular metacritic scores.

Top of the list? Castlevania Symphony of the Night – a truly awesome game which I missed on the PS1 and was very pleased to get the chance to try last year. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords comes in at number two. I loved this game but wasted an astonishing amount of time playing it and have had to delete it from my console to stop myself firing it up again. Third is the mighty Geometry Wars.

Looking through this list reminds me of how much the Arcade has changed the way I play games. Games like Puzzle Quest and Castlevania are things we’d have overlooked at retail, but got to enjoy thanks to the wonderful fluffy impulse pricing they get on the Marketplace.

Head past the break for the full list of games.

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How many of each console are out there at the moment:

Wii – 14.25 million
Xbox 360 – 13.37 million
PS3 – 5.9 million

DS – 55.51 million
PSP – 26.52 million.

That’s a whole lot of consoles!

Mario Galaxy has overtaken Zelda: Ocarina of Time to become the highest rated game on Gamerankings.com. Zelda has been sitting in the top spot for 9 years. A mere 0.2% separates the two games, with Mario ranked at 97.8% and Zelda at 97.6%.

With Metriod Prime at number 3, Nintendo now hold the top 3 places on the list, which averages reviews from around the web.

[Read, via the Tanooki]

Mario Party DS goes in at number one, with Mario Galaxy falling to number three. Shin Sangoku Musou 5 (Dynasty Warriors 6) also sold pretty well.

The PS3 manages to overtake both the Xbox 360, which outsold it last week, and the Wii, making it the lead selling non-handheld. Xbox 360 sales went back to their normal paltry levels.

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The latest Japanese sales figures just came out. There’s no surprise about the biggest selling game of the week – it’s the fantastic Super Mario Galaxy. In second place, amazingly, it’s an Xbox 360 game! Ace Combat 6 flew off the shelves this week, selling over 70,000 units.

Riding the success of Ace Combat 6, the Xbox 360 actually managed to outsell the PS3! Pretty good news for Microsoft, Sony will draw a little consolation from the current popularity of the PSP.

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Famitsu, the Japanese game magazine leviathan has published a list of its readers all time top 100 games. The list is dominated by epic RPGs as you can imagine. Non-Japanese games barely get a look in with GTA: Vice City scraping in at number 76, and Japanese conversions of Wizardry, Sim City and Tetris hovering around the bottom.

Head past the break for the full list.

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The launch for the standard PSP slim built on the sales of the first week limited edition to keep Sony well in the lead this week. The Xbox 360 sold a few extra units in anticipation of the Halo 3 launch, maybe we’ll see a bigger jump next week.

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Some great news for Sony this week! The PSP has reached the top spot! After months of dominance by Nintendo the chart finally shows a bit of movement. Naturally the increase in sales was spurred by the release of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, and the limited edition FFVII PSP. The standard PSP slim went on sale a couple of days ago. It will be very interesting to see if Sony can maintain their momentum. Tune in next week to find out!

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Here are the latest figures. Nintendo’s sales have fallen quite sharply in recent weeks. Is this the beginning of the end? We doubt it somehow, although with the PSP Slim launching soon, could we see it taking the number two spot from the Wii?

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Holiday week in Japan saw record breaking temperatures, but that didn’t stop people buying consoles. No change in the running order, the DS is still on top and the 360 on the bottom:

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