Super Smash Bros. Brawl hung onto the top spot last week, but not by much. For the first time, the king of Nintendo fighters was actually close to the game behind it, with a lead of less than 10,000 units. Considering that Brawl has dominated for a month and is already over the million mark, though, we’re not surprised to see a little less dominance from the title.
A lot of new software was released last week, which finally caused Super Mario Galaxy to fall out of the top thirty. Winning Eleven: Play Maker 2008 was the Wii’s new game, debuting at the number six spot. Family Ski also managed to jump up five spots, despite the plethora of new titles.
On the hardware side, the Wii continues to reign in first place. The PSP and DS aren’t too far behind, but the Wii is outselling the PS3 4:1 with the help of Brawl.
You can check out the listings and sales numbers — they’re posted after the break.
Hardware:
Wii: 63,504
PSP: 53,373
Nintendo DS: 50,151
PlayStation 3: 14,060
PlayStation 2: 9,634
Xbox 360: 2,001
Software:
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) — 77,525 (1,291,000)
Etrian Odyssey II: The Royal Grail (DS) — 68,913 (New)
Wii Fit (Wii) — 61,922 (1,546,000)
Musou Orochi (PSP) — 46,667 (New)
Harvest Moon: Shining Sun and Friends (DS) — 44,721 (New)
Winning Eleven: Play Maker 2008 (Wii) — 36,067 (New)
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (PS3) — 22,696 (New)
Bioshock (360) — 17,808 (New)
Wii Sports (Wii) — 17,077 (2,798,000)
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (DS) — 14,932 (236,000)
Family Ski (Wii)
Wii Play (Wii)
Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side 2nd Season (DS)
Mario Party DS (DS)
Poison Pink (PS2)
Monster Hunter Portable 2nd (PSP)
Iron Pachi-Chonmage 14: Pachinko Mask Rider (PS2)
Burnout Paradise (PS3)
L, the Prologue to Death Note: Rasen’s Trap (DS)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
Devil Might Cry 4 (PS3)
Mobile Suit Gundam: Gihren’s Ambition, the Axis’ Threat (PSP)
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we speak about games that aren’t on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.
Once again, we’re turning to a crappy game for our weekly recommendation, due to its historical (or hysterical, amirite) notability. We’ve proven that we kind of enjoy bad Street Fighter II-era fighting games; now that time has passed and the awful clones didn’t lead us into another crash, we can enjoy them as bizarre and hilarious curiosities. Well, “enjoy” is a strong word.
Street Combat on the SNES is one of those curiosities, mostly because of its origins. Don’t be fooled by the “IREM” on the label — this game dates back from when good old IREM had enough money to publish other people’s games. Don’t take it as the mark of quality it usually is. Street Combat was actually developed by NCS/Masaya, who are known for bizarre, but not necessarily great, shooters like Cho Aniki and the Langrisser strategy series. They made a Cho Aniki fighting game, Cho Aniki Bakuretsu Rantouden, but that’s not exactly a wonderful fighting game pedigree.
LikeFighter’s History, Street Combat has one of the words in the Street Fighter II title in its own title. Whether this tactic drove any confused or overenthusiastic sales remains to be seen, but we’re going to go ahead and say “no.” What makes the use of the very evocative title even less defensible is the fact that very tiny of the game’s combat takes place on the street. Yes, Street Fighter II has the stage on top of the buildings, and wherever the thing with the elephants was, but also? Streets.
The reason for the weird non-street environments? Street Combat, in its original Japanese form, was a Ranma 1/2 game, Ranma 1/2: Chounai Gekitou-hen. Back in 1993, Americans didn’t know what half a Ranma was, so it was apparently a better idea to replace the culturally unfamiliar characters with, uh, cyborg dudes. And robot dudes. And military dudes. The stuff of video games. You can still clearly see animeness in the characters and (especially) the backgrounds.
This means, however, that even as an “original” fighting game, Street Combat is a licensed fighting game at heart. And thus not very good. How not-very-good? Well, it’s got a jump button. Also, like the first (awful) Street Fighter game, your character choice is limited in single-player, to Steven, the mulleted, visored guy. Wouldn’t want people to have too much fun with the other characters!
If you’re a true blue fan of any game, it pays to have an official website to browse through, doesn’t it? Now that the Wii version of Resident Evil 0has been confirmed, Capcom has put up an official website for fans of the game to check out, and from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it has potential for more undead goodness.
Granted, the text of the Resident Evil 0 website is in Japanese, but that won’t prevent you from peeking at the eye candy that’s currently on the site. Capcom has decorated it with various screenshots taken from the game, as well as character art of protagonists Rebecca Chambers and Billy Coen.
While the Resident Evil 0 website is still in its infancy, chances are Capcom can do much more with it, especially as development on the game progresses. The game has been scheduled for a summer release in Japan, but we’re not ruling out the possibility of an international release. Stay tuned for more updates on this classic survival-horror title game. Meanwhile, if you’d like to have a look at the site for yourself, the source link below will take you there.
Much to our delight, SNK’s Neo Geo Stick 2 for the Wii will retain that classic black look of the original and PS2 controllers, foregoing the predictable white case that Hori opted for. Jeux France has uncovered several photos of the arcade stick, unboxed and beside its packaging, and it is gorgeous. Leaving one of these displayed on your coffee table sends a clear message to your visitors: “This guy is serious business.” Just make sure not to break up that illusion by letting them see your Chewbacca bedsheets — you don’t want people to think that the business you’re serious about is living like a twelve-year-old.
Back on topic, the Neo Geo Stick 2 supports both Wii games and Virtual Console titles. Retailers in Japan won’t begin selling the arcade controller until April 10th, but you can preorder one now from import shop Play Asia for as cheap as $59.90. Step past the break for more photos from SNK’s product page.
Speaking at the recent Game Developers Conference, Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama revealed that the Wii very nearly shipped with a tantrum-inducing, Xbox 360-style parental control timer, designed so that our mums and dads could make sure we weren’t getting square eyes.
In fact, one of the biggest supporters of this feature was supposedly Satoru Iwata himself, who was keen for Nintendo’s console not “to be seen as an enemy in the household.” Eventually, however, an alternative way of monitoring use was found: the play history list that we’re all now familiar with.
Said Aoyama: “Instead of instituting some play limit … this allowed parents to monitor and discuss how much their children were playing … this is why you can’t erase the play history on the console.”
Interesting! Any parents/kids out there who care to give their opinion on which they think works best? Also, does this mean that Iwata is something of an authoritarian with his own kids? It’s difficult to imagine him being so strict and ruling with an iron fist — just look at his happy face!
We imagine the above individual’s diary entry for this day would look something like this:
Dear diary,
Well, I finally decided to take my love of Birdo to the next level. This day, I finished creating my life’s greatest accomplishment. I’ve attached a picture sample of the Birdo costume I created. You, like, absolutely know I’m all about Birdo. How many of your page’s margins are full of hearts and little Birdo faces? Too many to count!
I figured with the costume, I could find my soulmate. So I created a myspace account (Birdo-missive57821) to find the perfect mate. They’ve to be tall, love Super Mario Bros. 2 (especially Birdo, lol) and enjoy listening to Marilyn Manson while pouring hot wax all over themselves. I think this costume I made will really help me find the right person to spend the rest of my life with. Someone who will respect me for the one-of-a-kind and talented person I’m.
Anywho, I have to go, Courtney is coming over so we can both listen to some Savage Garden and give each other hickeys with the vacuum cleaner. You know, to impress the boys in gym class.
Well, this is officially awesome: a homebrew program called bin2jpg has been designed to convert Super Smash Bros. Brawlscreenshots saved to an SD card into .JPG format. Now you’ll be able to display your awesome victories on the World wide web, and illustrate strategies with helpful screenshots.
Those two things we mentioned? Not going to happen. The only things that Brawl screenshots will ever be used for, ever, are:
Even so, we’re happy about this development, and will continue to be until we see the first horrible webcomic. [Via 4cr, image created by GBATemp forum member SpikeyNDS, found here]
Super Smash Bros. Brawl 
Welcome to our weekly feature, 
