Konami's baseball is gone, thanks God. During the Christmas week, sales for Mario Party 7 and Naruto 4 have been improving, which is good news, but both games remain quite much the previous titles from those franchises.

Mario is a beast. Even after throwing his seventh party, he manages to climb up the chart while Naruto and Bleach suffer a hangover and fall down a few places.

The ranking expands as a peacock's tail, Mario Party 7 moves upward while Gundam Gashapon collapses, in the meanwhile Bleach arrives in the middle.

Take no prisoner: One Piece and Battalion Wars were shot down out of the charts in a blink, respectively losing (at least) 17 and 8 places. In the meanwhile Naruto stumbled and fell sharply, while Mario is trying to keep his balance after partying all night long. Good news for all fans of Japan, SD Gundam entered the charts pretty high, but will their cute look be enough to ensure a lasting success ? An interesting fact about last week hardware sales was that the GameCube almost sold as much as the Game Boy Advance SP, could it possibly outsell it, indicating that there's still like in the GC ? We'll see that soon enough, in the meanwhile the DS is kicking butts, selling almost three times more than the PSP.

Naruto 4's first week sales surpassed all previous results of the Naruto Gekkitou Ninja Taisen series. It entered directly in the chart with over 100.000 sales which is also better than many Nintendo games for GameCube this year. It proves once again, if necessary, the strength of the Naruto franchise, which, although less remarkable than Dragon Ball, reminds us of this other phenomenon of the 80's and 90's.

Harvest Moon: Poem of Happiness world version didn't last a week, neither did Mario Party 7's supremacy. The biggest surprise this week doesn't come from the GameCube though, but from the poor performances of the two new Pokemon games on Game Boy Advance (130.000) and Nintendo DS (153.000). For Pokemon RPG on handhelds, the results seem indeed quite catastrophic, even though those games are not a part of the root series (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Silver, Gold, Crystal, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald and whatever).

No matter how many times it has been iterated, the Mario Party series still performs well. Well enough at least to grab the number one spot (an achievement which happened all too rarely during the console's life time) in this quiet November week. However, as Dengeki notes, sales for the series has been declining ever since it's reached the GameCube's shores: Mario Party 4 (1st week sale: 189.000 / total sales: 810.000), Mario Party 5 (f: 110.000 / t: 672.000), Mario Party 6 (f: 93.000 / t: 500.300). And now a third less for Mario Party 7, with a small 69.000 units in the first week; if the trend continues, total sales for Mario Party 7 should be somewhere between 300.000-400.000, perhaps 375.000.

Things didn't quite turn out as expected: Zoids Full Metal Crash is gone and now Battalion Wars is left alone to compete with 49 other games ! To say the GameCube is doing very bad in Japan at the moment is an understatement. Fortunately things are not that bad in general for Nintendo, even though 3/5 of the ranking is Playstation games (PS2+PSP), the remaining 2/5 is all for Nintendo console games (DS+GBA and, well, GC).

Safe ! Mario and Pokemon have been wiped out, but Battalion Wars and Zoids Full Metal Crash are in, saving the GameCube's honor and even improving its sales a little on the way.

This is literaly a cliffhanger ! Both Pokemon XD and Mario Baseball are hanging on the edge of the ranking. Are Pokemon and Mario going to die ? Will a new title come to save the GameCube ? Will the ranking be without a single GameCube title since the console launched in Japan ? All this and more next week on Samurai Nintendo ! To be continued...

This week both games are coming dangerously near the edge of the ranking. Are we going to have a top 50 without a single GameCube game ? It's possible, but unlikely, even though there's still a week to go from now before the next releases. Sales of the GameCube in the meanwhile have never so low.

Viewtiful Joe Battle Carnival didn't survive round 2 and we're back in the same situation as before with just Mario Baseball and Pokemon.

A very unexpected entry this week, it's Viewtiful Joe's fighting game, Battle Carnival, also known as Red Hot Rumble on our continents. Why is it so unexpected ? For two reasons, firstly, because the game was obviously under-promoted. No one, not even the fans of the first Viewtiful Joe plaform games seem to be looking forward to it (as suggests our poll). Secondly, the two first games have achieved poor results in Japan: VJ1 stayed 9 weeks in the ranking and sold 75.000 units, while VJ2 did not enter the ranking at all ! However, the circumstances are also favorable: there hasn't been a new GC game released for weeks and this week is pretty quiet with only a few entries to compete with Joe. Nevertheless, seeing Viewtiful Joe failed to beat the weekly sales of two aging GC games, the miracle should be short-lived.

Oh my goodness, something happened while I slept last week: Pokemon XD and Mario Baseball have swapt position ! Not very interesting, and yet... and yet it is ! Because Mario Baseball is an older game, it means it is more popular than Pokemon XD. Mario > Pokemon ? Not quite. Possibly: multi-player fun sport game > poor game sequel.

And to finish, some good news: the Xbox has been selling under 100 units this week ! Die bastard, die !

Zzzz... huh, duh, what ?? oh, yes, the Game Boy Micro has released in Japan. *yawn* Zzzz... Zzzz...

Well, well, well...

Quiet week...

"No one hears you scream in the depth of the ranking", that's what's happening to Chibi-Robo and the baseball team of Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 12 who are both out this week. Above, Mario and Pokemon fight to stay alive. On a brighter note, it's surprising how well the DS sells, more than twice as much as the PSP. It seems Nintendo did the right thing with its curious games which are not games such as the brain training software. But what about the rest of the world ?

"Back with a vengeance !" cries out a tiny metallic voice; it's Chibi Robo, back from the depth of the ranking to a heart-warming forty-third place, before Konami's Pro Yakyuu 12. For the rest, it's relatively quiet and surpriseless, Pokemon XD slides a little, Mario Baseball gains a little, and that's it.

This time, Pokemon XD failed to match Colosseum's results with a weaker 2nd week performance (34.000 XD / 47.000 Col.). Please note we're unsure the exact current sales total for Pokemon XD is 142 or 149 thousand units at this point. Number one this week is Jump Super Stars for DS with 207.000 units sold in the first week, actually a tad disappointing for such a high-caliber title.

Interestingly, Pokemon XD sold as much (or slightly better actually) than Pokemon Colosseum ! Now we know there are 115.000 dedicated Pokemon fans in Japan who are ready to buy such a game in its first week. But what of the others ? Will they be willing to pay too ? Pokemon Colosseum left the ranking in its 17th week with total sales close to 600.000. It would definitely be good news for Nintendo if Pokemon XD could achieve the same, but despite a good start, this seems unlikely. Global sales for GameCube games have been dropping increasingly for a year now, as disappointed results for Chibi-Robo and DDR with Mario suggest. We'll follow carefully Pokemon XD next week, and see if the game how the game stand compared to Pokemon Colosseum which recorded a 60% decline in sales in its second week.

Progressive decline, as usual, is what drives the sales of fresh GameCube games. Pokemon XD is released today (August 4) and results will come next week, it's difficult to know how well it's going to sell. Pokemon Colosseum, although a poor game by all means, sold pretty well, about 115.000 units in its first week. So, will Pokemon XD hit the 100.000 mark too ? It depends on two factors which are quite impossible to evaluate if you're not close to Japanese players: how did they like Pokemon Colosseum ? And how strong is the Pokemon craze at the moment ? Our idea is that Pokemon Colosseum disappointed in Japan like in the rest of the world, and that, although still very strong, the Pokemon craze is weakening more and more outside the handheld consoles circle. In addition, Pokemon XD didn't receive much praise in Japanese magazines. So if we had to take a wild guess, we'd say Pokemon XD won't make it pass the 100.000 units and maybe not even that high. But once again, one should never underestimate the power of Pokemon.

Thankfully, people still have enough good taste left in them to realize Mario playing baseball is somehow more decent than seeing him shake his fat on the dance floor. So Super Mario Stadium: Miracle Baseball managed to grab the third spot with satisfying sales numbers and we get as many as four GameCube games in the ranking, a feast which had not be seen for a long time. Again though, we can question Nintendo's choices: not only do they release their Mario Baseball title just a little bit after Konami's own baseball title, a courtesy that they could have avoided, but they also release two Mario titles almost at the same time. Sometimes you can't help thinking the person in charge of deciding Nintendo's releases is an utter idiot.

Shocking news: a new Mario title defeated by a Konami game from their enduring and ridiculously cute sport series ! We expected change and action in the ranking, but not THAT kind. Fortunately, the new title is just Dance Dance Revolution with Mario. And at the risk of being booed and hissed, I'm kind of glad this happened, at least gladder that if it had happened to a true new Mario game. It makes a point, the same one as with Donkey Konga but this time stronger: even though there's a small fan base for such games, that's not what most people want to play.

In their first week, the first Donkey Konga sold 55.000 units, the second one 47.000, the third one 42.000, and now Dance Dance Revolution sold merely 22.000 units ! I think it's self-explanatory and Nintendo, after four average results (failures ?), should come to this logical conclusion: 4 music titles in such a short period of time is much more than a console can bear, at least for a decent system like the GameCube. It's time to stop.

Nintendo probably thought they would get a new Mario Party kind of success series, but it didn't work and hopefully they will discontinue this failed strategic model with their next console. One might argue that DDR with Mario is more Konami's than Nintendo's. Nevertheless, not only does this DDR is entirely focused on Mario, Mario characters and Mario's universe, but it's also published by Nintendo and probably overseen by them. It is a significant failure for big N, not for Konami, even more being beaten by a Konami-published baseball title, a tired series in its twelfth iteration.

Chibi-Robo vs the World ! Tinhead is still all alone fighting the big bad rival consoles. Things should change next week after Dance Dance Revolution with Mario and Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 12 have been released, and that's happening today.

Sad prospects for the next half, the GameCube has still only one game in the ranking and it's not selling too well. Chibi-Robo, hold on !