Japan Charts: Koei scores a hit with another samurai action title

Dynasty Warriors publisher Koei has taken the top spot in the Japanese charts with another historic action title, Sengoku Musou, while Nintendo's Famicom Mini GBA titles have also made strong debuts.

Sengoku Musou, which is expected to launch in the west as Samurai Warrior in the coming months, sold some 639,000 units in its first week on sale, a very strong debut for the game and one which marks it out as a title almost as important as Dynasty Warriors in Koei's line-up.

The other big debut of the week was Nintendo's range of Famicom Mini titles for the GBA, cheap re-releases of NES titles on the handheld platform which are being sold at 2,000 Yen (around £10) each.

Super Mario Bros was the best-selling of the ten Famicom Mini titles, with around 65,000 units, followed by Legend of Zelda (47,000 units) and Donkey Kong (38,000 units). Between them, the ten titles sold some 304,000 units - representing over £2 million of revenue for Nintendo in a single weekend, from games well over a decade old.

Two western-developed titles make it into this week's ranking - with EA's James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing capitalising on the popularity of the English super-spy in the Far East to take the number eight position, while SCEE's innovative Eye Toy: Play makes it in at number ten.

In hardware terms, the Game Boy Advance dominates sales this week, with close to 63 per cent of the market by units - more than twice the share of the PlayStation 2, which has 31 per cent share. The GameCube is languishing on just 5.1 per cent share, although the very strong sales of the GBA do skew this week's figures; in fact sales of the PS2 and Cube have remained almost static compared with last week.

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