Japan Charts: Konami's Jikkyo Baseball leads summer market revival

The beginning of summer holidays in Japan has seen a marked improvement in software sales, with Konami's Jikkyo Power Pro Baseball 10 topping the charts and other key new releases also selling strongly.

Konami's baseball title was released simultaneously on PS2 and GameCube, and the PS2 version topped the charts, with the Cube version entering at number six. The two versions of the game made up combined sales of some 271,000 units.

Other key new releases this week (24 in total made it into the top 100) were Capcom's Mega Man X7 on PS2, which sold some 74,000 units and came in at number two, and Irem's R-Type Final, also on PS2, which came in at number five with sales of about 42,000 units.

Elsewhere in the top ten, two new GBA titles from Konami had fairly strong debuts - namely action RPG Korokke! 2, and Hideo Kojima's quirky light-sensor based vampire hunting title, Boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand, with appeared at numbers seven and eight respectively.

The other new entries in the top ten were Kino's Travels: The Beautiful World at number nine, a PS2 game based on a fairly popular recent anime series, and Hudson's Bomberman Land 2, again on PS2, at number ten.

In hardware terms, the GBA overtook the PS2 once again this week, with combined market share of 45.37 per cent for the GBA SP (35.90 per cent) and original GBA (9.47 per cent), compared with 39.52 per cent for the PS2.

The GameCube managed a market share of some 11.71 per cent, while the Xbox was on 1.20 per cent - just a tiny bit ahead of the WonderSwan Crystal, on 1.16 per cent.

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