Japan Charts: Tekken 5 punches in at number one

Namco's latest addition to the beat 'em up market, Tekken 5, has gone straight in at number one in Japan, clocking up first week sales almost exactly comparable with the performance of Tekken 4 three years ago.

The PS2 exclusive fighting game sold around 174,000 units, while Tekken 4 sold 173,000 in the same amount of time and eventually went on to sell just short of 300,000 copies in total in Japan.

Aside from Tekken 5, the market was relatively quiet this week, with no other major titles being released - in fact, only one other new title went into the top ten, namely Kid's PS2 visual novel Memories Off After Rain Vol.3 which went in at number six.

Konami's Winning Eleven 8: Livewire Evolution dropped just one place to number two, while Nintendo's Kirby Canvas Curse DS continued to sell well at number three - and a second DS game, Square Enix' Egg Monster Hero, held on at number nine, just ahead of the only PSP game in the ranking, Sony's anime-licensed BLEACH: Beat The Soul.

In hardware terms, the Nintendo DS enjoyed a second week of strong sales, holding 30 per cent of the market compared to just under 24 per cent for Sony's PlayStation Portable - although the PlayStation 2 regained the top spot overall, with almost 31 per cent market share.

While the DS' sales are being inflated somewhat by the launch of new multicoloured versions of the hardware, it's still an important milestone for Nintendo's console to be able to boost sales past the PSP even when both systems are well stocked at retail.

The DS continues to have a far larger installed base than the PSP in Japan, and unless PSP sales start to massively outstrip the DS, it's unlikely that the two consoles will reach parity until the end of this year at the earliest.

Japanese sales data provided courtesy of leading market research firm Media Create.