Japan Charts: Winning Eleven 8 still on top; new Famicom Mini titles sell strongly

Konami's World Soccer Winning Eleven 8 has held the top of Japan's software charts for a second week, but Nintendo's latest batch of Famicom Mini (NES Classics) titles has proved to be its most successful yet.

Winning Eleven 8 sold well over 100,000 units and is racing closer to the 1 million sales mark, which it seems likely to reach much faster than any of the previous games in the series did following a very strong first week debut.

Meanwhile, no fewer than five of the new Famicom Mini titles made it into the top ten this week, with the highest ranked being Super Mario Bros 2 - which sold some 99,000 copies, and was at number two in the all-formats ranking.

Overall, the ten Famicom Mini games sold some 358,000 copies over the course of the week, making this third batch of games into the most successful yet. The first batch had comparable week one sales of 304,000 copies, while the second batch sold 168,000 units week one.

Given that each game retails at 1900 yen - roughly 14 Euro - this means that Nintendo has managed to drive 680 million Yen (over 5 million Euro) through Japanese retail this week, off the back of decade-old games which can't have cost it more than a few thousand pounds each to port to the GBA.

Aside from the Famicom Mini titles (Zelda II: The Adventure of Link was at number three, while a host of titles we don't recognise took the lower slots in the ranking - Famicom Tantei Club Kieta Koukeisha (No.7), Famicom Tantei Club Part II Ushiro ni Tatsu Shoujo (No.8) and Famicom Mukasibanshi Shin Onigashima (No.10), to be precise) the only new entry in the chart was SNK Playmore's King of Fighters Maximum Impact (PS2) at number four.

In hardware terms, the GBA dominates this week's sales, with over 54 per cent market share, while the PS2 lags behind on just over 36 per cent share, and the GameCube sucks up the remainder of the market with just under 9 per cent share.