New Super Mario Bros continues to top Japanese charts

The latest charts from Japan show that New Super Mario Bros is still the country's best-selling game - with its host platform, the Nintendo DS, this week taking a huge eight out of the top ten titles in the region.

New Super Mario Bros sold almost a quarter of a million units in its third week at retail, and is edging close to the 1.5 million unit mark - it's less than 12,000 units shy of that in this week's figures.

However, its sales are still dwarfed by some of Nintendo's other big hitters on the DS; Animal Crossing: Wild World broke 2.8 million units this week, and both Brain Training for Adults (Brain Age in the west) and its sequel, More Brain Training for Adults, are rapidly approaching the 2.5 million unit mark.

Only one new release entered the top ten this week, with D3 Publisher's latest PS2 pachi-slot gambling title - this time themed on hugely popular nineties anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion - coming in at number two with over 100,000 units sold.

The only other PS2 title in the ranking was Konami's World Soccer Winning Eleven 10, which sold just shy of 35,000 units and has now broken the three quarters of a million sales mark.

In hardware terms, the DS Lite was unsurprisingly the dominant force once again, selling over 132,000 units - bringing total sales of the DS Lite and its older sibling, the DS, to over three million units this year so far in Japan.

By comparison, the PSP sold just short of 22,000 units, and has now sold just over 845,000 units during the year to date, while the PS2 did just under 19,000, and has sold 691,000 units so far. The Xbox 360, selling 1,100 units last week, has sold only 52,000 units in Japan this year.