It’s been a while since we looked at what’s going on in the World’s biggest games market. Mainly because the huge numbers the Japanese games market produces make us feel like woeful gaming part-timers in comparison. Likewise their software chart is both more turbulent and exotic than ours. For all that, though, J-gamers seem far more wed to mobile gaming platforms than those super-powerful next-gen consoles. We’ve never quite figured that one out either...

Take these figures for the week ending August 16th – DSi and PSP sales are significantly up on the previous week – getting on for 20K higher in the case of Nintendo’s machine. Meanwhile DS Lite sales have shrunk a little, as you might expect, yet it’s still selling more than the PlayStation 3. It’ll be interesting to see whether the PS3 Slim is able to reverse that bizarre state of affairs.

Guess we’ll see soon enough, right? Meantime the Japanese hardware market looks like this, last week’s figures in brackets.

DSi – 87,936 (70,066)
Wii – 47,732 (47,140)
PSP – 39,882 (33,893)
Xbox 360 – 9,612 (5,436)
DS Lite – 7,921 (8,699)
PS3 – 5,944 (5,826)
PS2 – 4,907 (4,601)