Oct 3, 2007
It'sa bit early to start proclaiming that "Microsoft wins Japan!" or the like (though that was our knee-jerk headline of choice) but we're still gobsmacked at the news that Halo 3 has taken first place in last week's Japanese sales charts, beating a Pokemon DS game into the bargain.
Bungie's 360-powered threequel managed to shift 59,000 copies in Japan, four thousand more than Pokemon's Mysterious Dungeon: Toki on Nintendo DS. And this in a landwhereFPS games traditionally fail to even dent theRPG-focused software charts. But there's more madness ahoy...
Famitsu, the oft-quoted (but actually fairly humdrum) Japanese gaming mag has been having a Sony love-in. It handed out a positively barmy 34/40 to PS3's "deeply flawed" Lair - a game that suffered a mauling from most reviewers, and boasts a pitiful Metacritic rating of 55/100. Comparison note: The exact same mark was given to Project Gotham Racing 4. But there's more...
Because, thanks to a slim redesign, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops + and Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, sales of PlayStation Portable in Japan nearly tripled last week. More than 270,000 PSPs were sold in a week, putting the handheld firmly at the top of the hardware charts, a full 200,000 ahead of Nintendo DS figures of 70,523. We'll spell that out for you - PSP is outselling DS! Will the wonders never cease?
Half-Life devs worried Gabe Newell "promised things that they couldn't possibly deliver" for the iconic FPS, but "they just didn't know" that they'd be able to do it yet
Former Valve exec recounts the meeting where Half-Life's publisher almost killed the iconic FPS: "Half-Life would quietly die. I was stunned"
