The games I recognize I can totally understand their appeal ...

• Bleach is a popular Anime series ...
• Final Fantasy Tactics, New Super Mario Bros. and Wii sports are all quality games that have a wide appeal
• English Training and Brain Training are games that apeal to the new expanded market

I don't really recognize the rest of the games to be honest.

Now, the expanded market games may seem unusual to us but consider many adults' tastes in North America; people who would never play a videogame will spend hours on crosswords, word searches, sudoku, and games like scrabble and yahtzee. Hypothetically speaking, if Nintendo found a way to produce a videogame that appealed to scrabble gamers you could see that top the charts in North America and stay near the top for quite a while.

As videogame players we think of a game that sells 1 Million copies world wide as being a success ... There have been board games (like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, etc.) which have sold tens (or hundreds) of Millions of units through out their life.

tell me what do Forza 2 has that is so hot for japanese that is a must buy??? GT came out at the righ time, car modifying concept was huge back then. you got GT, initial D series, Fast & the furious and alot of other clones. I dont remember which one out first as I'm not debating who is copying who, but when you having tons of car modifying concept at that time, it became a pop cultural trend. This is why GT become so successful. right now the trend cool down and you expect a none established driving franchise to be a system seller???? Dont be suprise when the new GT come out on ps3 it wont do as good as you expected, because that concept is not as hot as it used to be.

i told this guy that forza 2 wasn't going to do well and he didn't believe me. There was no reason to believe that forza 2 would do well.

I like that Japan has a totally different interest in games than the "hardcore" American gamer, forces the devs to think of new and even crazy ideas for the games

GT5 will do at a minimum 20 times Forza 2's sales it's opening week. I really don't know why people expected Forza to be a 360 game that could do well in Japan. Forza isn't even close to as popular as Gran Turismo in the US and Europe.

Buf ,it that Keikkashi game is only 40K and Wii Sports is fourth we can expect a very low week in numbers . Good to see two PSP games on the top three . Forza 2 didnt make any impact ,10K is even low as the 390K users of the machine in Japan tend to wait for good games as this one and buy it the first week .The genre isnt even as the hated FPS so this isnt excuse . As for the PS3 ,another week without releases .In two or three weeks we should see Folklore and Ninja Gaiden Sigma ,and sales should start to pick up a bit .

It`s all because of console war. =) x360 owners expcet every x360 game to be a hit, so it gets overreated and overhyped. =)

Of`course GT5 will sell much better worlwide, and if PD will make everything, what they recently announced, then next 5-10mln. worldwide sales guaranted. :)

Yeah. Our market is awash in popular games like Gears of War, God of War, World War II simulator #5643, and futuristic alien war #6743. Oh, and Madden. What's Madden doing in there? We need more war-themed titles.

Too many 'casual' gamers...

Also Forza didn't do anything for the 360, it sold decent though I think compared to other 360 games weekly, right?

I think the Forza numbers will be slightly higher. As of Sunday, there were already 15,000 unique gamertags on the Japanese leaderboards, and is #1 at mygamercard.net Sufficive to say, Forza 2 has bombed. I do believe, however, that MS is probably putting their eggs into the Trusty Bell basket instead. I really dont understand how Test Drive Unlimited>Forza 2. On a related note, Forza 2 is sold out where I live. The local EB sold out within 2-3 hours.