Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Death Smiles (Xbox 360) hits #6 on the sales charts - tops for a shooter this generation
Earlier today Famitsu posted last week's sales figures covering 4/20 - 4/26. One bright spot in the top 10 of the list happened to be the Xbox 360 port of Death Smiles, Cave's most recent Xbox 360 shooter offering.
Though it may not seem like much, Death Smiles' entry onto the top 10 with 20,000 units sold as a debut marks the first time that a traditional shooter has broken that boundary its first week of release for current generation consoles in Japan. It also eclipsed the performance of the 5pb port of Dodonpachi Daioujou (though it should be noted that Dodonpachi Daioujou was previously ported with a solid release on the PS2).
Considering that this was the first self-developed and published effort on the part of Cave in regards to their shooter collection on the Xbox 360, it is definitely a promising outlook for future support on the console. And it's also nice to see that the effort that was put into making the port as accurate as possible was also well rewarded. For information on the changes from the arcade pcb to the Xbox 360 version of Death Smiles, I recommend checking out EOJ's post on his forums over at Cave-STG. For those casual shooter fans out there that want to learn a bit more about Cave's entries into the genre, the resource is one that I highly recommend.
The highest previous opening by an Xbox 360 shooter was Konami's home port of Otomedius G for the console that sold 15,000 in its first week. It's slightly interesting to note that Death Smiles also outperformed Cave's last PS2 outing, Ibara.
In other Death Smiles news, the sequel to Death Smiles has been making the early runs of location tests around mid-April. Once I've seen a few impressions posted in regards to the game I'll be sure to share the links. Until then, I've decided to go ahead and embed one of the videos from the test below. This one is a second video coming from wx7407 (who provided the Chaos Code Youtube videos from yesterday).
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