"#5 and #6 Stranglehold and MOH:A duke it out in a rapidly-declining genre of AA games. It's suprising that Stranglehold had the smaller drop, however, I feel it might wind up appealing to the more 'generic' gamer than MOH:A did."

I don't think it's surprising. Both are lousy games that no-one should buy given the number of great 360 games coming out this year, but at least Stranglehold is *somewhat* different, whereas MoH has to compete with the 20 other WWII FPS games on the 360. Stranglehold at least appeals to teenagers who are easily impressed by the ability to slide down railings and do "bullet time" nonsense.

For Halo week, I expect BioShock and Madden (and to a lesser extent GoW and Oblivion) will do fairly well. At the very least BioShock should be above Heavenly Sword, but if Halo attracts enough new gamers to the 360 maybe even Madden could beat HS and BioShock it could come close to Wii Sports. I'm not predicting that, but it would be amazing. What will be really interesting is whether PS3 hardware drops again or not. If it does, that would really show what a zero-sum game it is between the 360 and PS3.

sinha -

I agree that in MOH and SH duking it out, SH has the advantage of atleast being a unique shooter. MOH is WW2 shooter 5,000,000 in a rapidly declining poor-userbase of WW2 shooters.

And again, SH has that more "generic" appeal that some games like Max Payne (although the perfect, polished generic shooter).

IMO, I think the huge drop in PS3 sales is probably from ioi counter-tracking sales vs. last month's NPD, and might not decline too too much.

However, if it is doing those numbers, and drops significantly, that's real bad news. IMO, to me, that means the could-have PS2 to PS3 userbase is constantly, and obviously attritioning to the Xbox 360...Totally antecdotal evidence, but I see that alot where I live, with PS2>X360 owners. But we'll see. If PS3 does under 125k in Sept NPD 5 week USA, and X360 is over 400k for Sept NPD 5 week - it's gameover for the rest of the year for Sony. At that rate, the even further $400 PS3 needs to happen. But then, MS just counters with the much-rumored $300 X360 Premium and $229 X360 Core, and Sony goes back to square one, with the X360 stil making cash, and PS3 losing even more.

smbu - If a X360, or most any game doesn't reach the top 50, it's likely that Famitsu and ioi couldn't find the data for the polling area. That doesn't mean M08 didn't sell at all, but wasn't sold well in whatever stores that ioi uses for sales.

Starcraft - IMO, LO should sell really well. Remember, the 2 X360 RPGs mimic the lesser-selling varieties of JRPGs in the US. Blue Dragon is similar to the 500k-selling Dragon Quest series, and Eternal Sonata, to the 250k selling Tales of Series. LO is the clear eqivilent to Final Fantasy, and MS should be actually promoting it.

But again, I hold out for BD and ES to have great legs over the rest of the year, and both end up doing 500 and 350k respectively.

To be fair.....

MGC numbers in Japan are going to be vastly escewed for non-online games. Blue Dragon was bought by ALOT of people that really couldn't care about online functionality, therefore the user #s are going to be low.

However, with Western games, it's very opposite. GOW, H3, DOA4, and other online-enabled games are going to have a strong card basis.

Now, the mystery is Oblivion. However, it's been selling so well, so I am not suprised. VP is a mystery too, but I could assume maybe alot of used copies went around the block, and inflated card #s.