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It’s amazing to see how popular the Nintendo DS and Wii are in Japan. Understandingly, the Wii will dominate the Xbox 360 because Japanese folks aren’t big fans of the 360 console.

But Microsoft aside, Nintendo makes Sony look bad in their own country. The DS Lite sold 163,888 units by the week ending in June while the Wii sold 65,582 units. Sony’s PSP rolled in third at 32,984 units sold and their last-generation console marked 11,962 units.

Is it the price? Or the game selection? For PSP vs. DS it seems the game selection is key to victory but the Wii console and PlayStation 3 console are both new and have very few games. Nintendo knows what Japanese gamers want and feed them a selection of games that strive to be hit titles.

The PlayStation 3 sold 9,581 unit, far below the figures of even the PS2 product line. The Wii is significantly cheaper in cost and a DS or PSP are cheaper still.

Is it the low cost console or the casual game titles that keep Japanese drawn to the Nintendo products like moths to a flame?

(Thanks, gamespot)

Miss Management is a simulation game. The developers decided to take the every day ho hum of an office place and make it exciting. If you have every worked in an office building, you know there are stereotypical coworkers. All of those stereotypical coworkers are in this game. The office kiss up, the person that smells up the place with their lunch, the gossiper, and many more.

If you have ever felt compelled to run an office building, now is your chance. You play Denise, the newly hired office manager. Your job is to do everything an office manager would be expected to do, delegate tasks, manage the office money to buy snacks for the employees and office supplies, but adds the fact that you need to make sure your employees are not getting too stressed out.

You progress through levels by receiving tasks each day. The tasks are color coded files. Denise can assign a task to an employee by bringing the task to them and dropping it on their desk. Of course, there are certain people that are good at certain things. The IT guy loves technical tasks, which makes perfect sense. There are characters that will only like one task and if they are given any other type of task they get stressed. If you give the wrong task to the wrong person their stress level goes up. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Lewis, Microsoft’s regional vice president of the EMEA home and entertainment division, has his eyes on the casual gaming prize. In order to take their Xbox 360 “to the next level” they’re going to have to attack their biggest rival… no not Sony, Nintendo.

“Our drive is to appeal to a wider genre with more casual types of gaming,” he said. “Clearly we need to continue toward more casual-based gaming experiences, and more peripheral-based gaming experiences in front of the screen.”

Let me translate for you “holy crap, this casual game market is huge! who knew!” Answer? Nintendo. By nature, a casual gaming fan is going to be attracted to what Nintendo has to offer, this isn’t a huge surprise for most folks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a Worms clone? This is a side-scroller arc-and-fire style game where you control a set of little infantry dudes and a sub-set of weapons and you fire them at the enemy. The trick is paying attention to the arcs on your rockets, grenades and other weapons along with strategic placement of your men on the terrain.

The game isn’t as easy to play as Worms because of its Flash gaming nature. The concept is solid, but you don’t have full-screen mouse control over the area of the screen. This requires you to use the ‘s’ key to select different guys when you want to move in for an attack. You cannot just zoom about trying to find out what the terrain looks like.

The game uses the keyboard entirely, odd for a Flash game, but its natural for old style gaming so it was quick to adapt to. Want to try it out? Go ahead!

Infantry Covert Operatives 2 – Take out the enemy

Looking to send a friend a bunch of virtual flowers? Need to cheer someone up but also show off your efforts and talents to them?

Sending them a pre-made virtual card is one thing, but what about putting in your own creative efforts? Flower Power will do just that! Is it silly? Yes! But it’s also a bit of fun, and you won’t stick yourself building a bouquet of flowers for a friend.

Show off your made flower building skills with Flower Power. You’ll need to create an account with Large Animal if you want to save them, e-mail them or embed them on your website.