Nintendo Wii Tracker

Natsume has announced that it will be publishing Harvest Moon: Frantic Framing for Nintendo DS this spring. The first screenshots and game-play details were also released by the company. The game will hit the store shelves this May.

Harvest Moon: Frantic Framing is set in the same world of island of the recent DS hit Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness. It continues the tale of the island and its residents. Players can choose from 12 playable characters where each one of them will have a unique story. The game has a variety of modes full of excitement to play. Players can also unlock character art, music and some special surprises in their Collection Room.

According to Gamasutra’s weekly column has provided an important update of sales patterns worldwide. Last week, Sailing the World: Street Fighter IV covers the top five sellers for all available platform in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
The chart of the last week found Street Fighter IV outselling all competition on the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America and the UK. Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Demon’s Souls are the leading games in Japan.

Amazon has reported that Wii Fit is currently in stock and is having a steady supply. This can be an indication that the title’s supply shortage may finally be over. Wii Fit is still ruling the charts but Rock Band 2 has slipped to 5th position from its second place.

Its time for the analysts who are watching the video-gaming industry to pitch in and predict the way January will shape up for the various hardware producers. It seems that video game sales will rise by more than 12% in January. Even though the supply of Nintendo Wii was stressed due to the huge sales in November and December in North America, still Jesse Divnich of EEDAR believes that hardware sales of all platforms will increase by 55% over January 2008.

Nintendo Wii is set to come in the first place with about 550,000 units sold while the XBox 360 will sell more than the PlayStation 3. All sources agree on the fact that Nintendo will continue to sell a lot of Wiis and make a pile of money.

The Nintendo Wii is still in huge demand proving that casual gaming is the biggest segment ever to appear. However, there are some big potential that have led to some very poor quality titles. 2K games Global president, Christoph Hartmann states that these titles would eventually lead to the downfall of Wii. The gamers would stop buying the games as only a handful of casual games are good while the rest fall in poor quality category.

It is mainly due to the excellent marketing strategy that the gamers find almost any game as the greatest. A lot of people don’t even bother to check the specialized websites for reviews to see if their possible future purchase is good. We can just hope that the developers make good and high-quality games for the Wii.

The third quarter of EA’s sale growth was weak enough to lower its share prices. It thus, outlined a number of ways for cost-cutting measures to boost profits. The Redwood city, Calif-based company’s chief executive, John Riccitiello accepted that the low economic conditions were to be blamed for this result. The low profit and sales is due to the company’s own performance with the games that did not do well in the market.
 
To go ahead with the cost-cutting measures, EA is cutting 1,100 jobs or 11 percent of its work force, closing the studios and working on games to focus profits. It is also working on developing more good games for Nintendo Wii but is also criticized for not dong well there either. It as already delayed the release of three games saying that it will set up its marketing campaign.

The downloading games have become much more popular among iPhone users than smart phone users. iPhone users are about ten times more likely to download games for their phones other than smart phone users. A ComScore report revealed that iPhone users were responsible for 14% of all mobile game downloads last year.

The credit for making a platform of games on the iPhones goes to the Apple’s head of iPhone software development, Scott Forstall. All this seems like a threat to the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. But it is hard to believe that a phone could beat out dedicated handheld gaming systems unless Nintendo DS or the PSP adopts the phone technology.