Most people who follow games closely, whether or not they specifically check sales numbers, probably have a rough idea of how each of the three consoles has sold so far this generation, but putting some actual numbers next to these impressions should be helpful. Sales numbers are broken up according to region, and the Wii currently leads in North America, Japan, and “other” (mostly Europe and Australia) with over 53 million unit sales worldwide (the Wii is tracking slightly higher than the best-selling console of all time PS2 at the same number of months from launch). This compares to 31 million for the Xbox 360 and just shy of 25 million for the Playstation 3. This breakdown has led to some analysts grouping the PS3 and 360 together as HD Consoles and comparing that entity to the Wii (this is pretty much the only way to make it look like the Wii is losing). The apparent justification for this is that a hypothetical developer, when faced with the decision of what console to create a game for has the choice between the Wii or the HD Consoles. Maybe a developer could tell us if this is reasonable; once you have created a PS3 game, I understand it would be easier to port it to 360 than to Wii, but is it a matter of flipping a switch? I suspect not, but I do not know much about development.

Underlying the World Wide unit sales are some drastic differences. The Wii leads in all territories, but by far less (in percentage terms) in North America than in Japan. In North America the Wii has sold 21.6 million units to Microsoft’s 16.3 million 360s and Sony’s 8.7 million PS3s. In (possibly xenophobic) Japan the Wii has sold 8.6 million units to Microsoft’s 1.1 million 360s and Sony’s 3.7 million PS3s. Worth noting is that despite the poor performance in Japan of the 360, this is more than twice what the original XBox sold in the region over its entire life. So in North America, the Wii is followed by the 360 and then the PS3, while in Japan it is followed by the PS3 then the 360; in the rest of the world the order is Wii, 360, PS3.

In broad strokes, year to date sales are quite similar to the life to date sales detailed above. The orders in each region are basically the same (in the “rest of world’ region the PS3 may be slightly ahead of the 360 this year, but they are reasonably close in both LTD and YTD sales). The main difference is that while all consoles sales have fallen significantly in Japan this year (the DS continues to do quite well in Japan, but handhelds are beyond the scope of this article, which is likely to be too long as it is) the PS3 has held up much better than the Wii; while the Wii has moved a few more units than the PS3 in 2009, the gap is quite small relative to where it had been in the past several years.

September (most recent available data) was an anomalous month because of the PS3’s price drop and remodeling. For the first time ever, the PS3 was the best selling console in North America (with 492k units to the Wii’s 427k and the 360’s 353k) and it won the month in Japan by a sizable margin (336k to 103k to 28k…poor Microsoft). As you can tell by comparing these numbers to the YTD unit sales, there was clearly some pent up demand for the PS3 that was either waiting for a price cut or a smaller (less ugly?) piece of hardware. Personally, the PS3 is the only one of the three I do not own, but the combination of the price cut, Uncharted 2 and Demon’s Souls in the past few weeks makes a pretty compelling case, so the jump in sales does not surprise me. The main question is how long the bump lasts. In a different month, I would say it stays elevated (above the 150-250k it had spent most of the year selling in North America) but comes down from that peak, but since the holiday season is almost upon us, my guess is that it may take a slight hit in October, but it (along with the other two) will have huge spikes in November and December.

Comparing total sales and operating income across the three hardware manufacturers is difficult almost to the point of being a fools errand. The most obvious issue is that Nintendo is primarily a games company, while Sony and Microsoft are conglomerates with many different operating segments. Until recently, Sony had an segment called “Games” which was convenient for those of us interested in video game company financial information because it did not include extraneous crap and allowed us insight into whether and to what extent Sony was profiting by being in video games. No more. They now have a segment called Networked Products and Services, which comprises PS2, PS3, PSP, Vaio, and a handful of other product lines. The cynical, conspiratorial side of me thinks they did this to obfuscate and mask the fact that the PS3 has cost them a ton of money. In any event, Microsoft has never had a games segment, but has for some time had an Entertainment and Devices Division, which includes the Xbox line, as well as Zune, PC games, and a slew of non-gaming products.

The next issue is a consequence of this first one: as a result of Sony and Microsoft reporting games income by segment rather than as a company, we can only get operating income, and not net income. Operating income is better than making up numbers, but not by as much as I would like. Essentially, certain costs that are not expected to be ongoing, or a part of the company’s operations (a relevant exclusion for these companies is foreign exchange losses, but a one time recall or a loss in a lawsuit would also not be included) will not show up in operating income, but would in net income.

Now that I have disclaimed all meaning out of these numbers here is how the companies/segments performed in the most recent quarter: Nintendo* had operating income of $713 million on sales of $3.3 billion; Sony NPS lost $654 million on sales of $3.9 billion; Microsoft EDD made $312 million on sales of $1.9 billion. In terms of operating margin, those are healthy numbers for Nintendo and Microsoft, but I can not think of a good way to spin that huge loss for Sony; their games division is hemorrhaging money. For Microsoft that $312 million is almost double the same period last year.

By listing the most recent annual numbers for each company/division we should be able to get some idea of how these quarterly numbers fit in a year long period. Yet another caveat: Sony and Nintendo fiscal years end March 31, while Microsoft’s ends in June. Regardless, the numbers should be relatively comparable since they all encompass one Christmas season, one summer, etc. In the most recent fiscal year, Nintendo made $5.7 billion in operating income on $18.8 billion in sales (Nintendo’s income would look quite a bit worse though still strong if the FX losses were included); Sony lost $597 million on $10.7 billion in sales; Microsoft made $169 million on $10.8 billion.

You will notice that the numbers for the most recent quarter are not approximately one-fourth of the annual numbers. Part of this is that the Christmas season distorts everything; many companies see half of their sales in the quarter during which Christmas happens.

There are a lot of numbers to sort through on this page, but they generally agree on a few points, but before I get into that, please note, these conclusions are taken from sheer numbers and do not necessarily reflect my gaming preferences; there are no qualitative judgments here. In broad terms, Nintendo has been very successful, both in terms of total hardware sales and the money those sales have made for the company. There has been a bit of naysaying recently since Nintendo’s profits are down this year and “the Wii has stalled in Japan,” but as the chart above shows, Nintendo’s earnings could fall by half and they would still have their best year over the period from the early 1990s through the Wii/DS-money-printing era. Microsoft has had smaller overall sales numbers, both in each region as well as worldwide, but they have recently started to make some actual profits from their games business (previously it seemed like a loss leader for getting Microsoft products beyond the office and into the living room, or possibly just to irk Sony).

This generation could generously be described as a disappointment for Sony, and more accurately as a small scale disaster. After the huge successes that were the Playstation 3’s progenitors, bringing up the rear in total unit sales and losing a ton of money in the process is a real let down. In my view, Sony’s only real hope for profitability in its games business in the immediate future is that the Slim has an impact on hardware sales similar to the effect the DSLite had on DS sales. This would then have to be followed by people buying a ton of games, since Sony can not rely on hardware sales to make money. It would not be the first time a console has turned things around, and many people think the Slim is exactly what Sony needs, but they have an uphill battle ahead of them.

* Nintendo reports only in yen, so to convert to dollars, I used a rate of 89.70 JPY per USD. Also, we are just finished Q2 and had Nintendo reported Q1 and then semi-annual results, so I did subtraction to get Q2 numbers.

Of course, we seldom practice what we preach. Kill.Switch may have dabbled with cover long before Gears of War, but we know which is the better game. On the other hand, most gamers shunned From Software’s game Ninja Blade as soon as the early screenshots showed us what looked to be a shameless clone of Ninja Gaiden. Even when the reviews rolled in, the same sentiments were common, despite the fact that Ninja Blade has quite a different purpose. Unfortunately, said purpose has little use in today’s world of action games.

Like Ninja Gaiden’s Ryu Hayabusa, Ninja Blade’s Ken Ogawa is able to run along walls and use potent ninja magic (manifested here as elemental shuriken attacks), all while wearing a heavy and ornate headguard. But NG isn’t the only game that Ken takes his cues from. Ninja Blade’s combat focuses on the ability to quickly switch between multiple swords, much like Devil May Cry 3, and both the weapon upgrade system and the game’s love of Quick Time Events hearken back to God of War. In reality, there is a mishmash of different inspirations here, and yet Ninja Blade still doesn’t play like any of them.

What you really have is an old fashioned game based on high scoring and speedruns. By the end of the first level, you will have access to all of the game’s swords, with the shuriken magic coming shortly thereafter. You always have the tools necessary to tackle any battle, and success is simply a matter of figuring out which ones to use. For example, the nastiest enemies are entirely nullified by your slow, strong sword, while your dual blades will make short work of faster foes. Combat with regular monsters exists not to provide a challenge, but to test how quickly you can run through them. Similarly, seemingly tricky platforming sections are made easy via Ken’s Ninja Vision, which slows down time and points out special areas of the environment, effectively spelling out where to go and removing hazards.

When you finally get to a boss battle, you will find a frustrating, mutli-staged fight that boils down to a war of attrition, as you slowly chip away at a boss’s health while figuring out which of his animations are safe and which will cause damage (it isn’t as clear as you might think). The key is to figure out which shuriken attack is most effective on them. Once you do this, bosses will go down with little trouble. Hell, even the QTE’s pose no threat, since you instantly retry them should you ever screw up.

The point of Ninja Blade is not to cause a constant stream of Game Over screens, but to time you. It even goes so far as to place various time constraints within certain levels to reinforce this idea. By constantly moving and eliminating threats as efficiently as possible, you can increase your end of level high score, which can then be posted to an online leaderboard. I understand the appeal of this approach, but speedrunning Ninja Blade isn’t as appealing as it should be, considering the game is designed around the concept. Figuring out a crucial or unintended exploit can be exciting and rewarding, but knowing that they exist for every situation makes it merely a matter of reflexes and memorization, rather than strategy or cleverness. Getting only half of the point means only half of the fun.

There is one other purpose of Ninja Blade, as expressed by the developers – create a game that emulates the most thrilling scenes of a Hollywood blockbuster. This is where the QTE’s come into play, allowing you to have some control over long, flashy sequences that cannot be easily mapped to the standard control scheme. At first, I didn’t mind these events, as they were logical in structure. Where God of War may tell you to hit X to cause Kratos to go wild on an enemy, Ninja Blade will ask you to hit the jump button to jump, or the joystick to dodge. Essentially, the game is saying “if you had full control over this situation, you would do these actions, so we will map them to their corresponding buttons.”

As the game goes on, this logic is thrown out the window; you start using certain buttons to initiate different actions, and the QTE’s become drawn out via unnecessary presses (one asks you to press one button to launch a motorcycle in the air, and another to land it, for no other reason than to look flashy). Some of these events are ridiculous enough to entertain, but their frequency dilutes this potency.

The reason Ninja Blade lets us down is not because it is Imitation Ninja Gaiden(tm), but because it takes ideas from other games in order to create something unique, and still ends up being pedestrian. It fails on two different levels, and I wonder if it would have been better off simply aping one of its inspirations entirely. Considering that this is a game from the same team behind the immensely praised Demon’s Souls, Ninja Blade is an immense disappointment. If there ever is a sequel (and the B-movie story is cocky enough to hint at one), I can only hope From Software learns a lesson or two.

100 Classic Book Collection is not a game. Don’t be confused by the packaging, the little box and the little game shaped cartridge. When you pop the cart into the DS and open it up you will not find a game. Instead you will find an assortment of 100 classic books to read. It could have been that simple. Here’s 100 books. Read them all. Cheevos for reading all of them. But much like an exotic alcoholic cocktail so many extra bits have been squeezed in to make it all the more worthwhile.

There is Background Music. Oh yes there is. This feature blows my mind. You can choose between a whole range of background music so although you may be sitting on a train or in bed reading the wordies from a screen you can choose a range of background music to make you feel like some kind of arthouse cunt deliberately reading classic books in a number of settings you might hope to pick up a girl in because she digs your goatee, your pink tinted glasses and your choice of literature. This must be the intention, otherwise why would you be able to choose between BGM from a coffee house, an airport or a train journey? I don’t care but I love it. Other BGMs are autumn night, summer night, log fire and my favourite: neighbours having noisy sex through the wall. That last one was made up. Anyway, BGM. They didn’t need to do it. They did. I love it.

Story. Your average game might have a story in it. Some have something that looks like a story but scratch the surface and it isn’t a story. It is total nonsense. 100 Classic Books has over 100 stories in it and some are the best stories ever put to paper. I’ve not quite read all of them yet but very few of them have talking to dogs in them and in the ones I have read so far at no point do “all the characters suddenly remember they all used to live in the same foster home”. These are awesome stories, people, not the usual shit you find in games. Read them all and realise how great stories were before everything became about murder.

The controls are fucking amazing. Basically, hold the DS like a book and then use the buttons, d-pad or the stylus to turn the page. Simple. You can also add bookmarks to keep your place. You can use more than one bookmark at one time in more than one book! Also you can skip to any page you might wish to. The best thing is when you hold your DS upside down all your bookmarks don’t fall out. Again, totally could have not been in there but the addition really makes you feel loved by Harper Collins. Another best thing about it is that all the books are arranged on a huge virtual book shelf.

You can be a Literature Critic. After you finish a book (TOP CHEAT: you don’t have to read every page) you get to review it and share that review with the other four people who have 100 Classic Books. I was reviewing the Hunchback of Notre Dame and spontaneously I developed a taste for red wine and the sweet sounds of jazz funk.

There is an Owl. Fully a motherfucking owl. Occasionally, it flies around and hoots. Sometimes it does the head twist so it takes you a while to work out if he is facing you but looking back or facing back and looking forward. Don’t know why it is an owl. A worm would have made more sense. But, yeah. Owl innit. Maybe you can unlock bausting? Who knows?

There are About the Author sections. Just like real books, before you embark upon a new journey you can read all about the author. This means you can impress more college girls at the jazz club with your authorly knowledge. SPOILER. Sometimes the about the author section contains pictures and words.

There are About this Book sections. Just like real books you can read about the historical, social and other contexts of the book when it was released. At least I guess you can because the last thing I want to do just before reading a book is to have the ending spoiled by reading about the book. By the time I have finished it I forget to go back and read about it. Still, option is there for next time.

You can download more books! If you are one of the one in five people who connects their DS to the network you can just download 10 extra fucking books for free. This is the greatest DLC of all time ever. Ten of the greatest books of all time for free. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.

If you are indecisive you can do a little quiz. 100 of any things is a lot of things to choose from. If you really want to read a book but find it hard to decide which literary classic you may wish to read you can do a little quiz (the owl will be there) and then the DS recommends some books you might like. The questions seem to be totally book unrelated but it is a nice addition. “Do you like being inside or outside?” is one question. There are loads more. This makes book selecting fun. In real life I just stare at the bookshelf for so long trying to decide what to read and then normally choose to read a comic. Not just any comic. Normally Marvel Zombies 2. I’ve read it like 40 times now! Goddamn I would like one of those owl quizzes in real life.

It tells you what you have read. When you read a book from start to finish a little symbol appears on the spine. This helps you keep track of which books you read.

It is great value for money. You couldn’t buy hard copies of all those books for anywhere near the price you pay for the DS cart. Sure, you could download them all from the internet for free but nobody likes PDFs. Plus you’d be hard pressed to find your own Summer Night BGM. Just get it. 110 books. It’ll be the most educational thing you have ever bough in your whole life.

I want more. I want more Harper Collins. Think about it. 100 Classic Sci-Fi books. 100 Classic Works of Philosophy Books. 100 Classic Popular Science Books. I would buy them all and take them all on holiday and they would still take up less space than those four huge books you pack in your luggage to only read the same four pages of on the plane.

Naughty Words. Sambo-gate is nothing; these books are old school and you’ll find no end of racial slurs in them. There’s a little disclaimer at the beginning about all the naughty words but if N’Gai Kroal bought 100 Classic Books and read them he’d have enough to write about for the rest of his career! Awesome stupid racist forefathers, boy could you write some books.

It isn’t available state side. Although Ubisoft is allegedly working on a 100 Classic Picture Books. It is still worth picking up

Summary. If you are in Oz or Europe just buy it. It is a great opportunity to read all those books you always wanted to but never got around to getting*. It is also 10,000% less effort and cost than buying an e-book reader and downloading all those books. It is also 140,000% smaller than most of those new e-book readers. Also, yobs are less likely to steal your DS if they see you reading 100 Classic Book Collection. Just get it. Get it get it. And if you are reading this Harper Collins, just release more of these please.

* And Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. Jesus Christ Man get to the fucking point. Okay I get it. The hills they are a-rolling. The river it is a-bending. The flowers they are a-photosynthesizing, just get to the point about the fact that she was already dead**

**Luddites won’t get this reference. Another excuse to buy 100 Classic Book collection.

As always happens when sharing something close to the heart with a friend, I was very nervous about how he would react. When I explained that at one time it was the best looking game on the market he said, “Yeah, this looks really good for 1991.” He probably doesn’t play games or look at calendars as frequently as I do. Had Shenmue come out a decade earlier it likely would have validated the many cults that worship Yu Suzuki’s as some sort of demigod, but even as a game from 2001 it still looks good today.

The character models are decent if a little blocky, the main characters faces look very good (though some minor characters look like they have congenital disorders), but it is the sheer amount of detail and complexity that keeps Shenmue visually impressive some eight years later. The textures may not be beautiful (apparently the PS2 couldn’t have handled them, take that Sony fans, Sega rules!) nor the storefronts, trees and benches composed of millions of polygons but the towns of Shenmue are intricately designed. You can see where at least some of those 70 million dollars went.

Unfortunately, the voice acting is terrible. It is wooden, stilted and likely poorly translated. I can only imagine the Japanese have terms for referring to “that day of the incident” that doesn’t require “that day of the incident” to be said repeatedly and to everyone. The voice actors themselves range from barely skilled to possibly some sort of talking dog.

The plot being delivered in such a laughable manner threatened to entirely undermine not only the greatness of Shenmue in my friend’s eyes, but also my taste in art as a whole (because I told him Shenmue is the pinnacle of human and potentially all alien civilization). There are three ways to cope with the voice acting. The first is to shut the game off and play something that doesn’t focus on “that day it rained.” The second approach is to laugh at the game, which I have certainly done a fair share of. This can, but will not always, lead to the third method of playing Shenmue, grow a thick skin to poorly delivered lines and get swept up in the drama despite it being presented so undramatically.

The music of Shenmue always functions as the direct inverse of the voice acting. The worse the actors sound, the better the music playing in the background is. The sweeping score combines with some pretty well done camera shots during cut scenes to almost negate the dialog entirely. I’ve always found the cut scene of Ryo dreaming of his father’s death to be particularly haunting, though the music is not included on the official soundtrack.

That I just spent so long describing the game without mentioning how it plays is somewhat telling. Shenmue’s strengths are mostly frivolous: there is a weather system that matches each day to the real weather patterns of Japan in 1986; there are obscene amounts of detail in every corner of your town; there are dozens of fully voiced people who go about their day according to a realistic schedule; and there are perfect ports of Yu Suzuki arcade games. But the actual gameplay of Shenmue mostly consists of fetch quests.

In the roughly 80 minutes we spent playing last night, there were zero fights and a single one button press QTE to keep a soccer ball from hitting Ryo (it was “A”). The rest of the time we spent talking to people on the street about the day of the incident, the day it rained, the day it thundered, the day it snowed, the black car, the men in suits, the old man’s injured back, the mud on Nazomi’s dress, the words Tom exchanged, a Chinese, the three blades, and finally sailors. All of our night’s efforts culminated in the pursuit of sailors.

Surprisingly, my friend didn’t mind the game. He wasn’t enamored by it but neither was I the first time I played. My theory on why it doesn’t cause players to instantly go deaf and void their bowels is that despite being nothing at all like successful games like Civilization, it uses a similar reward system that gives constant positive reinforcement to the player. We may have only been performing minor fetch quests but nearly each attempt ended in success and led us a little bit further. This sense of progression coupled with all of the things Shenmue does right is why so many seemingly normal people have been so immersed in Ryo’s world that they mail plastic capsules to Sega of Japan demanding another entry in the series.

The next time my friend comes by, in spite of everything wrong with Shenmue, I think he may just want to go looking for sailors.

But as I’ve written before – the Persona we received back when it was among the first in its genre for the Playstation wasn’t quite the same game they saw in Japan. Set in the sleepy US town of Lunarvale (which still managed to house a several-storied corporate office), the American students (who all wear school uniforms and are taught in a traditional Japanese concrete-block school) face an invasion of demons from an unknown source. Whereas much of the story itself is intact, some of the characters were… err… modified. Add this to the removal of the “bonus” branch of the story (which replaces the last 4/5 of the adventure with a few hefty dungeon crawls and a completely different plot), and Persona PSP seems like a remake with bonuses. Not only does it give us a new translation, it restores the original setting, adds a few FMVs, and gives us the Snow Queen Quest for the first time.

“That sounds good,” you might say, “but is the game actually fun?” The learning curve may get in the way here. While Persona does have a Beginner mode, the game is unintuitive at best. A single battle tutorial gives vague directions, but flipping open the manual reveals there are four broad classes of magic, with a total of around a dozen subtypes. Not only is that hard to keep track of, but there is also gun-type damage, area effects, formations which affect those areas, and the Contact system (which allows you to get more Personas). It’s not just a complicated game – it is, by a wide margin, the most complicated game I can think of.

Once you get to the point of understanding how things work, the game isn’t actually that hard on Normal difficulty. With a little bit of work, beating every boss in the normal story is fairly simple (hint: guns are your best friend for bosses). When I played through, I did have to spend some time grinding – the awful g-word – in the final dungeon. Given the game only runs about 25 hours, comparatively short to its epic-length sequels, this really isn’t too bad. The Snow Queen Quest is somewhat more difficult. You can’t save (except suspend save, of course) in the three towers that make up the bulk of the quest, so I would recommend waiting until you finish the main storyline.

Speaking of the storyline, it’s the same as the first US release except for translation improvements. The upgrade does make the latter half of Persona much easier to understand. While it’s not the largest scale story ever – you don’t get the impression you’re saving the world so much as saving your hometown – it is certainly an interesting one. It was unusual in several ways when we first saw it on the PSX; now, after Atlus has expanded much more on the base ideas of the game, it seems a little less impressive.

Persona was the first game for which Shoji Meguro composed a soundtrack. He did a bang-up job and he reworked most of the music this time around. Other remakes that have redone music (such as Wild Arms Alter Code: F) have come off as overdone, but this isn’t the case for Persona PSP. Some good tracks were cut, and others were reassigned, but the core feel of the game is still there and the new tracks are as good as the dropped ones.

Although it might not be as polished as more recent games, Persona PSP is still a good game in its own right. If you’re looking for a decent RPG for your PSP, and you either didn’t check Persona out the first time around or want to see what it could have been, this is the game for you.