Nintendo's Tomodachi Connection features Miis in a big way

Nintendo’s Tomodachi Connection (a kind of cross between Nintendogs and The Sims) is comfortably number one in Japan this week, selling three times as many copies as its nearest rival, with over 100,000 units shifted. Not bad for a brand new IP.

Given the long tail of Nintendo’s more mainstream-friendly output, I’d expect it to hang around the top ten for quite a while longer. Let’s hope it continues to sell, as it would certainly make a western release more likely - like labelmate Style Savvy, it’ll require a big localisation effort, but I wouldn’t bet against this arriving in the west at some point in 2010.

Elsewhere, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days creeps towards half a million sales, while Level 5 continues to have success with its increasing range of puzzle games - though Sloane and McHale is no Layton, it looks like it could well have legs. Meanwhile, Miles Edgeworth hangs on in there, making it a good week for Capcom, with two further entries in the top ten on PSP, including the imperious Monster Hunter Portable 2 G. Sad to see Platinum Games’ Infinite Space plummet from top spot to number 18 - hopefully this won’t deter Sega from bringing it to the west, even though there’s no sniff of a launch date over here.

The full top ten follows…

01./00. [NDS] Tomodachi Collection (Friend Collection) (Nintendo) - 102,000 / NEW
02./00. [PSP] Fate/Unlimited Codes Portable (Capcom) - 34,000 / NEW
03./02. [NDS] Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days (Square Enix) - 27,000 / 457,000
04./03. [NDS] Sloane and MacHale’s Mysterious Story (Level 5) - 15,000 / 144,000
05./06. [PSP] Monster Hunter Portable 2 G (BEST) (Capcom) - 14,000 / 749,000
06./04. [NDS] Gyakuten Kenji (Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth) (Capcom) - 11,000 / 244,000
07./00. [NDS] Akira Tago’s Mind Exercises (Atama no Taisou) Vol. 1: Puzzle Solving Journey Around the World (Level 5) - 10,000 / NEW
08./08. [WII] Wii Fit (Nintendo) - 10,000 / 3,463,000
09./05. [PS3] Shin Sangoku Musou 5 Empires (Koei) - 9,000 / 125,000
10./18. [NDS] Pokemon Platinum (Pokemon Co.) - 7,000 / 2,447,000

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As anyone who’s ever played a Harvest Moon game will know, having a surfeit of vegetables is rarely an issue - certainly to begin with. Yet that’s precisely the problem in Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming, a puzzle-based twist on the green-fingered series we all know and love. (And sometimes hate.)

It’s set in the world of the most recent DS release - the excellent Island of Happiness - and most of the game’s key characters are present, as they attempt to gather matching vegetables from the ever-growing crop (sounds like GM gone mad to me). It looks to be something of a tile-matcher with a few tweaks to the standard three-in-a-row formula - which Natsume’s press release unfortunately fails to detail.

Players can pick one of twelve characters, with the game’s story mode changing according to who you choose. There are Mission, Score Attack and Free Play modes, multiplayer options, and bags of unlockables including some adorable/chundersome character art, depending on which side of the cute/puke fence you sit.

It’s out in the US this May.

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Right, then. I finally got round to uploading some videos of my Wii Music compositions. Above is version one of John Lennon’s ‘Woman’ which I recorded a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I did another, very different take -with one instrument remaining the same - just to compare and contrast, and to show how you can change the feel of a song by the way it’s performed. See below.

To some people this is still going to seem like a load of old rubbish, but hopefully one or two of you will be inspired to pick up Wii Music after seeing just what you can do when you put your mind to it. Not for nothing is it in my top five games of the year…

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