The Mother-ship has landed. Mother 3 abducts the top spot for the week ending April 23rd.

Courtesy of Media-Create, we have the most recent sales figures from Japan.

While DS Lite continued to basically sell out of its weekly stock, notice the plummeting sales figure for the trusty "old-style" DS. Likely due to fading production as the Lite well and truly assumes the handheld spotlight, perhaps the old model will become something of a collector's item. A total cease in its production was and is inevitable.

Moving on to Nintendo's "second pillar", the GBA saw a nice boost in sales - a direct result of Mother 3 mania. In fact, notice that the Micro actually outsold the SP for the first time since its third week of availability: it has the swanky limited edition Mother 3 bundle to thank. And Wowz, look at those 360 numbers. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's (the trendy director behind Rez, now head of Q Entertainment) Ninety-Nine Nights probably had a lot to do with that. OK, enough teasing.

The week's console numbers follow:

In software, the week belonged to the long-anticipated RPG Mother 3, a sequel roughly twelve years in the making. A popular series in Japan (where it frequently adorned "Most Wanted" lists) revered for its hilarious and imaginative premises and writing, the Mother games have been relegated more to cult status in the West (which is perhaps why we failed to see release of 2003's Mother 1 + 2 collection for the GBA.) Needless to say, the huge spike in GBA hardware sales has this little game and its starved fans to thank.

DS software sales saw a noticeable drop from previous weeks - are the sales of the staple DS hits finally beginning to slow down? Afterall, hardware sales remained extremely robust. Of course, all this discussion is in the shadow of the fact that half the top 10 remained occupied by DS titles.

The weekly software numbers follow:

With humble apologies, the belated sales charts from the last week ending April 16th (with hardware following software). The DS saw a new platformer in Legend of Stafi 4, a very solid series that has unfortuneately yet to see localization: