The week ending the 26th of March marked the release of Pokemon Ranger and saw the DS Lite continue to light up the charts.

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

DS Lite continued to steamroll the sales charts - it is most likely that Nintendo will easily sell through the entire 550k units earmarked for March. Release plans for the lighter and brighter DS remain dim for the rest of the world. Though we can certainly thank insatiable Japanese interest for this development, nevertheless a timetable surrounding E3 remains a (hopefully) safe assumption. Meahwhile, PS2 sales (on fire the previous week thanks to Square's latest opus) cooled off and were again leapfrogged by the OG (original) DS; sales, while secondary to the Lite, have remained impressively substantial.

The week's console numbers:

Software sales were again led by Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 12 which surpassed 2 million copies sold in its second week. On the Nintendo (which these days generally means DS) side, the dual screens were treated to Pokemon Ranger: Road to Diamond and Pearl. The game, a more action-oriented offshoot of the perpetually popular series, handily sold over 190k copies. Nevertheless, it likely does little to assuage the demand of fans waiting painfully for the next full-blown RPG sequel.

Note that, in step with hardware availability, the popular DS titles (including Animal Crossing and the Training series) all saw their sales go up for yet another week. The staying power of these games is truly tremendous. At this point it is doubtful anyone knows when the demand for these titles will seriously begin to fade.

The weekly software numbers: