Girl Power drives the DS to the top of the software charts in the week ending November 26th.

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

Young girls flexed their buying power as Sega's new DS title Love & Berry DS weighed in heavily on the charts. The game is based on an extremely popular arcade game geared towards young girls that effectively utilizes the collectible trading card premise successfully used by Mushiking, another Sega hit. Instead of battling insects however, the game is all about fashion and clothes. For this DS game, Sega went all out by including a special card-reader attachment that scans the same cards used by the arcade game and even offering limited edition Love & Berry Noble Pink DS Lites. You can expect that this game will continue to be a hot seller and serve as a model for the next DS Mushiking game. So, girls like garments and boys like bugs - who said Sega's genius is dead?

The rest of the Top 10 was largely styled by other DS titles, including new release Jump Ultimate Stars. The game, a sequel to the hit Jump Super Stars released last year, is a fighter that utlilizes characters out of the vast pantheon of Jump-published manga series. As with the first, there is little chance of seeing the game outside of Japan due to licensing difficulties. Of final note, leave it to the girls of Dead or Alive to finally get the XBOX 360 some action on the charts. The 360 does have potential blockbuster Blue Dragon (an RPG by former Square-Enix stalwarts with character design by Dragonball's Akira Toriyama) releasing very soon as well...and the game may be the system's last chance to make any meaningful inroads on the Japanese market.

In hardware sales as well it was "so far, so good" for Nintendo. The PS3 has thus far failed to make a huge splash in the market, for what could amount to a variety of reasons. Regardless, its not Nintendo's problem as the DS Lite rode high for yet another month. This dominance will likely end next week however, for the first time in a long time. Big Brother Wii is now in the hands of Japanese gamers, and early reports are indicating a total sell-out of the roughly 400K units that were available on launch day. Stay tuned.

The weekly software numbers follow:

The week's console numbers follow: