A US-led campaign is currently blazing trails in an effort to get a number of core first-party games western releases...

An online-born campaign is currently gaining quite a bit of traction in an attempt to promote the plight of western gamers frustrated at the lack of releases from some of Nintendo's own Wii titles. Dubbed 'Operation Rainfall', the group has set up a blog, Twitter account and Facebook page.

The group's official main goal is to lobby Nintendo for the localisation of first-party games outside of Japan, but three Wii games are taking the current focus: Xenoblade, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower. Xenoblade has already been confirmed to be getting a European run, but no North American release has ever been confirmed - particularly odd seeing as it is getting a full English voice translation for its UK release this September.

Actions Operation Rainfall have currently taken include a mass letter-writing campaign to Nintendo of America's corporate offices, as well as encouraging emails and phone calls. Rather charmingly, fans have also 'spammed' Nintendo's official Facebook page with messages pleading for the release of the three Wii titles that are already on Japanese shelves.

But perhaps the biggest achievement of fans has been on Amazon. Xenoblade is still available to officially pre-order under its original listing of 'Monado: Beginning of the World' - a name which cropped up for the game back at E3 2009. North American gamers have rallied to create a mass pre-order campaign and, astonishingly, the game has shot up to number one spot in the video game chart. At the time of writing, orders for the game on Amazon have increased 156,000% over the past day.

Whether this will stir Nintendo of America into any substantial comment on any of games in question remains to be seen, but the movement has swiftly gained coverage on sites such as IGN, Eurogamer and Kotaku. If you want to learn more about what you can do to get involved, head over to Operation Rainfall's site.