Land of the Rising Thumb

You can't fault Nintendo's determination to exploit undiscovered territories with its new handheld games. You can however try to fault Nintendo for turning its back on more traditional genres – but I'm going to provide the argument against that. So there!

Anyway, the upshot of the Big N's multi-faceted stance is a Japanese sales chart peppered with the likes of Wagamama Fashion Girls Mode and Personal Trainer: Walking.

In Wagamama's case, the target audience is obvious: this is a fashion game for fashion-anxious teenaged girls. Fair enough though, because here it's selling like whatever this season's in-thing is. (Sorry, I really have no idea what that might be – elbow gloves?)

The game even has its own official magazine in Japan, exposing all of the items and secrets a girl might find in Wagamama Fashion as well as offering tips on how to look good.

Aside from dressing characters in the latest styles and organising virtual fashion shows, Girls Mode also gives its players the chance to run their own virtual boutiques powered by wi-fi shopping and trading between real people. In short, it has all the ingredients of a new social gaming phenomenon but without any aspect that would even remotely appeal to traditional Nintendo fans. Boo-hoo, indeed.

Personal Trainer: Walking, meanwhile, sees Nintendo merging features of Wii Fit and its various Training games to encourage DS owners to walk more and live healthier lifestyles (and you can't provoke gamers' ire in any more direct way than that).

Nintendo does this by bundling a couple of pedometers with each copy of the game. Carry one of these gizmos around with you throughout the day, then sync it up with the DS in the evening and Personal Trainer: Walking will analyse how active you've been – when and how quickly you've been walking during the day.

One of the most clever features of this software is that it can be linked with as many as four of these pedometer peripherals (extras are sold separately, ¥1,800, or £12.50, per pedometer), so in theory your whole family can use one DS and a single copy of the game to gauge and compare lifestyles. Some people apparently find all of this fascinating, as Personal Trainer: Walking has been sitting snugly (which surely goes against its remit) inside the Japanese gaming Top 10 since the beginning of November. Another defeat for the long-time Nintendo loyalists, then?

Well, hang on: Look at the top of the Japanese charts and you'll find… Kirby. Yep, good old Kirby is back and as popular as always in this part of the world. His latest game is an update of a SNES classic called Kirby Super Star, suffixed with the intrinsically Nintendo-related word 'Ultra'. It's a platformer. A cleverly reworked 2D platformer, but a platformer nonetheless. Pokémon Platinum also continues to do well, while Rhythm Tengoku Gold has now sold more than a million copies. All of these are games for gamers, so I say: Nintendo hasn't disowned its fans, it's just been actively seeking out new players as well. Forgive and move on.

Over in Sonyland, PSP sales remain as strong as they've been for the past year-and-a-bit, shifting an average of more than 40,000 handhelds every week. This is despite of a lack of big new games released during the past month. The last major new PSP title was Macross: Ace Frontier, which debuted at the top of Japan's sales charts at the beginning of October. The next killer PSP game is another Namco Bandai production in the shape of Gundam Vs Gundam (pictured), a port of the excellent Mobile Suit battling coin-op of the same (baffling) name.

And next month, Square Enix will release Dissidia: Final Fantasy to further boost the PSP's chances of ending 2008 on a high. The DSi is in control of Japan, but Sony's format is an extremely popular alternative to Nintendo's machine. In spite of Japan tripping into recession, the country still has a healthy, competitive portable games market.