With a month like Nintendo had in April, there’s really no need to provide any sort of spin whatsoever. Just look at the numbers: dominating performances by both of their systems, six of the ten best selling games were on Nintendo platforms, five of which were published by Nintendo. All they really need to do is regurgitate what the NPD released and bam — point made.

“Wii sales were buoyed in part by the strong launch of Mario Kart Wii, which sold more than 1.1 million units,” said Nintendo VP Cammie Dunaway. “Our belief in appealing to a broad, diverse audience of players continues to resonate with consumers, and we look forward to continuing our outreach to an expanded audience with the launch of Wii Fit next week.”

They even provided a handy bullet point list to describe how they beat down Sony and Microsoft:

• Mario Kart Wii finished as the No. 2 game of the month.
• Six of the top 10 games of the month are for Nintendo systems: Mario Kart Wii (No. 2), Wii Play (No. 4), Super Smash Bros. Brawl (No. 5), Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (No. 7), Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (No. 8 ) and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (No. 9).
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl crossed the 3 million sales mark in the United States.
• Wii and Nintendo DS again finished as the two top-selling hardware systems.

As it turns out, GameStop’s claim that 64% of all copies of GTA IV sold were on Xbox 360 was spot on — 64.9% is the exact number if you do the math with NPD’s numbers for the month of April. Between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game, GTA IV managed to sell 2.85 million even though it was released on April 29 — not too shabby.

Mario Kart Wii, meanwhile, sold more than a million copies. That’s a million plastic wheels out there in the wild, imparing people’s ability to control the game properly. And of course, with the number of Wii systems that sold in April, you know you’re going to see a lot of Wii Play sales, and that we did. Smash Bros. had a big drop off, from 2.7 million in March down to 326k in April. Not that Nintendo should be complaining, with five of their games in the top ten, with six of the top ten on Nintendo platforms.

April 2008 Software Sales

GTA IV (360) – 1.85M
Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel (Wii) – 1.12M
GTA IV (PS3) – 1.00M
Wii Play (Wii) – 360,000
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) – 326,000
Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3) – 224,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) – 202,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) – 202,000
Guitar Hero III (Wii) – 152,000
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) – 141,000

Call of Duty 4 on 360 continues to do its best Mustafa impression, as it just refuses to be kicked out of the top ten. Could next month finally see it kicked out? I’m going to go ahead and predict a bold “no.”

In more Nintendo financial news, the DS has now sold 70.6 million units worldwide and 30.31 million DS units were sold in the 12 months leading up to March 31. That is a lot of DS units in gamers hands. The biggest selling games for the Nintendo DS were Brain Age 1 and 2, Mario Party DS, New Super Mario Bros., Nintendogs, and Phantom Hourglass.

With more and more DS games being announced on what seems like a weekly basis (I am exaggerating of course) million dollar sellers could become the norm for Nintendo.

Thanks: Videogaming247

Prepare to be blown away by one of the coolest NES mods ever: what you see above is an NES cart that is an actual NES system. The innards of that poor copy of Super Mario Bros. have been stripped out and replaced with an NES on a Chip, which is a circuit that (tries) to duplicate the NES. As such, you’re not looking at everything from the inside of an NES, but it does have an NES cartridge slot, power and reset buttons, composite outputs, and two controller inputs.

Sure, it’s not perfect due to running on that NOAC, but it’s still pretty incredible to think that someone actually saw this project through. Is there nothing modders can’t do?

via technabob

It seems like almost everywhere there’s someone with way way too much time on their hands finding some new and interesting way to recreate the theme from Super Mario Bros. This guy headed to a parking structure to set up a whole lot of wine bottles in row, filled and spaced perfectly, so that he could drive an RC car by them to recreate the famous tune. I don’t know how he came up with the idea, but I have a feeling that it’s closely tied to the reason all those wine bottles were emptied. The best part though is probably the confused look on the guard’s face at the end.

Via Break

If you have played video games for most of your life, then you have heard of a few urban legends surrounding certain games. Just like urban legends in our everyday lives surrounding warts, the full moon, and boy scout leaders, these rumors tend to start taking on a life of their own. I came across a nice little post today concerning these urban legends of the gaming world, and while it is not a comprehensive list, it is a decent one nonetheless and basically mentions the ones that most people heard about, and steers clear of the obscure ones. While I can’t actually say that I have heard of a couple of them, I have heard the one about Lara Croft being naked in the water, and being able to jump over the flag pole in Super Mario Bros.

While there are many perverts out there who have modded Lara’s games on the PC so that she will indeed be naked, a mod is not an urban legend. It is just a mod created by a guy who has never seen a “set” in real life and could be using his talents on much more benign undertakings. The legend of her getting in the water and being able to see her naked through the liquid is indeed just that – a legend -and was thusly born from the womb of the console version, not the PC version.

Now, as far as the jumping over the flag pole in Super Mario Bros is concerned, I have never done it, I have never seen it being done, and if it has been, it is just a game glitch I am sure. People can argue until the day is long over this one, and I refuse to get involved in a “mine is bigger than yours” contest, so flame each other all you want on this one, just leave me out of it.

To check out the other urban legends mentioned, just click through the link below.

Thanks Juan!

Nintendo has announced that the May 13 launch of the Wii Want More service for the Wii Shop will give players the opportunity to grab new downloadable content for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Four new characters and two new stages will be available for free for one month after the Wii Want More launch. If for some reason you don’t take advantage of this sweet deal, you’ll still be able to grab the goods for 10 USD.

There will be DLC available for 27 games total at launch including The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and Mario Kart. The new service is also offering third party developers the opportunity to offer DLC. All of you Rock Band fans out there that were disappointed by the announcement that there are no plans for DLC for the Wii version should make it your business to tell Harmonix how you feel about it.

UPDATE: The sharp eyes of a couple of our readers have spotted something that indicates this is a hoax generated for April Fools Day. I surely hoped it wasn’t, because not only would it be great to have DLC for these titles, but I believe that Nintendo needs to go this direction to compete with XBL and PSN.

via Nintendo Pressroom?

[Note: This article was originally posted on my personal blog. Due to the popularity of it, I decided to share my story with the readers of Gaming Today. Enjoy!]

It was a pretty weird day here in Northern Jersey. There was tons of wind, but it wasn’t as cold as it normally is, at least during the day. But of course, the sun set and the wind remained, leaving it cold. Really cold.

I preordered Super Smash Bros. Brawl months in advance. Probably almost half a year or so. Saying I was excited about the upcoming release would be an immense understatement. Super Smash Bros. was a game I have always loved playing simply for the fact that you have no idea how the rounds are going to go in the game. One minute you could be beating the snot out of your opponent, and the next, he’s got a bomb or a hammer. Once either of those hits you, you’re pretty much done for.

I arrived at the local GameStop around 9:10 PM since they informed the people in the tournament that the latest we could be there was 9:30. I of course decided that I really had nothing else to do that night, so I might as well throw my hat into the tournament. The way I saw it, I was playing Smash Bros. earlier than the people online. I’d be getting a tiny crumb of that sweet sweet Smash Bros. goodness.

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Have you ever wondered how Super Mario Brothers would look from Mario’s perspective? The above image tries to depict exactly that. I’m thinking someone needs to send this image to Nintendo and encourage them to remake the old NES classic. I highly doubt that would ever happen, but it would certainly be one of the biggest game releases ever if they did try it. Even with modern technology, who knows if they can ever achieve the greatness of SMB or SMB 3 on the Nintendo NES.

Image Source

These days, when you think of LEGO and video games, you probably think of the hugely popular LEGO video game series (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, etc.). But, what if someone LEGO-ized the grand daddy of all video games.

Super LEGO Mario recreates each level from the original Super Mario Bros. to a pretty accurate degree. The only complaint I have is there’s no sound when Mario jumps on a Goomba or Turtle, but that’s really nitpicking since the video is pretty amazing when you factor in how much work probably went into it. This video has awesomesauce drizzled all over it.

Level 1-2 comes after the break.

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