Update: Added in the North American boxart as well.

Kid Icarus: Uprising will make use of the Circle Pad Pro. Designer Masahiro Sakurai confirmed the news to ONM.

Players control the game by using the Circle Pad to move Pit when he’s on land while the touch screen is used to move the camera. The Circle Pad Pro will allow gamers to handle touch screen usage with their left hand and move Pit with their right hand. This will certainly be very beneficial for left-handed users.

Sakurai explained:

“The way we are using the Circle Pad Pro in the game is to provide support for left-handed gamers. We’ve made it possible to use the right Circle Pad in place of the left one.”

The Circle Pad Pro won’t be implemented in any other way. In other words, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to use the extra analog nub to control the camera – that’ll always be done on the touch screen.

“I didn’t know the specs of the Circle Pad Pro, or what it looked like, until Monster Hunter 3G was announced, so we weren’t able to do anything big with it in the time we had. Even if we had known about it from the start, I don’t know whether we would have used both Circle Pads in that way. This would end up being just the same as controls on other platforms and I think the quick aiming possible with the touch panel suits the game best.”

Source

10th January 2011: Nintendo’s Wii Balance Board™ has been awarded a prestigious, new Guinness World Record™ for “The best-selling personal weighing device”.

In order to break the record, a total of 32,114,428* Wii Balance Boards were sold worldwide between launch and November 2010. This figure comprises 22,663,321 bundled with the original Wii Fit™ software and 9,451,107 bundled with Wii Fit™ Plus software. Since breaking the record, Nintendo has now sold over 22.67** million copies of Wii Fit and more than 19.31** million copies of Wii Fit Plus worldwide.

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Surely some of you remember Duludubi Star. For those of you who may have forgotten, it’s a PC title that garnered a great deal of attention for its resemblance to Super Mario Galaxy.

There’s another Chinese-made gaming ripoff in development, and I have a feeling that it will soon be as notorious as Duludubi Star.

This “new” game – unfortunately I don’t have title to give you folks – is for the App Store. It mimics just about everything from Mario Kart Wii: tracks, power-ups, and objects including item boxes. Heck, even the graphics are comparable.

This is by far the craziest Nintendo-related ripoff I’ve seen since Duludubi Star. I’d say that it’s even worse than Super Jump Bros!

You can find a few screenshots of the App Store game above. If that’s not enough to convince you that it’s a very blatant ripoff, perhaps this trailer will convince you.

Source 1, Source 2, Source 3

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy’s demo will be available on Wednesday through the Japanese store. Strangely, it can only be accessed three times. Once this play limit has been reached, the demo will basically become dead weight on the home menu as it can never be used again. That’s pretty darn strict!

Namco Bandai will also bring the same demo to Japanese retailers.

The company hasn’t said if the demo will also arrive on the North American and European eShops.

Source

The information below comes from Enterbrain/Famitsu data taken between November 28 and December 25…

01. [3DS] Mario Kart 7 – 1,072,391 / NEW
02. [3DS] Monster Hunter Tri G – 809,322 / NEW
03. [PS3] Final Fantasy XIII-2 – 697,146 / NEW
04. [3DS] Super Mario 3D Land – 499,669 / 1,042,511
05. [PS3] Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs. – 432,391 / NEW
06. [Wii] Kirby’s Return to Dream Land – 250,497 / 498,428
07. [3DS] Inazuma Eleven GO – 232,052 / NEW
08. [PS3] Musou Orochi 2 – 210,553 / NEW
09. [Wii] Just Dance – 201,996 / 427,874
10. [Wii] Wii Party – 156,780 / 2,123,773

The latest Nintendo Power is known as the “January/February” issue. We’ve never seen the magazine “merge” two months into one before. What happened there?

Editor in chief Chris Slate explained that a “scheduling quirk” led to the latest issue being called the “January/February” edition:

“On a side note, this issue is labeled ‘January/February’ due to a scheduling quirk, but things will go back to normal with the March issue, which will be followed by April, May, June, etc. Subscribers will still get the same number of copies they signed up for, so just ignore the slight strangeness of the ‘January/February phrasing, and everything will seem perfectly normal.”

Wedbush and the EEDAR have provided predictions for the December 2011 NPD report. The actual data will be made available on Thursday.

Wedbush / EEDAR November sales estimates (change year-on-year):

360 – 2,350,000 (27%) / 2,400,000 (29%)
PS3 – 1,700,000 (41%) / 1,350,000 (12%)
3DS – 1,625,000 (n/a) / 1,650,000 (n/a)
Wii – 1,100,000 (-53%) / 1,700,000 (-28%)
DS – 275,000 (-89%) / 650,000 (-74%)
PSP – 325,000 (-24%) / 375,000 (-12%)
PS2 – 30,000 (-60%) / n/a
Total – 7,405,000 (-12%) / 8,125,000 (-4%)