Leveling Down

Battlefield Heroes simplifies the core Battlefield gameplay a bit but adds in a lot of character customization, unlocks, and MMORPG style leveling.

Besides the two DS games I’ve been playing lately that I wrote about this week, I’ve also spent my gaming time on the following:

Battlefield Heroes (PC) – I just got into the beta this week, so I’m still exploring it and will give some impressions on it soon. It’s pretty crazy since I’m coming from Battlefield 2 and Battlefield Bad Company experience, but so far it works. It’s cartoony and web based so it’s relatively simple, but you create a character and level up through playing so it has an MMORPG style feel. It’ll also be free to play, but EA will be making money on it through advertising and charging for in-game items. It could work, based on what I’ve played so far – but of course, I personally won’t be paying for anything.

Ace Combat 6 – In my initial impressions, I thought the game was ridiculously hard. It was only shortly afterwards I finally figured out how to get help from other fighters, making the game a lot easier. Combine that with the fact that the best fighter unlocks in the game when you beat it on hard, and now I’m smiling and singing that I can actually unlock all of the single player Achievements in the game. And here I was thinking I was going to have to give up on this game for being too hard…

Halo Wars – Hit the Lieutenant rank this week by playing a ton of multiplayer. I stopped playing 1v1 just because at higher levels the game seems to be more about rushing, and I wanted to play more “full” games. Thus, I spent most of my multiplayer this week playing 3v3 Random Team, and I won about 2/3 of the games. Instead of 10-15 minute games that I used to play 1v1, they’re now 30-40 minute big games where everyone expands and techs to their end game unit. Definitely a lot of fun and I realize now how powerful a scarab with 5 engineers is for the Covenant. Probably going to take a break from it for the time being, now that I’ve unlocked all of the Achievements I wanted to unlock for the game. Maybe I’ll give it a spin later once the rebalance patch comes out.

March 2009 US Software Sales
Rank | Platform | Title | Units Sold | Last Month | Lifetime to Date
01 360 Resident Evil 5 938,000 n/a 938,000
02 NDS Pokemon Platinum 805,000 n/a 805,000
03 360 Halo Wars 639,000 n/a 639,000
04 PS3 Resident Evil 5 585,000 n/a 585,000
05 Wii Wii Fit 541,000 644,000 6,487,900
06 PS3 MLB ’09: The Show 305,000 n/a 305,000
07 PS3 Killzone 2 296,000 323,000 619,000
08 Wii Wii Play 281,000 386,000 10,469,396
09 Wii Mario Kart 278,000 263,000 5,724,000
10 360 Major League Baseball 2K9 205,000 n/a 205,000

March 2009 US Hardware Sales
Rank | Platform | Units Sold | Last Month | Lifetime to Date
01 Nintendo Wii 601,000 753,000 19,685,900
02 Nintendo DS 563,000 588,000 29,201,900
03 Xbox 360 330,000 391,000 14,886,400
04 Playstation 3 218,000 276,000 7,488,100
05 Playstation Portable 168,000 199,000 14,878900
06 Playstation 2 112,000 131,000 46,000,000+

Great to see that finally there’s a month where the top game sales are not Wii titles. To no one’s surprise, the 360 version of Resident Evil 5 sits atop the charts, at almost a million sold in US alone for the 360 version. Add the PS3 version to that and in its first month of launch it’s already sold over 1.5 million. Pokemon Platinum claims second, which makes me wonder if there really are more Resident Evil fans out there than Pokemon fans. I would have thought the opposite to be true! Halo Wars also had an astounding sales month for a RTS title on the 360, but maybe not so good for a Halo title. I guess it evens out. Killzone 2 also had a respectable month, selling almost the same number of copies it sold last month. Perhaps it has staying power for PS3 owners after all. The rest of the top ten are comprised of 09 releases of MLB games on the 360 and PS3 as well as the usual Wii top titles for sale.

What’s very interesting is that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the DS was also released in March, but did not even crack the top 10 game sales last month. With a DS install base of over 29 million in the United States, it comes as a huge surprise to me that of those 29 million, not even 205,000 copies were sold. The console versions sell millions, but the DS sold practically nothing! Well, to be fair, the DS also had a huge flood of releases last month, so they probably ended up cannibalizing each other a bit.

NPD Sales Results for March 2009 [NeoGAF]