The official numbers for May have been released by the NPD Group, and for the third straight month, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter’s forecasts have missed the mark.
But that’s very good news for Sony in their battle with Microsoft for second place in the next-gen race.
Pachter had predicted XBox to outsell PlayStation 3 for the month of May in North America, but Sony wound up selling 208,700 units while 186,600 XBox 360 consoles were sold during the same period of time.
Nintendo won for May altogether with 671,000 units sold.
While Playstation 3 was number two this month, it was expected that GTA IV would translate into big hardware sales. It didn’t.
“The continued success of GTA IV is not translating into big hardware sales for either the PS3 or the 360 but there may yet to be a lift in June due to gift-giving for Father’s Day and graduations,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.
Sure, Microsoft has slashed the price of Xbox 360 in order to try to get an edge against PS3. And yes, Nintendo’s DS still outsells Sony’s PSP.
But that doesn’t mean that Sony isn’t having an incredible fiscal year nonetheless.
Head honcho Jack Tretton recently revealed how the company is ahead of the game with PlayStation 3 and PSP.
“We are tracking at 100 percent up over last year,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “…About 30 percent ahead of where we should be. So sales could slow down and we will still hit our number.”
In fact, if the trend continues, there may be some heartbreak when the holidays roll around.
“I’d say we are able to meet somewhere between 80-90 percent demand, based on how things are trending,” said Tretton. But even if supply does get limited, he said that the shorages would not be “drastic”.
For those who are fans of horror-survival and FPS’s, Dead Space does not and will not disappoint!
The player assumes the role of Isaac Clarke, and engineer sent to the disabled space craft USG Ishimura, to discover why there is a distress call.
The enemies in Dead Space tend to be quite unlike those from just about any other game. The organic alien forms that you meet are grotesque parodies of the human form and range from the extremely quick and mobile all the way through to the completely immobile spawners, who may well cause you more problems than you’d think. Each weapon seems to be suited a particular enemy, but some are far rarer in terms of ammo than others.
The setting is dark, the enemies can pop out of literally anywhere and when the warning lights activate and you’re sealed in for a quarantine session I guarantee your hair will be standing on end. The USG Ishimura is a strange and unsettling place, all the more so for the many system failures it seems to suffer on your way out of the near-derelict ship.
The graphics are above first-rate, and the game play is both engrossing and somewhat complex…yet easy to master. There are a few spots in the game where (unlike others of this genre), the void of space produces pure silence…which adds an especially creepy element to the already superb sound contained within this game.
Dead Space is certainly a game to play, and to keep an eye on for a possible franchise.
