Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Some of our readers wonder exactly what they're supposed to do with the Japanese hardware sales every week. To promote enlightenment and worldwide harmony, we've taken the liberty of creating a step-by-step walkthrough of a proper response to the weekly figures. Adhere to these rules whenever possible, and if you must deviate, remember to at least properly remove all semblance of standard English grammar from your comments.

1. Look for any obvious outliers in the sales data, such as the Nintendo DS falling out of first place. This will never occur; advance to step 2.

2. Statistical variation causes slight fluctuations every week. Immediately look for numbers that come close to dividing evenly into one another; this enables comments such as, "lol, wii sold 5x of PS3s this week, pwnage."

3. Should any Nintendo systems suffer a decrease in sales, come up with reasons as to why they dropped. The usually accurate "supply is unable to currently meet demand" excuse is no longer sufficient in most cases. Come up with creative replies like, "redirected shipments of software caused a temporary instability in the retail market," or "lol ghost of kutaragi put a curse on teh DS kekekekeke."

4. There will invariably be a Sony or Microsoft troll, defending his or her own system while attacking your own. Henceforth, we'll be posting IP addresses and relevant contact information*; please take it upon yourselves to attack and/or maim the aforementioned troll, preferably with some kind of mace that grants +7 strength while fighting trolls.

*Really.**

- DS Lite: 127,461 16,248 (14.61%)
- Wii: 58,644 6,451 (12.36%)
- PSP: 26,097 1,408 (5.12%)
- PS2: 11,311 430 (3.95%)
- PS3: 9,627 968 (11.18%)
- Xbox 360: 2,044 18 (0.89%)
- Game Boy Micro: 407 21 (4.91%)
- GBA SP: 288 42 (12.73%)
- Gamecube: 256 20 (7.25%)
- DS Phat: 81 55 (211.54%)
- GBA: 17 16 (48.48%)

[Source: Media Create]

**Not really.

Update 2: Congratulations to Kurifurisan, Mr. Scolex, Oro, and Jennifer for successfully completing the ARG! The clues are explained below.

Clue 1: As you can see below, the word Wii and the numbers 10 and 29 are highlighted in bold. This obviously refers to the Wii Fanboy blog in particular, on the date October 29th. Only one article was published on this date: Toys R' Us nonsense.

Clue 2: In this post, we can immediately see that the post picture has been altered. It features four DS games: Spyro: A New Beginning, Contact, and Nintendogs (presumably the newer Dalmatian Edition). These games were all released on the same week, and thus, should have led you to the DS Fanboy post DS Releases for the Week of October 16th.

Clue 3: This post had an extra final line added: "4 leaves take 5 4 good, 6 feet under. A shame, really." Silly numbers games aside, the death and departure of four leaves refers to the untimely dissolution of Clover Studios, makers of such fine games as Viewtiful Joe and Okami. This should have referred you to the final destination post, Clover Studios Goes Six Feet Under on Nintendo Wii Fanboy. If you found the cross-linked post on DS Fanboy, there was a message saying you had the wrong blog.

We hope you enjoyed the game, and if you failed to complete it, you'll have some chances next year to prove your mettle. If you gain any, that is. Hah!

For the uninformed, ARG stands for "Alternate Reality Gaming". That's really just a silly hype-word, we think, but here we go. Your task: follow the sequence of clues to various past posts in both Nintendo Wii Fanboy and DS Fanboy. Should you manage to defeat our ingenious riddles, post a comment on the final post to declare your victory to the world. Heck, we'll even go back and give you a star for doing it, too ... the feature is temporarily out of service, but our tech guys should have it back up and running soon.

Below are the sales figures for this week, and contained therein, the first clue.

- DS Lite: 319,708 10,078 (3.25%)
- Wii: 108,237 22,798 (26.68%)
- PS3: 70,942 20,771 (41.40%)
- PSP: 48,962 20,032 (69.24%)
- PS2: 37,730 7,270 (23.87%)
- Xbox 360: 17,168 18,175 (51.42%)
- GBA SP: 1,867 29 (1.53%)
- Game Boy Micro: 1,491 64 (4.12%)
- Gamecube: 1,152 583 (102.46%)
- DS Phat: 158 9 (5.39%)
- GBA: 42 25 (147.06%)
- Xbox: 3 3 (50.00%)

[Source: Media Create]

Have you been a long-time poster at Joystiq or one of its awesome network-affiliated sites, only to see others have stars placed next to their name (or negatives) and wonder what exactly dictates that rewarding or stripping of star(s)?  Well, Joystiq's Vlad Cole has broken down the star system to show you exactly how it works. These guidelines apply to all the Joystiq network sites:

• Value: Does the comment enhance the topic at hand and add new perspective to the discussion? Is it a good question or interesting insight?
  
• Impartiality: This is hard, especially for Fanboy sites such as this, but as much as we loudly proclaim this system to be the superior, it detracts from the discussion at hand. It's OK to be touched with Fanboyitis, however try to curb it as best as you can as to not damage the topic at hand whilst commenting.
  
• Civility: This is just common sense. We all have opinions and want to share them, however as human beings we have the ability to exercise civility, even during the most heated debate.
• Other: Humor, wit, and bribes of cold, fresh chocolate milk. We like chocolate milk.

As such, these are the guidelines followed when hiring Bloggers for the network (you have no idea how much chocolate milk it took for me to get the job), so keep that in mind should you one day wish to kill me and take my place. Vlad is answering as many questions as he can over at Joystiq, but if you post any questions here, we'll try as best we can to answer.