UK Charts: EyeToy makes it five weeks at No.1
Manic arm-waving officially more fun than smashing demons through buildings.
Sony's EyeToy: Play has racked up another week at number one in the UK sales rankings, while key new releases including Chaos Legion, Pirates of the Caribbean and Otogi performed disappointingly.
This is EyeToy's fourth consecutive week at number one (it was knocked off the top spot for a few weeks back at the end of July by the arrival of Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire), and the quirky title looks likely to continue selling strongly right through to Christmas - boosted by the arrival of a second pack of games for the webcam peripheral, and a forthcoming new bundle deal.
The highest new entry this week is the standalone expansion (no, that statement doesn't make much sense to us either, but you know what we mean) for Ghost Recon on the Xbox, Ghost Recon: Island Thunder, which pops in at a respectable number seven.
However, other new titles don't fare so well - and while a debut at number 30 for EA's Battlefield 1942 expansion pack, Secret Weapons of World War II, isn't too bad at all, it's rather less impressive that Ubi Soft's movie tie-in Pirates of the Caribbean manages only a number 34 ranking.
Worse yet is Capcom's relatively heavily promoted Chaos Legion, which pops up at number 35... And then there's From Software's Otogi on Xbox, published here by Sega, which manages a sixth place ranking in the Xbox chart and doesn't even make it into the top 40 All-Formats chart. Ouch.
Pivotal Games' The Great Escape meanwhile rises six places to this weeks' number two, displacing FIFA 2003 which drops to number three. Publisher SCi will undoubtedly be happy with this showing, even if it does come off the back of some early retail discounting of the title - developers Pivotal might not appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that their game is threatening the top of the charts in the same week that the demise of the studio (brought down by Kaboom Group's receivership) is being widely rumoured within the industry.
The other item of note in the charts is Atari's Beyblade: Let It Rip!, which continues to prove that there's a market for PSone games if you have the right property by hanging in at number four for a second week - well ahead of any of this week's new releases on next generation platforms.