Gamecube Surges Past Xbox In Uk!

GAMECUBE SURGES PAST XBOX IN UK!

Latest UK hardware figures offer encouragement for Nintendo, but it\'s another disappointing week for N-Gage

16:55 GameCube has enjoyed a bumper week at UK retail, with sales of the console surpassing main rival Xbox for only the second time in several months, while all major home consoles, with one notable exception, enjoyed a healthy, if predictable, rise in the run up to Christmas.
For the week ending November 22, GameCube sold slightly more consoles than Xbox, with sales for the period approaching 19,000 units.

\'Cube sales increased around 35 percent in total, suggesting that Mario Kart\'s recent release and the subsequent \'Cube and Kart bundle was a strong factor, pushing past Xbox whose sales, despite some staggeringly generous bundles available at present, only rose by a fraction for the period.

More bad news for Nokia, however, as sales of N-Gage were down by almost a quarter on the previous week, with a little over 200 units sold through ChartTrack\'s 6,000 accredited specialist retailers.

Nokia will insist that this figure is not representative, since it fails to take into account sales through mobile phone retailers; however, if, as a Nokia employee recently told us off the record, ChartTrack only accounts for "a third of our business", the company will surely be looking for much improved results in the coming weeks and months.

Elsewhere, SP was up by over a fifth with almost 30,000 units shifted, while the regular GBA rose by more than 10 percent to sell just short of 6,000 units.

PS2 remains way out in front, however. Last week saw a rise in sales of a fifth, with over 65,000 consoles sold in total. A market in decline? Seems that somebody forgot to tell Sony...