UK retailer Game is gearing up to sell the final thing it has on its shelves -- itself -- and has hired Banque Privee Edmond de Rothschild as the sale adviser, Bloomberg cites the Sunday Times as reporting. The Sunday Times doesn't list a source or means of obtaining this information, Bloomberg writes, but with Game's awkward economic happenings recently, this news doesn't come as either a shock or surprise.

Game hasn't been able to stock high-profile titles during recent launches, including Street Fighter X Tekken, Asura's Wrath, Ubisoft's Vita launch titles and Mass Effect 3, the last of which alone lost Game an estimated £2 million ($3.2 million). Game's market value sits at roughly £15 million ($23 million), MCV reports, meaning the lack of just one title, Mass Effect 3, generated a loss of one-seventh of Game's entire worth.

Engine Software is porting the classic arcade laserdisc game Mad Dog McCree to 3DS, for release on eShop. That merits at least a reserved "Yee-haw." Engine's VP of development Ruud van de Moosdijk told Nintendo World Report that the downloadable six-shooter shooter will be released "very soon." Engine tracked down publisher Digital Leisure and asked for the rights to create a 3DS version.

You might be thinking that it seems prohibitively expensive to remaster a random arcade game like that, full of real recorded video, in 3D. You're probably right. Whatever the reason, Engine is opting not to use stereoscopic 3D for the port. " "There's really no 3D in the 3DS version," van de Moosdijk said, "because how were you gonna do that?"

Rovio's plans for porting Angry Birds Space are just as ambitious as they were with the original, according to chief marketing officer/Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka. "With all our games, we're going for all the screens: Smartphones, tablets, TVs, the web, so we really want to bring Space to all the screens as well," Vesterbacka told us during this week's SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX. "As always, we have limited resources, so we can only do iOS, Android, PC and Mac for the launch, but the other platforms will follow shortly after."

Vesterbacka also mentioned that Rovio's back catalog of bird/slingshot simulators are still coming to the 3DS, and that potential Vita versions are in Sony's court: "We'll have our games on the 3DS pretty soon. The Vita we haven't decided what to do about yet, but of course we want to be on all the screens, so let's see how the Vita does in the market. And of course, always when working with these console guys it's not that we can decide, it's really if Sony wants to have Angry Birds on Vita. It's more up to them than to us."

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No 3DS games sold enough in the US to place in the top ten last month, according to NPD data. But 3DS sales were happening just under the surface, with many 3DS games making it into the (undisclosed) top 25 games of February.

The NPD told Joystiq that "some examples" of the 3DS titles that made the list include Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, FIFA Soccer, Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, Resident Evil: Revelations, and Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games -- the last two on that list being February releases.

That's ... a significant portion of the top 25. It's also evidence of a reasonably engaged 3DS install base, and therefore stiff competition for the PS Vita, which came out in February. The Vita's Uncharted: Golden Abyss placed somewhere in the top 20 (at least in retail; Vita games also have digital sales not charted by NPD).

This is a column by Kat Bailey dedicated to the analysis of the once beloved Japanese RPG sub-genre. Tune in every Wednesday for thoughts on white-haired villains, giant robots, Infinity+1 swords, and everything else the wonderful world of JRPGs has to offer.
I wish more Japanese RPGs were like Rayman: Origins.

Alright, I'll give you a moment to wrap your brain around that statement, then I'll explain. As most of you know, Rayman: Origins is a completely beautiful platformer that captures everything that is great about the genre -- precise controls, expansive levels, and high challenge. It's at the forefront of the genre's mini-renaissance, which has been ongoing for a few years now.

I want all that for Japanese RPGs. More to the point, I think that it can happen, if only an enterprising publisher or developer were to pick up the baton.

At the moment, I think there's something of a taboo against the classic form, at least among the larger developers. Even Dragon Quest -- long the bastion of reliability -- has been shaking things up with its multiplayer innovations. The unspoken mandate is that the genre must evolve or die.

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The numbers for February are in, and while hardware performance was better than it was in January, both hardware and software sales are seeing significant declines when compared to figures from February 2011.

With hardware and software combined, total new video-game sales rang up at $1.06 billion for last month; a 20 percent decline from the $1.33 billion spent during the same period last year. Breaking that total down, hardware sales accounted for $381.4 million of all moneys spent in February, down 18 percent year over year, while software sales accounted for $464.4 million (down 23 percent year over year) and accessories sales brought in $215.2 million, down 16 percent year over year.

Despite those year over year declines, hardware sales increased 62 percent over January, Vita sales notwithstanding. Factoring in Sony's new handheld boosts that figure all the way up to 87 percent.

On the software front, the Vita's best-selling launch title was Uncharted: Golden Abyss, earning a spot among the month's top 20 overall best-selling titles. The top ten best-selling titles for February can be found after the break, with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning being the only new IP to make the list.

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With February's NPD numbers upon us, Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy 2 has joined a prestigious club. The portly plumber's Wii title has now crossed the 5 million sales mark. Nintendo notes that the Wii has now amassed nine titles that have passed 5 million in sales, which it says is "nearly twice as many 5-million sellers as competing current-generation consoles combined." The company added that Just Dance 3 is quickly approaching the 5 million mark, with 4.61 million copies sold to date.

On the handheld front, two other Mario titles, Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land, both moved more than 100,000 units. In addition, Nintendo notes that Pokemon Black and White have surpassed 4 million units in combined sales.

In hardware, Nintendo sold 228,000 Wii consoles, 262,000 3DS units and 135,000 DS units.

Update: It's actually Super Mario Galaxy, the first one, that just hit this sales milestone.

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"I don't think I mentioned anything about PlayStation Vita," Keiji Inafune told me in an interview this morning. His answer -- an outright lie -- elicited laughs from myself and his translator, both of us having attended his state of the Japanese game industry panel yesterday at GDC 2012 -- where he teased a PlayStation Vita project.

"I can say that I got in trouble from Sony," he said. Uh oh! Unsurprisingly, Inafune wouldn't budge on any more details, only adding that, "You should be able to hear something more in detail soon." That's right, folks -- even important devs like Keiji Inafune can't just walk around saying whatever they want about unannounced projects all willy nilly.

But don't fret, fans, as Inafune plans on launching his already announced Nintendo 3DS project, King of Pirates, worldwide. "For all my titles, I'm looking to do worldwide publishing. I can't say who is publishing because it could be Marvelous directly or maybe they're going to find another publisher in the US," he said. "But the plan is to do it worldwide."

We have a coveted double Virtual Console event today, in which emulated retro games appear on both 3DS and Wii. On 3DS, you can experience the thrill of being beaten severely by enormous people in Punch-Out!! And on Wii ... pretty much the same thing (beatings, enormous humans) from a different perspective in King of Fighters '97.

DSiWare now features Zuma's Revenge, just the latest in PopCap's widespread assault on every platform ever.

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