6th Place Start For 3rd Birthday

AKB1/48 gives you the chance to reject 47 of the 48 members of pop group AKB48.

Media Create won't be sharing its sales data for last week (and the current week) until early 2010. To get a glimpse at how things looked at retail the week of Christmas, we'll have to go with Famitsu.com, which provided Enterbrain sales data today for the week of 12/20 to 12/26. As usual, the data is without actual sales figures.

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd continued to remain in first place, a position it has held since its release on December 1.

Taking second in its debut week was AKB1/48, Namco Bandai's PSP love simulation that lets you act as a pretend stud who's being chased by all forty-eight members of pop group AKB48. There were some pre-release indicators that the game was going to be a big hit, and this does seem to be the case.

The only other new entry in Enterbrain's top 10 is The 3rd Birthday. Aya Brea's modern revival debuted at sixth.

Here's the full top 10 for the week:

• 1. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (Capcom, PSP, 12/1)
• 2. AKB1/48 If I Loved an Idol (Namco Bandai, PSP, 12/23)
• 3. Donkey Kong Returns (Nintendo, Wii, 12/9)
• 4. Pokemon Black & White (Pokemon, DS, 9/18)
• 5. Wii Party (Nintendo, Wii, 7/8)
• 6. The 3rd Birthday (Square Enix, PSP, 12/22)
• 7. Mario Sports Mix (Nintendo, Wii, 11/25)
• 8. Inazuma Eleven 3 (Level-5, DS, 12/16)
• 9. Ni no Kuni (Level-5, DS, 12/9)
• 10. Tongari Boushi to Mahou no Omise (Konami, DS, 11/11)

The 3rd Birthday is in the company of games that tend to see major boosts during gift buying periods, so it's difficult to tell how strong its first week performance was without actual numbers. For solid sales figures, we'll have to wait until Media Create's first sales report of 2011, on January 5.