Danny Cowan from Gamasutra writes:

"Gamasutra's weekly column, "Saling The World", covers the top five sellers for every available platform in the United States, Japan, and Europe, providing an important update of sales patterns worldwide.

This week's charts, with data taken from February 5th, 2009, find Halo 3 and Call of Duty: World at War at the top of North America's Xbox 360 software sales charts, while Star Ocean: Second Evolution and Mario Kart DS drive sales on portables.

Data for "Saling The World" comes courtesy of the public sales information on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.co.jp, with sales split out for each platform and territory, and pre-orders disregarded. This results in a true sense of what games are selling worldwide on the real-time updated service, as follows..."
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Edge writes: "Animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have commended Sega for pulling an ad for the rhythm game Samba De Amigo Wii that featured a "chimp actor."

According to PETA's blog, the organization contacted Sega after seeing the ad and informed the game maker of mistreatment of such chimps in the past.

"Faster than you can mangle a Metallica song on Guitar Hero, Sega pulled the video from its site and promised to keep all great apes out of its ads!" wrote PETA blogger Amy Elizabeth."
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"Sega has just unveiled, at le Festival du Jeu video in Paris, the final version of the red maracas that will be used for Samba de Amigo Wii for the Wii..."
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SEGA of America, Inc. today announced that Samba de Amigo, exclusively for the Wii home video game system, has shipped to stores across North America. Voted the best Wii Music/Rhythm Game by IGN.com at this year's E3, Samba de Amigo is an addictive rhythm game that gets players shaking to the beat with an irresistible Samba-inspired soundtrack and crazy, colorful environments packed with wacky characters.
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To be used with Samba de Amigo, a new Wii accessory has been revealed: Wiimote-Maracas, and will be on sale for $14.99
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Samba de Amigo (Gearbox Software), one of the very first admired rhythm games, comes to the Wii with some classic tracks and some exclusives that came along for the music ride. Maraca attachments will be available for the Wii controllers, and yes, Sonic is confirmed as a playable character.

More after the jump
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SEGA of America and SEGA Europe ltd. are excited to officially announce that Samba de Amigo - the zany new Wii-exclusive rhythm game coming out on September 23, 2008 - will be one of the first titles to offer exclusive downloadable Wii content.
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Nintendo Wii Fanboy reports that Sega sent out a press release announcing their upcoming releases, hiding a bit of news among the tentative release dates. In the blurb about Gearbox's new version of Samba de Amigo, Sega confirmed the existence of "over 40 songs and additional downloadable tunes." Will they cost money? Probably! Given the choice between getting money and not getting money, even Sega probably knows what to choose.
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For anyone out there who loves their Wii and shaking about like a peanut during an earthquake you can go check out the official website for upcoming Wii shakefest Samba De Amigo
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Samba De Amigo for the Wii was announced nearly a year ago and though everyone was excited, the knowledge that the maraca peripherals were half the fun overshadowed its joyous return.

Gearbox/Sega luckily felt the same way and we're now getting maraca shells to accompany the game. They even kept the zany color scheme, opting away from Wii's clean as snow motif. No price has been announced, but hopefully Mario Kart Wii has set a precedent. There's also no word if beads are in the shells to give full maraca action, but we speculate that there's something in those beautiful bulbous shells.
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