First sightings of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection

It's the most anticipated DS game of the year, and with a rapidly approaching Japanese release date of June 23rd, we're starting to see The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass sneaking out onto the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

So who's playing it? Your guess is as good as ours, but we think it's either lucky Japanese journos doing previews or reviews of the title, Nintendo folk doing last minute testing (or it's not so last minute and the game has slipped…), or perhaps lucky employees getting first grabs on early boxed copies.

The thought that some fortunate folk are already taking Link out into the internet will set many DS-heads drooling, of course; we got our own hands on during the Game Developers Conference in March. There are still those rumours about in-game voice chat to iron out, too – perhaps that's what's being utilised?

Tracking the game through the wonders of Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection, we see the following behaviour:

Before the start of May 2007, there have been relatively few log-ins – at most there's about 30. Perhaps just a couple of testers have been working on the game? During May, however, things start to pick up.

For example, Wednesday May 2nd saw a peak of 148 player log-ins. Then there's hardly any activity over the weekend (even Nintendo staff get time off it seems) before the log-ins pick up again, with around 80 occurring on Tuesday May 8th, and around 124 on Friday 9th, and then continue up to 128 on Saturday 12th May.

There's even 70 log-ins on the following Sunday! Things are hotting up it seems.

Of course, with the game expected to sell millions of copies, Phantom Hourglass is likely to eventually swamp the Wi-Fi Connection for a period. For example, the most popular game on the NWC is currently Pokemon Diamond, which regularly peaks at over 260,000 players on Saturdays.

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