Six of the 10 most-searched keywords on Ruten.com during the Lunar New Year holiday were related to toys or video game consoles, with “Lego” taking first place, according to statistics released by the online auction site on Friday last week.
The second-most-searched keyword was “PS4,” referring to Sony’s PlayStation 4 vgames console, followed by “Nintendo Switch,” the Japanese brand’s upcoming console.
“VR,” “year-end party prizes” and “bluetooth headsets” took fourth, fifth and sixth places respectively.
Rounding out the top 10 were Japanese video game Resident Evil, “gift bags,” “iPhone 7” and Detention, a locally developed video game based on Taiwan’s Martial Law era history.
According to Ruten, more than 100,000 Lego-related products are on sale on the site, an increase of more than 20 percent from the same period last year.
Thanks to the Lego Batman Movie, which was released on Wednesday, the Batman series has become a popular choice for Lego fans, the Web site said.
During the holiday from Jan. 27 to Feb. 2, the sales of PlayStation 4 consoles on the Web site increased 50 percent from the same period last year, while the sales of virtual reality headsets increased by about 70 percent from the Christmas shopping season in December last year, Ruten said.
Although Nintendo Switch is not to be released in Japan until next month, many people have pre-ordered the product, it said.
Resident Evil 7 has been received well since its Jan. 24 release, with sales during the holiday increasing more than 50 percent from the first days of its launch, Ruten said.
Detention gained worldwide popularity soon after its launch last month, the company said.
Compared with the first week of its launch, online searches for Detention rose four-fold during the holiday, while a novel based on the video game set to be released later this month has also garnered many pre-orders, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching