It seems that at the moment that if you’re company name is Nintendo and you’re selling your videogame console hardware in Japan, consumers just can’t get enough of it. Which is funny, because that’s exactly what is happening to Nintendo in the land of the rising sun. The most recent sales figures from data trackers Media Create reveal that the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS are simply trampling all over the opposition.

During the week ending April 8 sales of the Nintendo DS rose by 28 per cent to reach 110,935. The handheld as been suffering a lengthy shortage of stock in the territory of late (due to the unstoppable demand for the thing more than anything), so this figure would probably have been even higher if the console had been readily available in stores. In comparison, the Nintendo DS’ biggest rival, the Sony’s PlayStation Portable witnessed its sales plummet by nearly 20 per cent for the week, down to 31,503 units.

The Nintendo Wii also continues to sell in healthy numbers, up slightly from 51,365 to 52,583 units shifted in the seven days following April 8. Japanese publisher, Enterbrain, recently estimated that Nintendo’s little white beauty had pushed past the 2 million mark in sales since its release in the region last December.

Again, these figures appear favourable in comparison to the Wii’s nearest competition. The Sony PlayStation 3 saw a drop in sales from 16,889 to 14,520 in the same period, meaning that despite a head start of a couple of weeks in Japan, its total sales figures are less than half that of the Wii, currently standing at 826,000 units. Even the ageing PlayStation 2 continues to outsell its beefed up successor, 17,787 of the machines leaving the hands of retailers.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Xbox 360 is still struggling to secure a foothold in the Japanese market - the most recent sales data for its performance show that it sold a sorry 2,963 units in the region, a drop of 24 per cent on the week before. So far Microsoft’s next-generation machine has sold just over 346,500 units in the territory since the console was launched there in December 2005.

Lastly, the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube also enjoyed small-scale rises in their sales, up to 12,57 for the former and from 205 to 255 for Nintendo’s previous hardware venture.