Wii, DS and X-box consoles thrash PS3

With the Playstation 3 finally launching here tonight at midnight, the news from the US is that the much-hyped Sony console is being hammered on the sales front by Nintendo's Wii.

Sales figures for February from market watcher, NPD Group, showed that the Wii sold 335,000 units compared to 127,000 PS3s - almost two to one.

Even more surprising was that Nintendo's DS racked up an astonishing 485,000 unit sales. This gave Nintendo a 54 per cent share of all gaming hardware sales.

Even the 15-month-old Xbox 360 trounced the pricey newcomer, with gamers snapping up 227,000 of them in the same period.

Since launching in November, the Wii has sold more than 1.9 million units in the US compared to 1.1 PS3s, which also launched around the same time. The Xbox 360, which launched a year earlier, has notched up sales exceeding five million.

"We're gratified that the explosive appeal of Wii, in terms of both new players and new ways to play, has created unprecedented demand, substantially beyond supply," said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America.

"But we also understand that there are hundreds of thousands of consumers still waiting to get their hands on the system so we continue to both ship more units to retail every week and work non-stop to build capacity."

Obviously, it helps that the Wii is less than half the price of the PS3 but many gamers are being enticed by the console's unique wireless controller and new style of active gaming.