Nintendo rolled the dice with the Wii and it seems to have come up seven for the company, while Sony is constantly betting the hard eight and losing chips by the handful.

Has the world gone mad?  At this time last year Sony was sitting comfortably on top of the gaming console hill, having easily bested Microsoft's Xbox in terms of sales and smiling smugly as reports about the then still new Xbox 360 dying on consumers poured in from all across America.  Nintendo, the former king turned bastard child chugged along in a distant third place with its purple box of a console that had lots of games for kids and no online support whatsoever.  Times were good for Sony and it looked as though they would reign supreme in the world of video games for a long while to come.

Then we started to hear whispers of a revolution.  More aptly, we heard about the Revolution, the next-gen console from Mario world that was going to turn the gaming community on its ear.  Sony, like the rest of us, listened to Nintendo's claims about its new machine and then took a look at that stupid controller (at least that's what we thought about it at the time) and laughed a laugh that only a sadistic overlord can laugh... usually right before he is ousted from his throne.

Fast forward to today.  Sony still sits atop the gaming heap, but may not be resting all that comfortably these days.  It's interesting that the first few PS3 consoles sold in the US came with a Blu-Ray copy of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby because Sony is now a bit like Will Ferrell's Ricky, seeing that competitor coming up fast from behind.  Instead of a gay French NASCAR driver, it's an Italian plumber coming by way of Japan, Sony's home turf.

Sony is far from out of the race, of course, and as SCEA President and CEO Jack Tretton recently told Game Informer, "It's a little early to talk about who's winning the game right now."  Be that as it may, the simple fact is that Nintendo has moved over 1.1 Million Wii consoles since launch while Sony managed to sell just over half that number. Initially Sony could claim the difference was due to shortages of their extravagantly priced console (production numbers for the launch fell drastically short of Sony's initial projections due to manufacturing problems), but this is no longer the case. 

As GWN recently reported, despite the fact that Sony still hasn't caught up to where it intended to be in terms of units produced, PS3's are sitting on store shelves while Wii's are nigh impossible to locate.  The staff at my local Las Vegas GameStop (my home away from home) told us that they still have people lining up in the mornings to get their hands on whatever Wii consoles may have come in that day, while there are "plenty" of PS3s in stock.