Can Wii prolong winning streak?

Reginald Fils-Aime, president and chief operating officer for Nintendo's North American division, said at the press event last week that Nintendo in April had taken the No. 1 spot for sales of consoles, games and hand-held game devices, with its DS portable player. The last company to accomplish that feat, he said, was Nintendo itself -- in the 1980s. "We have become a viral and cultural phenomenon," Fils-Aime said.

To bring in more casual gamers who don't have the time or patience to learn their way around a 16-button controller like the PS3, Nintendo developed a novel remote that uses a motion sensor to let players use their arm movements to control the action on the screen. For example, to swing a club in "Super Swing Golf," players swing the controller.

That's what hooked Allen and his family. When he showed the games to his 63-year-old father, Allen had to pull him away from the TV screen. "He was so into it, he forgot he was playing a video game," Allen said.

The controller, Allen explained, makes games such as the Wii version of tennis much more intuitive to play.

"If I want a cross court shot, I start low and rotate my forearm, and I get a nice cross-court spinning shot, just like real tennis," he said. "I don't have to learn anything new."

That ease, combined with realistic physics, has led the Wii to pop up in some unexpected places. The Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Canada, uses the Wii to help physical therapy patients improve movement and balance. Norwegian Cruise Line, which caters to seniors, has purchased the system for all of its ships.

The Wii's popularity has made it an attractive system for game publishers, whose ability to crank out fresh games for the device is vital to keeping consumers interested. It also generally costs less to create games for Wii than for the Sony and Microsoft systems, especially since it shares technology with its predecessor, the GameCube.

Wii games can cost anywhere from $1 million to $7 million and take less than a year to make, whereas a typical PS3 and Xbox 360 game can cost more than $20 million and take more than a year to produce because of the complexity and high-level graphics involved in those consoles.

"The console with the greatest momentum now is the Wii," said Brian Farrell, chief executive of THQ Inc., the Calabasas-based game publisher. "The controller is highly innovative. The price point is attractive. The demographics are broad. And the cost to develop games on the system is relatively low. There's a lot to like about the Wii."