Nintendo announced today that annual profits are up from 98.4 billion yen last year to 174.3 billion yen for this fiscal year. Thatsa 77% percenta!

Nintendo's big profits have long been powered by their smallest unit: the Nintendo DS, which has been easily outselling Sony's PSP handheld game unit. "In the handheld market, the DS is pretty much unassailable," said Yuuta Sakurai, analyst for Tokyo's Nomura Research Institute.

And now Nintendo is translating their handheld dominance into console dominance - the Wii is outselling the PS3 by more than two-to-one in the US and Japanese markets. Nintendo's report announced that since the Wii was released 5 months ago, they've sold 5.84 million units, which falls slightly short ot their 6 million unit sales prediction. And those numbers would most likely be even higher if anyone could walk into Walmart or Target and find one on the shelves. The Wii shortage GameRadar reported earlier this week is certainly holding those sales figures back, and who knows where Wii sales will head once the supply can keep up with demand.

If you can read Japanese, the original report from Nintendo is here. If you can't, then you're going to have to take our word for it.