As we move into the second half of the year, sales figures for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft from the first six months are published...

Nintendo grabbed the best-selling handheld game for the first half of 2005 with Nintendogs - despite it being released only three months ago. The portable puppy trainer game has to date sold through 494,330 copies, and was the fourth best-selling game overall, behind GT4, Sangokushi 4 and DragonBall Z 3, all for the PS2. In contrast, the top game for the PSP only - Hot Shots Golf - got to 15th place overall, selling through 231,933 copies.

49 PS2 games made it into the top 100. The DS and PSP had 14 games each that ranked in the top 100 sales charts, while the Game Boy Advance had 16. The GameCube only had seven games in the top 100. PS2 also sold the most games - a whopping 14,010,000 to be exact. The GBA sold 3,408,000 games, the DS sold 3,1996,000 games and the GC sold 1,549,000. The PSP sold 2,103,000 games during the six-month period.

Meanwhile Microsoft continues to lag way behind. Not a single game for the console ranked in the top 100 sales chart for the first half of 2005 - just like 2004. Fable sold the most with 12,090 copies, but this was no where near the 100th place in the chart (Rockman Zero 4 for the GBA, which sold 65,341 copies). Embarrasingly, the best-selling game for the PSOne (a reissue of Valkyrie Profile) still sold double the volume of Fable.

Happily, Nintendo were the top publisher, shipping a total of 3,166,103 games. The company also had the biggest number of games - 17 - in the top 100. Sony Computer Entertainment was in second with around a million less games, followed by Namco in third, while Square Enix and Bandai rounded out the top five publishers.

Hardware-wise, despite the DS regularly selling better than the PS2 in the last few months, the PS2 just managed to get the top hardware spot with 1,286,882 units, narrowly beating the the DS into second place whose sales so far stand at 1,236,268 units. The PSP follows closely behind with 1,137,597 units sold in the same time period. Rounding out the top five were the GBA SP with 497,931 units and the GameCube with a dissapointing 159,559 units. The original GBA sold 16,040 units and the Xbox sold 9,045.

Taking a detailed look at the DS vs. PSP, since its launch in December, the PSP has sold 1,477,541 million hardware units and 2,654,000 games in Japan, a ratio of 1.8 games sold for each PSP. The DS has so far sold 2,332,198 hardware units overall in Japan and 4,408,000 games since its launch, equalling 1.89 games sold per DS.