The company says that more than 550,000 Wii and more than one million DS and DSi systems were sold. The DS and DSi numbers, Nintendo points out, set an all-time record for handheld games. The mark previously was held by Game Boy Advance sales during the Thanksgiving week of 2002.

A Thanksgiving Bounty, Sort Of

VGChartz, a site that tracks the gaming industry, put Nintendo's numbers into context, both against previous Nintendo results and against other platforms. What Nintendo failed to point out was that Wii sales were down about 250,000 units from last year's 800,000 consoles sold. In 2007, 350,000 Wii systems were sold.

VGChartz says that the DS system's million-unit sales mark beat out the figures from 2007 (about 653,000) and 2008 (about 780,000).

In other gaming-industry news, Sony's PlayStation 3 sold 440,000 units over this year's Thanksgiving holiday, quite a jump from the sales of 150,000 and 130,000 in 2007 and 2008, respectively, that VGChartz estimated. Microsoft 's Xbox 360 sold about 310,000 systems in 2007 and about 390,000 last year. The site quotes Microsoft sources as saying that this year's sales doubled last year's.

It's difficult to use total sales numbers to assess the success or failure of the industry compared to previous years, however, as pricing changes may be driving up raw numbers without helping profitability.

There are some warning signs ahead for the gaming arena. The Associated Press reports, for instance, that shares of video-game maker GameStop have fallen as analysts worry about soft video-game sales. It's not a good sign that the company declined to release sales figures for the Black Friday weekend, according to the AP.

Cautious Optimism?

In general, the online and offline news from Thanksgiving seems mixed to somewhat positive when compared to last year.

The National Retail Foundation commissioned a survey by BIGresearch, which revealed that 195 million shoppers showed up in stores or logged in during Black Friday and the subsequent weekend. That, the survey said, was up from 172 million last year. Average spending slipped from $372.57 to $343.31 per person, while total spending reached about $41.2 billion over the three-day period.

Coremetrics, a firm that tracks e-commerce activities, said that sales on Cyber Monday -- the Monday following the Thanksgiving weekend -- were up about 14 percent compared to last year. (Video games were not broken out by either the NRF or Coremetrics.)