Nintendo, who is currently the top maker of handheld game consoles and is the third largest maker of non-portable gaming systems, said that it plans to sell around 35 million of its Wii gaming machines in four to five years time in the U.S. Previous-generation Gamecube console from the company was far less successful and current ambitions are very close to Sony PlayStation 2 sales figures.

“The company will reach its goal by 2011 or 2012,” George Harrison, marketing chief at Nintendo of America Inc., a unit of Kyoto-based Nintendo, said in an interview from Seattle yesterday, Bloomberg news-agency reports.

So far Nintendo sold about 2.5 million Wii game consoles in the United States, the agency notes. Meanwhile, sales of PlayStation 3, which was introduced at about the same time as Wii, have reached 1.3 million. But while PS3 sales have been declining for six consecutive months, Nintendo recently managed to increase sales of its Wii.

Sony Computer Entertainment America sold approximately 38.2 million of PlayStation 2 game consoles in the USA in about seven years, therefore, Wii’s target is really close to Sony’s results. Nevertheless, given that Wii is the least powerful game console among the current-generation machines, which also includes PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, its target market may be somewhat limited.

“The 35 million target is a bit too optimistic for now as it seems the Wii is targeting light gamers, but the U.S. market has a lot of hard-core game players,” said Etsuko Tamura, an analyst with Mizuho Investors Securities Co. in Tokyo. “It’s too early to decide whether the Wii will be the winner among game consoles.”

Nintendo Wii console features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.

Nintendo set the recommended retail price of ¥25 000 (about $211) in Japan, $249 in the U.S. and €249 ($325) in Europe.