Canadian retailers sold out of Nintendo's new Wii video game console on launch day, although a few units may be found in places that don't have Sunday shopping, the company says.

"It's another vindication of Nintendo's strategy," Farjad Iravani, a marketing manager with Nintendo of Canada, told CBC News Online from his Vancouver office on Monday.

"There might be some scattered stores that have a couple of units here and there, but in terms of the national picture, we have sold through the Canadian allocation," Iravani said.

He said more shipments are expected every week, starting this week, so the company can meet its worldwide goal of selling four million units by the end of the holiday season.

The $279.95 Wii makes use of current — instead of cutting edge — graphics technology for its graphics, diverging from competitors Sony and Microsoft, whose consoles focus heavily on providing gamers with high-definition graphics capabilities.

Instead, the Wii's gameplay centres on its unique motion-sensitive controller, which resembles a television remote control connected by a cable to a module similar to a computer mouse. People swing the remote like a baseball bat or sword to see their physical actions duplicated in the game, and similarly, they can use the mouse or "nunchuk" to steer their character around onscreen.

Holiday sales expected to hit four-million-unit mark

Meanwhile, the high-fidelity graphics of Nintendo's rivals come at a price — $549.99 or $659.99 for Sony's PlayStation 3 models with differing capabilities, which sold out on launch day Nov. 17; and $399.99 or $499.99 for Microsoft's Xbox 360 models.

The Wii comes with Wii Sports, a collection of five sports games, and is backward compatible with a library of some 530 games for the previous Nintendo GameCube console. Owners can also connect to the online Wii Shop Channel, which lets them download classic games such as Donkey Kong, Super Mario 64, and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog.

Nintendo expects to sell four million units worldwide through the holiday season, and had previously said it expected to ship one million Wiis to North America for launch — more than double the 400,000 units Sony had said it would ship for its North American launch.