Despite the global economic crisis constricting consumer demand for most luxury items, Nintendo has lifted its sales targets for the Wii for the year ending March 2009.

In its quarterly report Nintendo said it now expects to sell 27.5m Wii units by the end of the fiscal year, up from its previous target of 26.5m units sold. Many analysts expected the figure to fall in light of the economic downturn.

The company has also claimed that the DS has surpassed lifetime sales of the company’s first handheld, the GameBoy. According to Nintendo, the original GameBoy had sold 81.3m units, whereas the DS has now hit 84.3m units worldwide.

Some would call this a fairly selective claim, as the GameBoy sales figure does not include sales of the GameBoy Color, which was as much of a hardware upgrade as the DS Lite was to the original DS.

However, these distinctions may eventually be pointless; Nintendo has kept to its existing DS sales forecast of 30.5m units for the year. So far this year, the company has sold 13.7m units.

From the quarterly report, Nintendo also maintained its fiscal year sales target of ¥2 trillion.