Much has been made of PS Vita's slow start in Japan after a respectable launch week, with the holiday period being by far and away the 3DS' finest hour thus far.

However, looking at the latest figures from Media Create, it appears PS Vita - despite selling fewer units than last week - may be making up ground on PSP, which has been outselling its successor week to week post launch.

The hard sell

For the week starting 9 January, PS Vita sold a total of 18,361 units – significantly down on the previous week's total of almost 43,000 units, but now just over 4,000 units behind PSP's total of 22,538.

Indeed, it's worth pointing out that surpassing PSP will be some accomplishment - though hardly a stellar performance in the west, PSP has been a big hit for Sony in Japan throughout its lifetime, and still posts healthy figures today.

Also worth noting is the fact that all of the handhelds suffered a significant drop. 3DS remains the most popular console in the country, though its weekly sales more than halved from more than 240,000 to just over 100,000 thanks to an industry-wide post holidays slump.

Below is the hardware sales chart in full, with the previous week's sales in brackets.

Nintendo 3DS - 100,668 (240,819)

PlayStation 3 - 30,332 (74,459)

PSP - 22,538 (71,033)

PS Vita - 18,361 (42,915)

Wii - 14,179 (49,525)

Nintendo DSi LL - 1,515 (3,971)

Xbox 360 - 1,519 (2,738)

Nintendo DSi - 1,206 (3,565)

PlayStation 2 - 766 (1,323)

[source: Andriasang]