According to the latest survey by the NPD, gaming has attracted a larger female audience in 2009 than in 2008, more significantly in consoles. The number of lady gamers out there increased by up to 4% both in "heavy portable" and "extreme games" as compared to last year. More after the jump.

This is a rather unique position we are in. The E3 is nearing, and yet we've got just about the biggest surge we've had the past couple of months. Okay, that might well be an exaggeration, but still. You gotta agree with me when I say it was a busy past week, yes? Rumors, confirmation of rumors, and surprising - yet at the same time not-so-surprising - NPD results for this month all proved to be the cherry on top for this game-filled, fun-filled week. Hmmm.. imagine all those cherries on top.... Dig in, then.

Now this be crazy! The April results from NPD show that the DS outsold all other platforms combined, thanks to its whopping one million units sold. Satoru Iwata, adopt me now.

Brain food! While you're busy trying to avoid getting crunched by hordes of Majini, Capcom's busy crunching Resident Evil 5 sales figures by the hundreds of thousands: well, one and a half million, to be exact. Yes, the NPD software sales figures for the month of March have already been released, and in that report, we find RE5 on the Xbox 360 and  PS3 bringing home the bacon (and the meat, and the brains, and the guts...). See the full article for the breakdown on software sales.

After exceeding expectations last month, the NPD data for the month of March 2009 now shows a lot of dips in hardware sales. Has the video game industry's resilience to the economic crunch finally been broken?

The March 2009 hardware sales figures haven't been released yet, so you can expect Michael Pachter and EEDAR to throw in their pre-NPD report forecasts. Some numbers for their projected sales of consoles during last month may vary, but one thing remains similar: the Wii may still be on the lead, but the gap between the PS3 and Xbox 360 seems to be thinning down.

Usually, the trend has been to experience a noticeable dip in the amount of news coming out the week before the GDC. However, this year's pre-event week proved to be a rather different one from those I've experienced in the past. Unexpectedly, but fortunately, there were a great deal of updates. It was a busy one, alright, and thank God you stuck with us throughout the week, making it such a blast!

Interesting week for Microsoft, wouldn't you say. If you take a look at the bullets for each category after the jump, you'll see that they're pretty even, yes, both Gaming and Industry news are. Usually Industry news will be just a couple of bullets, but not this week. Yep, it's been yet another exciting week for the big MS. More record-breakers are here, anticipated demos, BioShock 2 updates, new maps, price cuts, trailers and a certain bird that is apparently also the word. Word.

So the latest NPD results are out. Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg got a head start and already snuck in some stink bombs on the arena. Well, today, we get to hear more reactions on February's sales figures, this time from Sony, Nintendo, and (again) Microsoft. This via Gamespot.

Looks like February was a pretty good month for video game hardware, despite the ongoing lackluster economic performance worldwide. According to NPD's released data for last month, hardware "strongly outperformed market expectations", with every console strongly outperforming their respective expected sales.So the retailers' fear that more people will buy less games was not as apocalyptic as they thought, after all.