February's U.S. software champ, Wii Fit, didn't have the strength to fight off the combined forces of Resident Evil 5, Pokemon Platinum and Halo Wars, the top three bestselling games in March.

The Xbox 360 version of the survival horror adventure walked away with the number one spot, moving 938,000 copies to U.S. consumers. Its PlayStation 3 counterpart moved 585,000, giving Sony's current generation platform three titles in the top ten, including MLB 09: The Show and Killzone 2. The latter of those saw sales close to that of its debut month, moving another 296,000 copies in March. Sony announced earlier today that Killzone 2 has sold 1 million copies worldwide since launch.

Chart regulars Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii combined for another half million in sales, with 2K Sports' MLB game rounding out the top ten. Missing from the top ten is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, which looks to have sold on par with EEDAR's estimate of 200,000 copies or less. Guess we'll go with "risk" on that.

All the fun numbers and more, after the break..

The top ten bestselling games in the U.S. for the month of March, according to the NPD Group are...

01. Resident Evil 5 (X360) - 938,000
02. Pokemon Platinum (DS) - 805,000
03. Halo Wars (X360) - 639,000
04. Resident Evil 5 (PS3) - 585,000
05. Wii Fit (Wii) - 541,000
06. MLB 09: The Show (PS3) - 305,000
07. Killzone 2 (PS3) - 296,000
08. Wii Play (Wii) - 281,000
09. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) - 278,000
10. MLB 2K9 (X360) - 205,000

Video game software sold to the tune of $792.83 million in March, a 17% drop year over year. That puts annual industry sales at $2.21 billion, which would indicate a drop in total revenue for the year.

And in Hardware Charts..

Nintendo hardware continued to move in excess of over one million units a month in March, but the video game industry saw a severe drop in spending year-over-year, resulting in a 17% drop in revenue.

Nintendo's Wii and DS platforms held strong as the best and second-best selling hardware in March, moving a combined 1.16 million-plus units last month. That's a drop from March 2008, when Nintendo hardware racked up 1.42 million in total Wii and DS sales, boosted by the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which shifted 2.7 million copies that month.

Hardware sales were down across the board for Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, month-to-month. Year-over-year, however, the Xbox 360 actually saw an uptick in sales, moving 330,000 consoles last month as opposed to 262,000 during March of last year.

Here's how the U.S. console war went down in March, with the NPD Group reporting sales from 3/1/09 to 4/4/09.

• Wii - 601,000
• Nintendo DS - 563,000
• Xbox 360 - 330,000
• PlayStation 3 - 218,000
• PSP - 168,000
• PlayStation 2 - 112,000

NPD analyst Anita Frazier commented on the down month.

"If there was one area that surprised me this month, it was hardware sales," Frazier said. "While it's not unusual for March hardware sales to be lower than February, I thought we'd see higher unit sales on most platforms. The Xbox 360 was the only platform to achieve a year-over-year unit sales increase."

She also adds that the PlayStation 2, which saw a price drop on April 1 in the United States, should be reflected in April's sales.

"The PS2 price decrease occurred on April 1, so this month included only 4 days of sales as the new retail price. We would expect to see an increase in PS2 hardware sell-through in the April data."

via Kotaku