USA Charts: MVP Baseball tops March rankings ahead of Cube and Xbox exclusives

Electronic Arts' MVP Baseball 2004 was the best selling title in the USA during the month of March across all formats - but very strong sales of Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden and Nintendo's Pokemon Collosseum make them into single-format leaders.

MVP Baseball is propelled to the top of the charts by strong showings on both PS2 and Xbox - but Ninja Gaiden was the best selling game on a single format, followed closely by Pokemon Collosseum, with the games taking second and third places in the overall ranking as well.

Another Xbox exclusive also placed high in the chart this month, with Splinter Cell: Pandora tomorrow coming in at number five, while a second Cube exclusive, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, came in at number ten.

The other really notable new release in the top ten for March is Midway's The Suffering on Xbox and PS2, which came in at number nine and has done wonders for the struggling publisher's fortunes - so much so that it bought the game's developer last week.

The rest of the top ten is unremarkable, with EA's mighty duo of Need for Speed Underground and James Bond 007: Everything of Nothing both still in residence, along with Sega's Sonic Heroes and THQ's MX Unleashed.

In hardware terms, the GBA was the best selling console in the USA last month - outstripping sales of the PS2 by some 40 per cent. The GameCube narrowed the gap with the Xbox as well - it boosted its sales by 19 per cent during the month, while Xbox sales fell three per cent, leaving the Nintendo console less then 35,000 units behind for the full month, and just a touch over 1.1 million units behind in installed base terms.