May NPD: LA Noire makes the case, Xbox 360 stays on top

Even though we hid the list of May's top software sellers in North America after the break, we have a suspicion that your unparalleled acumen and unmatched perception will provide the clues necessary to determine what the month's top seller was. Simple. Let's move onto harder stuff.

Without a solid historical basis, determining the month's top-selling console might be difficult. So we'll give you a hint: It's been the top selling console for 11 of the past 12 months. That's right, it's the Xbox 360 which managed to move 270,000 units according to Microsoft, representing 39% year-over-year growth and marking the "seventeenth month of year-over-year hardware sales increases," according to a now routine email boast from Redmond.

Overall video game spending is down 13% year-over-year, dropping from $829.4m to $718.8m; while hardware is only down 5%, video game software was down a whopping 19% from May 2010 to 2011. Looking at the list of top sellers, you'll see a few notable facts: the poorly received Brink managed to arrive in second place; there are two Lego games from two separate publishers; and perhaps most notably, there isn't a single Nintendo-published title on the list. Find the full software rundown after the break.

Top 10 best-selling games (US) for May 2011:

1. L.A. Noire (360, PS3)

2. Brink (360, PS3, PC)

3. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (Wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSP, PC)

4. Portal 2 (360, PS3, PC)

5. Mortal Kombat 2011 (PS3, 360)

6. Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, PS3, Wii, NDS, PC)

7. Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (Wii, 360, PS3)

8. NBA 2K11 (360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, PC)

9. Just Dance 2 (Wii)

10. Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (Wii, NDS, 360, PS3, 3DS, PSP, PC)