Japanese videogame maker Square Enix said on Tuesday it had launched its first game for Apple’s iPod, broadening its target hardware to the top-selling media player.

"Guitar Hero: Aerosmith,"  Activision's latest installment of their video game franchise, launched Friday at Time Square's Hard Rock Cafe release party n New York. It's the fourth game in the best-selling title, but the first based on a specific band.

Nintendo is banned everywhere but the classroom at Tokyo Joshi Gakuen school in Japan as the ubiquitous DS consoles become the latest tool in English instruction.

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software were $1.12 billion in May, up 37 percent from a year earlier, with Take-Two Interactive's "Grand Theft Audio 4" the best-selling title for the month, market researcher NPD said in a report on Thursday.

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 57 percent from a year earlier, industry data showed on Thursday, evidence that the industry has so far been immune to wider economic woes. 1st paragraph of story should go here

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software hit $1.33 billion in February, up 34 percent from a year earlier, with Sony's PlayStation 3 topping Microsoft's Xbox 360 for the second month in a row.

Robust holiday sales of Wii and DS game machines helped Japan's Nintendo more than double its operating profit in the nine months to December and prompted it to raise its outlook beyond market expectations.

Amazon.com said it sold about 17 of Nintendo's Wii video game systems per second when it had them in stock.

Shoppers jammed stores over the last weekend before Christmas to try to scoop up bargains. But the spending surge may not be enough to offset what is shaping up to be a mediocre December for some retailers.