The Mortal Kombat reboot rose up against franchise fatigue, a dead PSN, and space-time-tunneling competition to claim the top spot on the NPD's April sales charts. Turns out there's a big audience out there for seeing inside some dude's body as his bones are breaking. And also accessible, fast-paced fighting games. But mostly the X-ray bone breaks. Portal 2, of course, came in at No. 2.

Probably as a result of these two games, total US spending was up 20 percent year-over year, from $802.4 million in 2010 to $961.2 million in 2011. Microsoft can also claim some responsibility for the high numbers -- it informed us that the Xbox 360 was the top-selling console last month, moving 297,000 units (a year-over-year increase of 60 percent).

Sony helped too, by motivating some of those Xbox 360 purchases.