Midnight Club series developer Rockstar San Diego will be revisiting its street racing franchise and bringing it to current-generation consoles. Publisher Rockstar Games today announced Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the fourth game to bear the series' name. No specific details were included in today's announcement beyond the game's target platforms of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

"On prior consoles, the Midnight Club franchise continually raised the bar for racing games, evolving from being the first ever street racing game to setting the defining standard for credibly integrating street racing culture with an intense racing experience," said producer Jay Panek. "With Midnight Club: Los Angeles, our goal is to evolve on all possible levels and stay true to the hardcore gaming experience the series is known for, while making it accessible to casual gamers and car enthusiasts."

Midnight Club: Los Angeles will not mark Rockstar San Diego's first outing in the current generation. Last year, the studio shipped Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis for Xbox 360. Rockstar Games expects to release Midnight Club: Los Angeles for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 early next year.

Microsoft has announced via the Gamerscore Blog run by several of its marketing employees that it has begun restricting Xbox Live access to consoles which have been physically modified against the system's terms of use. Users whose machines are detected to have been modified will receive an error of status code "Z: 8015 - 190D" along with an explanatory message.

"This console has been banned for violations of the Terms of Use," the message reads. "To protect the Xbox Live service and its members, Microsoft does not provide details about console bans. There is no recourse for Terms of Use violations."

Significantly, the ban applies not to Xbox Live accounts but to specific physical console units. Owners of banned consoles will still be able to retain their Xbox Live accounts and use them on other machines.

The latest United States industry sales data furnished by tracking group NPD Funworld shows Nintendo again taking the top two hardware slots during the month of April, with the release of strong first-party software grabbing the top four software slots as well.

Hanging onto last month's positioning, Nintendo DS took a commanding lead with 471,000 units, followed by Wii with 360,000. Perennial seller PlayStation 2 grabbed 194,000 sales, followed by PSP with 183,000 and Xbox 360 with 174,000. With its 84,000 sales, Game Boy Advance manage to edge out PlayStation 3's 82,000.

On the whole, hardware sales saw an impressive year over year increase of 52% to $338.4 million.

1. Nintendo DS (471,000)
2. Wii (360,000)
3. PlayStation 2 (194,000)
4. PlayStation Portable (183,000)
5. Xbox 360 (175,000)
6. Game Boy Advance (84,000)
7. PlayStation 3 (82,000)
8. GameCube (13,000)

On the software side, Game Freak's two latest Pokemon releases, Diamond and Pearl, took the top two salse slots with combined sales of nearly 1.8 million units, a particularly impressive feat given how late in the months the titles launched. Diamond and Pearl's debut marks the highest first-month sales for any new Pokemon game or pair of games in the series' history. Intelligent Systems' Wii platformer/RPG and Nintendo's mini-game-centric Wii Play came in at #3 and #4. Both Harmonix's Guitar Hero II and Treyarch's Spider-Man 3 made the list in their Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 incarnations. Two first-party PlayStation 2 titles rounded out the list, as SCE Studios Santa Monica's God of War II and SCE Studios San Diego's MLB 07 The Show took #9 and #10.

1. Pokemon Diamond (Game Freak, NDS) (1.045 million)
2. Pokemon Pearl (Game Freak, NDS) (712,000)
3. Super Paper Mario (Intelligent Systems, Wii) (352,000)
4. Wii Play (Nintendo, Wii) (294,000)
5. Guitar Hero II (Harmonix, X360) (197,000)
6. Guitar Hero II (Harmonix, PS2) (142,000)
7. Spider-Man 3: The Game (Treyarch, X360) (117,000)
8. Spider-Man 3: The Game (Treyarch, PS2) (105,000)
9. God of War II (SCE Studios Santa Monica, PS2) (101,000)
10. MLB 07 The Show (SCE Studios San Diego, PS2) (79,000)

Earlier this year, Sony Computer Entertainment America used a screenshot from Bizarre Creations' Xbox 360-exclusive Project Gotham Racing 3 in order to promote its Connect download service. Apparently, somebody at Sony marketing confused the game with Sony's own Gran Turismo HD. Now, bafflingly, the exact same mistake has occurred again. Earlier today, a few sites noticed that a Spanish cross-promotion between Sony and auto manufacturer Kia shows a screenshot from Project Gotham Racing 3 being displayed on a widescreen television next to a PlayStation 3 unit. After the news had circulated, the image was swapped for one drawn from Gran Turismo HD, but TeamXbox managed to snag a capture, which it compares to the original screenshot.