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[Director Makoto Shibata (Fatal Frame) talks to our Christian Nutt about the inspiration for his West-targeted PS3/Xbox 360 shooter Quantum Theory, and details Tecmo's internal development process and plans.]

Tecmo has been one of the most consistently successful Japanese developers in appealing to a Western audience -- with its Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden franchises, as well as the lesser but notable success of its cult survival horror franchise Fatal Frame. This is so true that Koei Tecmo president says he sees Tecmo as the part of the merged company which will teach Koei how to appeal to Westerners.

Makoto Shibata, director of the company's upcoming Quantum Theory, worked on the Fatal Frame games but now has a bigger mission: to create a third person shooter that can appeal to a broad Western audience, not a select one.

A fan of Western games and a man with an eye for detail, he's serving up a PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 title which seems to owe a great deal in inspiration to Western titles -- particularly Epic's Gears of War.

The game does have a Japanese sensibility, too -- your AI partner isn't another lumbering soldier, but a lithe female warrior who dashes in for Devil May Cry-style combo attacks. Shibata calls out Japanese games -- Resident Evil 4 and his company's own Ninja Gaiden -- as influences.

Two years into its development, the game is due early next year. We tracked down Shibata and discussed the development processes and technical decisions Tecmo made with the title, and its influences and aims:

It's still pretty rare for a Japanese developer to make a shooter, so I was wondering, are you a big fan of the genre? How did you come to make the decision to make a game like this?

Makoto Shibata: Yeah, I am a big action fan -- a big third person shooter fan. But looking at it from the company as well, we have action games; we have fighting games like Dead or Alive. So as sort of the next challenge for us as a company to take on, we thought a third-person shooter would be the way to go.

And this is your own engine for this game, right? You developed it all internally?

MS: Yes.

Last year, I spoke to Kikuchi-san about sharing some of the Team Ninja tech across Tecmo; has that progressed at all within the company?

MS: We definitely looked at the Ninja Gaiden engine, but this is for an action TPS, so it's a little bit different; we can't just reuse things as-is. So we have essentially come up with this on our own. We of course looked at the Ninja Gaiden engine for technical knowhow -- to borrow some of that knowhow and ask them how they do things, but it's not like we're using their tech.

You announced the game last year, but it wasn't playable.

MS: Yeah, there wasn't anything at the Tokyo Game Show last year that, game-wise, we could really show. We were still working on the engine at that point. We started from the engine, so just doing that work, even before it became a game, laying the ground-level work of making the engine took up quite a bit of time. Other third-person shooters and first-person shooters use a lot of middleware, and we're not doing that; so we had to sort of take our time to make it as we went along.

Did you consider using any middleware solutions and then decide not to, or did you feel that you wanted to develop your own technology from the start?

MS: We wanted to do it from the start; we wanted to make our own. We looked at some middleware, but in the end we decided to make it all on our own. It's worth it to make our own engine. That's what we felt.

How did you tie that into your game design process? Are you document-oriented, or prototype-oriented?

MS: There are of course areas where we planned it out on paper first, but since we were coming up with the engine -- literally everything from scratch -- it's sort of been adding to that as we go along, seeing what our needs are, and putting them into the engine. Even within Tecmo, this sort of development style is kind of different.

Since this is the first current-generation game for your team, it's probably a different process than you would follow for the next game. The next time, you'll actually have your technology set from the beginning, I'm guessing.

MS: Yeah, once the engine gets completed, we should be able to take ourselves back to more thinking about things before and planning it out before putting it into the game.

In Japanese game development I often see the concept of "planning" as a job, including production work, managing schedules and managing schedules alongside gameplay design. In America it's more split out, so some people are producers and some people are gameplay designers. How does planning work within your studio?

MS: Really, to sum it up, it's the guy who's thinking about how to make the game fun. Once you have sort of that idea -- what's going to be fun -- you look at that and say, "Okay, well what parts do we need?"

You talk to the audio, you talk to the graphics, you get the models; put them together. The planner can look at that and say whether that's what he was aiming for or not, and you can fix for that. When you're talking about basing things on a paper plan, the planner can sit down there, and that's what you're looking for; the core of the game -- what's going to make it fun. You set that there at that time.

How much documentation is typically written for a game like this? There's a lot of debate in America about how much is right, these days.

MS: There's documentation that the planner will come up with in the beginning for the concept, and that sort of becomes the core. Then, as the game progresses, in order to make sure that everybody is still on the same page, we do have some documentation that gets updated regularly for, you know, feature sets and the way things should play out. Internally, we have like a wiki page for the project, and that's the design document that has the topics for the various teams to look at, and gets updated as the game progresses.

Since this is aimed for the Western market, did you guys actually do any focus testing in the West, or any sort of user experience, or anything like that?

MS: Not official focus tests, but we were listening to sort of the opinions of our U.S. office and the people over there -- we get feedback from them.

When you're making a game like this -- more of a shooter -- is there a way to make the genre more appealing to a Japanese audience? Why do you think the Japanese audience just hasn't gotten really super interested in the genre?

MS: I'm not really sure. I'm also curious about why Japanese people haven't taken to shooters as well. I think that shooters are accepted -- you know, Resident Evil sells really well over here. So people are familiar with them; it's not like they hate them. But yeah, others just haven't taken off.

I was talking to Rex Ishibashi, who is the president of EA Japan, and he said that Western games only account for 5 percent of the Japanese market. That's a very small percentage.

MS: We think games from overseas are very high quality, so looking at the kind of stuff that they're doing now, I think that you're going to see more of a percentage and more growth in Japan for overseas games.

Do you feel like there are design elements and techniques coming out of Western games that you didn't see coming out of Japanese games, that you feel do appeal to a Japanese audience -- maybe if they were just presented in a different way?

MS: There are good points and bad points to Western games, but you look at a game like Fallout 3 and the kinds of things that you're doing within Fallout 3 -- it's an RPG, and you're going around an open world... You would think that Japanese players would like that. Maybe there's something about the setting and the world view and the look of the game that they don't like; we're not sure. But as far as game design goes, that just seems like it would be very appealing to a Japanese audience.

Quantum Theory is specifically targeted to a Western audience, but you're going to put it out in Japan as well, right?

MS: Yeah, it's going to come out here as well.

Do you have an expectation that maybe, because it comes from a Japanese team that has a lot of influence from Western games, it might actually get a better reception?

MS: Yeah, yeah. With the character design, the action elements -- we think those will appeal to a Japanese audience. When you're looking at even the visual design, we think that there's a Japanese design sense in here that informs the overall look and feel of the stages. We think Western games look gorgeous; they obviously have excellent visuals and all of that. But we want to try something that a Japanese audience would like and make it just as pretty and just as powerful as Western games.

Way back when you were making the Fatal Frame games, they were more popular in America than maybe people expected at first. Did the inspiration to make this game come from previous experience in the West, or did it come from just your desire to challenge yourself and see if you could do that deliberately?

MS: It's kind of a little bit of both. Obviously, we had success in the West, so we knew that was a possibility; and the Western market is bigger than the Japanese market, so from a business sense we wanted to succeed in the West. But it's also that I like third person shooters. I like shooters, so I wanted to make a game that I like.

Making a horror game and making a third-person shooter are very different; the process is very different. With a horror game, you're trying to control the player's emotions; you control the way they think -- the way they feel. For a third person shooter, it's more about the mechanics and responsiveness and how the game's being played. So the way you're looking for and what you're looking at are very different.

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week, we examine two different versions of panicked, squeaky-clean PSP title Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!]

There's been an odd glut of tongue-in-cheek Japanese games based on 16bit RPGs recently, games like Half Minute Hero and 3D Dot Heroes. I've already picked my favourite. I like it because it's about PANIC.

I love panic in games. That icy pang of realisation, the blitz of thoughts that follows, the test of keeping your cool. In panic you can find such easy access to that magical realm where the only things in existence are you and the game. And it's such a useful design tool!

Resident Evil 4 was full of boring bits like rooms where nothing happens or having to retrace your steps to stick a stone donkey tail on a carving of a donkey, but nobody noticed because those moments were respite from panic. Inaction became soothing, and a masterful action game became a game of the year.

My favourite of the comedy 16bit reimaginings, then: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a PSP series which gives you the task of digging out a dungeon with the aim of killing the heroes that habitually raid it. The original game isn't great, but the sequel is, and that's getting released in America in Spring 2010 with the majestic title of Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! Time to Tighten Up Security.

The first game (out now in America as Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?) is so impoverished in terms of content it resembles a prototype, which probably explains why it didn't get a boxed English language release and can currently be found in the shiny blue limbo of the Playstation Store.

And yeah, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! does panic very, very well. Here's how it works:

You play the overlord of a 16bit RPG dungeon, which you view from a side-on perspective like you would an ant farm. The game is in digging out earth to create the tunnels and chambers of your dungeon while keeping it populated with monsters.

Every so often a bunch of nosy jerks known as 'Heroes' will come crashing through your front door, and the game asks where in your existing excavations you want to hide. The game is lost if the heroes find your squealing avatar and manage to drag him, trussed up like a common criminal, back to the surface.

Midnight Soil

What's alarming about this? Well, the way you enlist monsters, for one. Certain tiles of dirt contain nutrients, or, after a hero has cast a spell near them, magic. The more nutrients or magic in a square, the higher level the monster that comes staggering out when you dig out that tile. Fine. Except all but the lowest level slimes and sprites need to eat lower level monsters to survive and reproduce. You're not just filling your dungeon with employees, you're managing a fragile ecosystem, and nature runs its course so fast you're always returning to view parts of your dungeon to find they've changed.

Your lizardmen might have eaten all the dogs in their area and are starving as a result, or your faeries have reproduced like bunnies and set up shop where you were planning to lure a dragon. The exception to this rule is when you want the inevitable to happen for the purposes of something like evolution, whereupon you'll watch predator and pray avoid one another like opposing genders at a school prom. And that's not even the bad news.

Because your only real means of interacting with the world is permanently digging out these tiles, Badman's quirk is that, like a Go board, you only have a limited number of moves to choose from. While most defence games have you building, Badman gets you subtracting.

The irony is that the ultimate protection, 1000 feet of packed dirt, is there from the start, but you need to hide. So you dig down, dig deeper, always chipping away at your options and always panicking because of the acute awareness that you're backing yourself into a corner and sooner or later those heroes are gonna come for you.

Graveyard Humour

Did I mention you need to dig fast? The time frame on each party of heroes arriving is agonisingly tight, so you're often slicing out serpentine tunnels by holding down the dig button and sliding your pickaxe over the screen, praying you don't screw up that delicate ecosystem. You do, of course, and worse besides.

Whether you're extending your dungeon or cutting out delicious nutrient-rich tiles for the monsters within, you'll end up turning blind corners into smooth curves, putting safe spots in killzones and (most embarrassingly of all) knocking down walls and creating shortcuts that let heroes bypass whole areas of your dungeon.

And so you panic. You panic because there's no save, and your dungeon is in ruins, and you don't want to start the level again, and-- oh, mercy! Oh, mother! Here they come!

I'm a big fan of games which invisibly force you into role-playing your character through mechanics alone, so it makes me pretty happy when you end up every bit the bumbling villain in Badman. As a player you'll brood, you'll giggle, you'll hatch plots (the game's too fast-paced for any grand strategy, so hatch you must) and you'll panic when your schemes don't work out, most likely because you ruined them yourself. I love it.

Click here for a trailer and a little more info on Time To Tighten Up Security. And remember, don't bother with the first game! It's not being All It Can Be. Save yourself for this.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

[In his latest GameSetWatch-exclusive interview, Jeriaska talks to two veteran Square Enix translators on the intriguing history of localization at the Final Fantasy creator and their work on classic titles like Vagrant Story.]

At the most recent Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Kajiya Productions gave a presentation on their work localizing Japanese games into English. Operated by Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder, the two translators have also worked in novels, manga, and anime.

The team is perhaps best known for having had a hand at various times in bringing to life the English-language dialog of such Yasumi Matsuno-inspired Square Enix titles as Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions.

In this interview, the writers offer their insights into the advantages of paving an independent course as freelancers, having previously worked in-house at the Tokyo-based Final Fantasy developer. The discussion delves into the evolution of the Square localization strategy, from the early days of the Playstation console.

Also influential to the development of Kajiya Productions has been the experience of working with the music department of Square Enix. The interview sheds light on Smith and Reeder's work translating lyrics into English and even lending their voices to game audio projects. The informal talk provides some background on the challenges underlying localizing Japanese games with sung and spoken word, rich story and characterization.

Alexander O. Smith at the Penny Arcade Expo

Last time in the Square Haven interview you had mentioned that ironically while in-house there are often greater obstacles to communicating your needs as localizers directly to game designers. Do you find there are a number of distinct advantages to working freelance?

Alexander O. Smith: I would say there are far more benefits than disadvantages, especially in terms of flexibility. The problem with working in a company is that you’re subject to their stratified structure. You’re basically forced to only talk to certain people and go through all the official channels.

When I was working as an employee, we would have a meeting and they would say, “You’re going to be working on this with this person.” And if you wanted to change it, you had to go smoke cigarettes with someone. I don’t even smoke and I would willingly sit in the smoking room, inhaling secondhand smoke in an attempt to curry favor.

On Final Fantasy XII, I was already freelance at that point that [Yasumi] Matsuno tapped me for that game. When it came time to do the translation I got to grab [Joe], and we got to pick our own editor, Morgan Rushton. That was huge, because we knew there was going to be a lot of British English in the game. As a freelance localizer, they treat you like a business partner, as opposed to the indentured servant that you are when you’re in-house.

Joseph Reeder: Of course working for a company and then going freelance gives you a lot more clout as a freelancer.

AOS: You can make your needs known to the development team in a much more direct way. There's also flexibility of place. Even when I worked at Square I would as much as possible take my laptop and go to a café or something. There’s nothing conducive to being creative inside four gray walls. (The worst problem was there was no oxygen in the Meguro building. You’re sitting there kind of wheezing the whole day.)

In a perfect world we would have complete control over every element of the game development process for the English-language version, but that’s never the case. Half of our job is pursuing a vision and executing it well. The other half is compromising and picking your battles. There are definitely some battles where Joe and I have said, “Okay, this is the hill we’ll die on.”

You've both worked on a number of the same Square Enix game localizations, but how long have you been collaborating in this company?

JR: We’ve been working together on Kajiya Productions for just over a year now. July 31st of last year I left Square and moved to the United States.

AOS: I started it as an idea back when I was working at Square. It was a known secret that I was working for other companies at the time, just doing editing work and other stuff like that. I knew that I would eventually go freelance, and it’s very beneficial to actually have contacts outside of the company when you do break out.

It was also brought on by the development schedule. When I arrived at Square we would have half a year of intense work, working nineteen-hour days, and half a year of doing nothing. There just were not that many games, especially before the Square-Enix merger. We actually had too many localizers.

JR: Since you don’t have control over exactly when the Japanese is going to be at a point where they can assign someone to translate it, inevitably you get these really long downtimes.

AOS: Because I couldn’t list my name on the credits when I edited The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. I signed my name as AO Kajiya: My first two initials, plus "Kajiya" which is "blacksmith" in Japanese.

Joseph Reeder at PAX

Many of your localizations have been for Yasumi Matsuno titles, who is known to put an intense amount of effort into research for his literary and historical references. Is it especially demanding working on the translation of a Matsuno game like Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy XII?

JR: It is a little more demanding than your average run-of-the-mill Japanese game in that there is more of a sense of pressure to live up to it.

AOS: You do set a much higher bar for yourself. In terms of translation it’s usually a breath of fresh air. He’s very good at writing terse dialog—he’s not wordy. It’s a blessing, because Japanese RPG’s are all about talking and talking and talking. The first day you’re on the game, he will send you a preliminary glossary with all the character names and their backgrounds. There are literally paragraphs and paragraphs of text on each character.

JR: When we first got the voice scripts, there were pages of notes before you even got to any dialog, talking about background and what was going on. Obviously that’s all stuff that does not directly show up in the game, but it influences the level designers, the artists, everybody.

AOS: We then have to reconstruct a framework for this English version of the world. If you know how people are related, and that this guy came from this region, it really helps you construct something with a feel of realism.

When did you first meet with him in person?

AOS: There were English-language parts in the Japanese game that were easter eggy. For instance there were evolutionary scale rankings that you got if you went through the game and got certain achievements. I remember the first time I went into speak with Matsuno, he talked very quietly and he wouldn’t slow down at all. I had to lean in a little bit. He was looking for silly ranks that you’d basically feel insulted by, and one of the lower ranks I suggested was “platypus.” He smiled at that.

At what point did you feel that the game designers at Square were getting the message that your work as localizers deserved more consideration than it had received previously?

AOS: Vagrant Story was the first Square game that got recognition for its localization after the post-[Ted] Woolsey rough period. I was not very subtle about printing out reviews and giving them to the people that I thought would care, because they didn’t read English periodicals. You sort of had to be a lone gunman, out for yourself, in those times, just letting people know you were doing something important. “People are seeing us as part of the company, so treat us as part of the company.”

Does he have an ear for English?

JR: I think so. If you look at his class names or weapon names, you have do far less adaptation of the original Japanese to get it to a usable form in the English.

AOS: He’s very interested in Western fantasy, far more than any of the other developers. I’m sure he’s read the Japanese translation of every major fantasy work in English, because he’s always drawing from things there. A lot of the preliminary work on Vagrant Story involved going over to Europe and taking photos of French castle towns.

You've spoken about game director Takashi Tokita having supported your efforts to improve the localization standards at Square. It seems he must have a crazy sense of humor, because his games Hanjuku Hero and Live A Live are totally off-the-wall.

AOS: Yeah, in a great way. We actually started this thing called the "Maniac Nabé." Basically we’d watch crazy videos and eat nabé that were also kind of crazy... chocalate nabé. Me, Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda of AltJapan would bring American stuff that the Japanese guys hadn’t been exposed to, like the early Æon Flux stuff. Actually, Tokita-san and [Michio] Okamiya-san played guitar and bass at my wedding reception. That’s why I’m on one of the [Black Mages] albums saying, “Maybe I’m a lion.”

No kidding, that’s you?

AOS: Yeah, my non-game spoken performance.

You’ve both worked with the music department at Square Enix. Is it true that you’ve even recorded vocals?

JR: Yeah, mine were for a game project that had been canceled, but they used it for a compilation.

That track is Ryo Yamazaki’s “Feel Gravity” on the Official Bootleg Compilation Volume 2?

AOS: That’s right, you were doing some techno.

JR: Some techno ambient songs—I’m on iTunes. I had never done music before, in the least, so it was a unique opportunity. I was sitting in my cube working on FF XII at the time and I got the call to come down to record for a couple hours. Half of one floor in the Shinjuku building is dedicated to their sound department, and so everyone there has their own little studio. I got to tweak the lyrics before my performance.

AOS: That's very cool. My involvement with the music has been more incidental--mostly because I happened to be there when they needed somebody who was fluent in English. I have a musical background, and I translated “Melodies of Life.” That was composed in Hawaii, where the FF IX team was at that time.

If you know the lyrics for [Final Fantasy VIII's] “Eyes on Me,” it’s not really English English, though it works great. The first draft of “Melodies of Life,” the theme song for Final Fantasy IX, I don’t think even worked as well, so they had me do some rewriting. Later they called me in to the studio to help [Emiko] Shiratori-san with pronunciation.

Shiratori in fact sung that song at the 2008 Press Start Symphony of Games concert, alternating between both the English and Japanese lyrics.

AOS: That’s awesome. I basically had to sing the song for her, and that then became my job at Square. Whenever they had a recording, I would rehearse the part for Japanese singers.

The other thing is I did vocals for “Otherworld,” [a battle theme in Final Fantasy X.] First of all I rapped that section, and then the singer said it over my voice. You can actually hear both of our voices in the rap. My voice is also overlaid on top of that as an announcer, saying “Go!” It was all kinds of cheese, but it was fun.

JR: There’s also the two songs for Final Fantasy X-2, which Brian [Gray] worked on, “1000 words and “Real Emotion.”

AOS: There, I was working as a moderator, keeping Brian’s vision for the song aligned with Avex Trax’s concerns, who basically wanted something that was easy for the singer to pronounce. They didn’t want stuff that Japanese people couldn’t get a handle on. The final lyrics were decided in a two-hour meeting with Avex.

JR: As all good lyrics are. Originally the English lyrics were sung by Koda Kumi, but we felt that because it’s supposed to be Yuna singing—or Lenne (Yuna’s doppelganger)—having that voice have a Japanese accent from the game’s perspective wasn’t working. So ultimately it was Sweetbox who sang the US version.

On the subject of voice recordings, what process goes into finding actors like Gideon Emery and Kari Wahlgren? There are some great performances in Final Fantasy XII

AOS: We were very pleasantly surprised, though we did spend a long time on casting with the voice director Jack Fletcher. Voice on XII represented 7% of the total text volume of the game, and we spent the first nine months doing voice. When I play it now, there are one or two words I would change, but that's about it.

For the main roles we would have thirty people audition for each role and have to listen through mp3 files. From those we picked roughly top five and the voice director had a few picks. He had contacts in theater and for all the minor roles we went with stage actors, a lot of people that had never done voice acting for games before.

JR: We did remote recording through an ISDN line connected to London while we were in the studio in LA. I think it gives it a different vibe than you get from most videogames. I'm also so glad we didn't go for a woman for the voice of Larsa, [voiced by Johnny McKeown, son of Tracy Ullman.]

AOS: The interstitial dialog is amazing. The characters sound Shakespearean because they're all Shakespearean actors. Since many of them were in London with no video reference, we would have to read the lines to the actor over the ISDN connection to the pacing that fit the lips. It's funny because everyone's blindfolded. One team is describing the elephant and the other team is painting the elephant.

You did work on War of the Lions, the localization of Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, which was originally Matsuno’s first game for Square. Had you been exposed to the notorious North American Playstation localization?

JR: I had a friend in the US that was playing it at the time and he would call me and quote a particularly hilarious screen.

AOS: There are actually some quotes in FF XII relating back to the FFT translation.

When is that?

JR: If you listen carefully in a particular scene between Ashe and Basch, you can hear Vaan, Penelo and Larsa goofing off in the background with lines from the original FFT translation such as "I got a good feeling!" and "This is the way!"

AOS: I try to get a "spoony bard" in every game.

What are your thoughts on Ted Woolsey's contribution to the history of Square game scripts during the SNES era?

JR: A lot of people online complained that he wasn’t literal enough or that he took too many liberties, but I think that’s ridiculous. At the time it was a great localization. He was way ahead of the curve at the time.

A number of his choices appear to have had a lasting impact. For instance, no one campaigns to have "Terra" called "Tina." Tactics rolled back some of the Woolseyisms, like “Mogris” in place of his “Moogles,” and it read markedly worse.

JR: And also on VII. That definitely proved to be a step in the wrong direction.

AOS: To set the record straight, from Brian Bell’s account on VII the head translator had only a month to do it. I’m amazed that Woolsey managed to do what he did, because in my first two years at Square much of my time was spent creating some semblance of order in the chaos and making sure development knew what we needed. Up until that point it was a free-for-all. We would get a copy of the game, and we would say, “Well, what about files?” And they would say, “Oh, I don’t think you need those.” So we all bought Game Sharks.

Literally on Final Fantasy VIII we were playing our own game and hacking it with Game Sharks for the translation. It was very sad. While for Final Fantasy XII we got mpegs of all the gameplay and movies to reference them. In the space of six years it’s definitely progress.

[Find out more about Kajiya Productions on the official website. This article is available in French at FFWorld. Images courtesy of Square Enix. Photos by Jeriaska]

Publisher Rockin' Android has already made an impression amongst "doujin' fans for packing its summer/fall release schedule with four shooters (Qualia and Suguri Perfect Edition already out, two more on the way), but the company doesn't plan to limit its scope to simply localizing Japanese PC titles.

Along with its plans to secure licensing on more independent Japanese games like RosenKreuzStillette, Dread Lock, Crescent Pale Mist, and Big Bang Beat, Rockin' Android also wants to eventually bring its titles to console download services.

"Porting our games over to Xbox Live, PSN and WiiWare has always been part of the plan," Rockin' Android's president Enrique Galvez told gaming blog Siliconera. "We made a splash at Comic-Con International recently and received a lot of attention from the big guys, so it’s in the works for next year. Sadly, I can’t say too much yet."

Galvez didn't specify when the company hopes to pursue these plans, but with an already busy schedule ahead of it, I suspect Rockin' Android won't jump into these plans for some time.

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Starting up another week of GameSetLinks, we begin with Michael Abbott taking a look at Spider, an iPhone title that's worth looking at from a design perspective as well as, uhh, just fun.

Also in this set of links - a discussion of music games and how over they may or may not be, a moral code for game development looked at, plus a look back at BBS Door games, analysis of whether The Long Tail is truly working in the plethora of current digital titles, and more.

Slanderous myths:

The Brainy Gamer: Emerging
Good discussion of Spider, which is easily one of the most interesting iPhone games released so far, and is doing pretty well in the charts, too.

The Bottom Feeder: Rock Band. Guitar Hero. Why They Are Doomed.
'Someday, we will look back on the Great Music Game Fad and remember the glut of titles and the mountains of instruments at Best Buy and the $299 video game controller and go, "Wow, what was that all about?" and laugh and laugh and laugh.'

Ascii Dreams: Towards a Moral Code for Game Designers
'I suggest there should be a moral code for game designers: one which provides clear examples of the boundaries of which a game design should be careful straying beyond.'

BBS door games: Social Gaming innovation from the 1980s | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)
Absolutely great article: 'If there’s one thing to be learned from the BBS games and their related cousins, MUDs, is that great social interactions can trump pretty much everything else.'

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : The New Age of Games That Got Away
An interesting point by Parish: 'Haven't you noticed? More and more often, quality Japanese games are failing to make their way west.'

Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » The Hits Get Bigger
Great piece: 'With rare exception... the Long Tail primarily benefits platform holders and the creators of hit content, not the broader creative community.'

[Talking to big sister site Gamasutra as part of a wider article on publishing Japanese games in the West, GaijinWorks' quixotic Victor Ireland has been getting specific on advance amounts and his plans to return to game publishing - always interesting to hear what he's planning.]

After 17 years as president of Working Designs, a localization house for niche Japanese games, Victor Ireland launched Redding, CA-based GaijinWorks in 2006.

These last three years, the company has functioned as a "localization developer," most recently on Hudson's Miami Law, according to Ireland, who is the company's president. But he intends to begin publishing "eventually, perhaps in the next 18 months to two years," he says, focusing -- like XSeed and Atlus -- on RPGs.

These days the niche he intends to join is a much more crowded one than when he headed up his former company, "but there is still a huge amount of software in Japan that doesn't get licensed. So, yes, it's more competitive, but if you really know where to look, there's a wealth of titles available."

To be successful, Ireland explains, it takes the tenacity to play through the games to make sure you know what you're getting up front, it takes the ability to speak Japanese, and it takes a confidence in your ability to pick a good game. "If you have all three, the risk is low," he says.

Ireland isn't as reluctant as his competitors when it comes to discussing the cost of licensing Japanese games.

"For an A or B+ title -- not an AAA title -- it can go anywhere from $100,000 to as high as $800,000 depending on the game," he reports. "That's the minimum guarantee. If the title is a hit, you could wind up paying an additional two to four million dollars in royalties."

"But if you're doing the developer's first game, if they are a small company, if they are hungry to license, then the cost could be less. And there are different kinds of deals -- revenue-sharing or upfront deals; there are a million ways to slice it. It really depends on your negotiating skills."

It also depends on how much the developer trusts the licensee and whether this is the first time they are working together or it is an old relationship. Or the relationship could be with another company that is close to the licensor.

"There are really too many small developers in Japan for you to be tight with all of them," says Ireland. "But if you know the right people, you can get the 'golden introduction,' which is almost the same thing. If you can get a good introduction from someone who has the trust of the developer you're pursuing, then 'bam' -- you're instantly up on the relationship meter."

"So we have relationships with well-established companies that are willing to introduce us to the licensors. In Japan that goes a long way, and is certainly better than cold-calling. If you think you can cold call, you're really fighting a tough battle."

It's a challenging sector to join, the pros agree. It takes experience, lots of connections, and at least a half-million dollars or more just to get your feet wet, says Ireland.

You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including further comments from Atlus and XSeed executives on the state of the publishing market for Japanese games in the West.