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DS owners have been a bit put out with Square-Enix lately. Not because they aren't releasing good DS games, but the highly anticipated Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Dissidia are both exclusive to the stinking PSP. Why not the more popular DS?

Pocket Gamer, unlike most grousing forum dwellers, had the courage to take the DS question to Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core producers Hideki Imaizumi and Yoshinori Kitase. Their response is highly unexpected.

How much the product sells really depends on the game itself, who it's targeted to and all sorts of different factors. It's not really always about the hardware. Especially in terms of this game where the demographic was higher teens to young adults as opposed to small children. The PSP seemed closer to that demographic than DS in general. So we feel we really made the right choice.

We'll make a DS game called Brain Age: Final Fantasy for DS [laughs].

Er, wait, Square-Enix is still approaching the DS as a system for little kids and old ladies? How... 2006.

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So, the second game in the Professor Layton series is generally called Professor Layton and the Devil's Box in Japan. There's no way this name will stand for US release, because think of the children!. So what's the game going to be called over here? Well, a GameTap interview cinches it.

GameTap: Were there lessons you've learned along the path of creating Professor Layton and the Curious Village? And how did you apply them to the second title?

Hino-san: I learned that it's better to integrate the puzzles in the story.

In the first title, I was concerned that the puzzles which unrelated to the story abruptly appeared along with gameplay. So, for Pandora's Box [the second Layton title], we designed most of the puzzles to go along with the storyline. On top of that, for the puzzles related to the core part, the graphics were particularly created to match Professor Laytons world.

Hm. Professor Layton and Pandora's Box? Not a bad choice, actually.

There's a new Iwata Asks interview up, this one with Shigeru Miyamoto talking about Wii Fit and the production of the Wii Balance Board. Where Iwata's interview with Sakurai was... let's say, lucid and precise, the interview with Miyamoto is utter insanity. There are many digressions about Miyamoto's inspiration for the game, and how he treats his design teams. It kind of has to be read to be believed... here's a snippet to get you started.

Miyamoto: I used to play pachinko many years ago, but that stopped when I started swimming. Simply swimming without thinking about anything except how demanding it was had a similar effect to the stress relief I got from pachinko, which enabled me to escape the cycle of worries I had. Another thing I managed after quitting pachinko, was to stop smoking which also lead to better fitness. To be completely honest though, I don't really like being thought of as such a serious person. I mean, I didn't drink in the first place, and on top of that, I managed to quit smoking and get actively involved in doing sports, so I must seem like some kind of a role model! (laughs)

The game I'm really dying to play right now is Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for DS, which hits March 4th. Here's a Siliconera interview with the English language producer, Keith Dwyer to help you get psyched up, too... and explain the NA version's terrible, terrible boxart.

Speaking of tweaks the box art gives Shiren a different feel. ... He looks like a fierce warrior on the US box. Why the change?

Sometimes packaging needs to be revisited to communicate new features the game has, or to be appropriate for different market segments. With Shiren, we had a few things to consider; we had to create art that resonated with gamers in the US, but it also had to convey the new edge of this revamped version. ... It's a tough journey, and we wanted to portray that.

I appreciate good intentions, but to me you primarily portrayed "We hired a guy who can't draw very well."

Suda51 was in strangely restrained form for his latest interview with Edge, by which I mean no elaborate toilet-related metaphors. Still, he said some interesting things about the different versions of No More Heroes and the role of blood in action gaming.

In the action part of the game, the moment when Travis finishes his adversaries is quite bloody in the American version. Was that always OK with Nintendo?

Indeed it was. But its an important point that the game is different in different territories. The Japanese and European versions have no blood and you simply kill those enemies. The US version is the closest to my initial vision of the game. The issue of having blood spilt is an interesting one. Todays technology makes a very realistic visual experience possible, so does that mean blood has to be sprayed all around? Im not sure. There is, in terms of videogames, almost a natural absence of blood: you kill an enemy and thats all.

To round off an interviewful day, here's an excellent GameSpot talk with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. It's not so much that the questions are good, but that Iwata is unusually frank and willing to allow insight into why Nintendo does what it does. Probably the most interesting answer of the piece is Iwata's discussion of the success of the Wii in the US, so I'll tease you with that. The entire piece is really worth reading, though.

In retrospect, the US culture of the house party played a major role in spreading the value of Wii to a bigger circle faster than we ever predicted. All of my American friends keep telling me, "Man, the Wii is the ultimate party machine!" [Laughs] But none of that was intentional on our part. All we did was ask ourselves how to pack the most smiles and surprises into the product as we developed it. Fortunately, we hit a sweet spot. As a result, interest in the Wii has spread across the US surprisingly quickly. I think that explains why the DS took off faster in Japan, but the Wii has spread faster in America.

If Shigeru Miyamoto ever had to stop making games, would his replacement be Yoshiaki Koizumi? Edge sat down to have a talk with the increasingly influential Nintendo game designer about Super Mario Galaxy and many other things.

Indeed, Koizumis influence is focused on player experience. In all of the games Ive worked on, Id say I spent most of my time working on the player character, Koizumi says, but he cant help but note Miyamotos role once again. Miyamoto has taught me that if the player does not feel right, this can affect the whole game. The more things a player can do, the more possibilities are available for the game. A great example is Super Mario Bros. What if Mario couldnt jump? Even the lowliest Goomba would be unstoppable. But when he can jump, breaking blocks and stomping enemies becomes possible. So several new possibilities can open up from only one new ability. But of course, complexity can become higher. At Nintendo we call it player-based design. Its all about the balance between fun and complexity.

The world's finally ready for massive co-op RPG titles like Dungeon Explorer, a game that was hopelessly ahead of its time on the TurboGrafx-16. The DS and PSP revival, Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts, is promising hack n' slash RPG action, online multiplayer with both random and friend code match-ups, and both voice and text chat when you play with a friend. This is pretty sweet and the Siliconera interview has good info, but what's most interesting to me is a little question toward the end...

Is Hudson considering reviving more TurboGrafx-16 franchises? Personally, I would love a new Bonk or Air Zonk game! Neutopia would be a great fit for the DS too.

We are definitely reviving more TurboGrafx franchises! As you know Hudson has a large library of titles that we can draw from. Look for announcements in the coming months.

Is it a coincidence that this happens once TurboGrafx-16 titles are available on a popular hardware platform that frees them of collector's market prices? I think not.

I'm convinced Ninja Gaiden DS is going to be a really good game, and not because I think Itagaki and Team Ninja are somehow incapable of making bad games. Whenever they discuss this particular title, there's an attention to details about the game that make it sound wonderful in a concrete sense.

Take for instance, this interview Cubed3's Adam Riley conducted with the infamous Itagaki. He discloses a lot of very specific details about Dragon Sword that sound both really great and the kind of thing only superior games consider. He also talks about the possibility of a Wii Ninja Gaiden, but it's up to you to figure out how serious he's being.

AR: Finally, and obviously everyone is eager to know this answer  if Dragon Sword is successful, will gamers get their wish of Ninja Gaiden in any form, new or old, on Wii?

Itagaki-san: If I were to attempt that, I would need to fundamentally change the mechanisms of the core gameplay. This is not just a matter of simply using Nunchuk control. At any rate, Ill go ahead and think about the possibilities, if for no other reason than to train my brain.

I kinda wonder why no one thought of doing this sooner-- I guess feeling about system flipping runs pretty high in the enthusiast press. Regardless, MSNBC actually found a Wii flipper and interviewed him about how he got into the "hobby" and why he doesn't feel bad about exploiting the impatient. He apparently is of the camp convinced that if you couldn't find a Wii in 2007, it's because you were stupid or lazy:

Q. How did you find these things? I've gotten dozens of e-mails from people--good people, decent, hard-working people--who waited in pre-dawn lines, in sleet and snow. Were you bribing people at the Fred Meyer?

A. I'm telling you, the whole point was the timing. These people were not waiting in line in mid-November. That's their problem. They might have been asking casually at the store, but they weren't systematically looking at when these stores got their shipments. People are told to start shopping for Christmas during Thanksgiving, and that's what people did.

Reading the interview, I was struck by how lousy the extra cash he was making had to be compared to the time and effort he was investing in flipping. $55 per bundle? Lousy.