Last night's Elite Beat Agents 2 rumor has us dreaming of a songlist for the possibly-upcoming title. If such a sequel existed, or might exist (please?), we couldn't possibly guess all of the tracks ... but from some of the classics in the first -- memorable songs with a strong beat -- we may be able to guess a few. If nothing else, we can wish. So get to wishing, folks. What would you like to see in a sequel?

Agents are ... go!

Elite Beat Agents built a reputation on many things: colorful characters, marvelous music, and, on later difficulties, the combination of soul-crushing challenge and those godforsaken spin markers. But look beyond that shiny veneer and you'll see above all an incredibly unique game, one that takes advantage of the DS's touch-screen capabilities arguably better than any other title on the system.

And it's a hell of a lot of fun. Give the game a spin for just a few minutes and you'll see what I mean, as part of Elite Beat Agents's charm is its bite-sized gameplay. Take one of the many songs for a ride and you'll get a glimpse of nearly everything the game has to offer, with the frantic tapping, circling, and groovy beats the title is known for. It's okay to dance with your DS. I don't judge.

Can you feel the music? Come along with this week's edition of Gaming to Go and see why exuberant dancing can solve all of the world's problems.

Whenever the topic of internationally developed homebrew DS games comes up, as it often does among hip and attractive people, most people in "the scene" immediately think of France, whose homebrew community rivals North America's in both size and production. You'll see an occasional release from other countries, such as Spain or Korea, but you'll rarely see much activity elsewhere.

But what about Japan's scene? For a country with so many DSes and a strong independent game development community, outside of Infantile Paralysiser's MoonShell media player, we've hardly seen any DS homebrew projects cross the Pacific. Where are all the doujin developers?

At least one programmer in Japan has been working on creating games for the DS, and we're bringing him out of the shadows to highlight three of his projects, likely games that you've never even heard of, let alone seen. If you're interested in homebrew development at all, you definitely need to pay attention to MeRAMAN!

We actually enjoy playing our DS in the car quite a bit. In fact, one of us even went so far as to enjoy playing Puzzle Quest at red lights while behind the wheel. It's a dangerous obsession that not only threatens our own lives, but those of everyone else in the world. It's the nature of the beast, we suppose.

So imagine our surprise when we read this little piece and totally realized we could output our DS's sound to our car speakers, almost providing a surround sound experience. Sure, we have headphones for when we're trying to get our dual-screen on out in the wild, but sometimes they're uncomfortable. This just seems like an incredibly obvious thing we never thought of ourselves. We can totally picture playing Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents in this manner.

If you are missing out on a DS game or GBA game and don't feel like paying retail, know that Circuit City is having a huge sale right now. The problem so far has been that an entire list of the games on sale had not been available anywhere online. That is, until now.

Selling select games such as Final Fantasy IV Advance and Mario Tennis: Power Tour on the GBA, along with DS titles such as Elite Beat Agents and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (get a loved one involved) for $8.96 a piece, we're wondering if this is perhaps the biggest sale we've seen yet. So, get down to your local Circuit City and get to the stock while it still lasts.

[Via QJ]

One thing you can count on for any decently successful rhythm game: someone will figure out a way to make a free PC clone. First there was Stepmania for DDR players, then there was Frets on Fire for Guitar Hero shredders and now there's Osu! for Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents fans.

The public beta, available since yesterday, does a remarkable job of capturing the tap-out-the-rhythm gameplay of the DS games, though the dancing cheerleaders have been replaced with static videos for each song. You can build your own levels or download over 100 "beatmaps" of primarily J-Pop songs that were made by testers.

Casual fans beware -- a lot of these fan-designed levels are killer, though there is an easy mode that makes things a little more manageable. Even if you're a master at the DS games, using the mouse takes a little getting used to. Then again, if you have a tablet PC, it's probably just like the DS games. Except, er, bigger.

Keiichi Yano of iNiS has a unique perspective on the Japanese and American game industries. His company remade their game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! into a new game whose references and music are more famililar to Western audiences; now Japanese shops are importing the resulting game, Elite Beat Agents, for Japanese sale. In addition, as discussed in this interview with Gamasutra's Christian Nutt, iNiS has been licensing their nFactor2 engine out to developers for use in Xbox 360 games-- a move that, to be honest, would seem to have more benefit to the American market.

Furthermore, the genre to which he contributed so much-- music games-- now has an American juggernaut in Guitar Hero that threatens to subsume all other music games (except Rock Band, which is a direct descendant of Guitar Hero) in the public's consciousness.

We'd listen to anything Keiichi Yano had to say based only on our teary-eyed devotion to Gitaroo-Man. Luckily, he's actually interesting in this interview about music games, middleware, and international game development. Readers-- are-- GO!

No doubt communicating to Gamasutra via boisterous cartoon speech bubbles, Keiichi Yano of the annoyingly capitalized iNiS confirmed that his team is currently working on an unnamed Xbox 360 project. "Yeah. We are currently working on a title," he said when prodded about Microsoft's console during Seattle's GameFest event. "I can't really get into it more than, 'Yes, we're working on something!'"

With iNiS' past creations consisting of feel-good rhythm games such as Gitarooman, the Ouendan series and Elite Beat Agents, said something could easily involve catchy tunes, rhythmic button presses and unintentional gyration. We're certain the iNiS co-founder isn't pressed for ideas, but even if he was, he'd only need to holler for help. The strange men leaping out of his closet in response would probably share some sort of song about putting Gitarooman on Xbox Live Arcade ("it was the best decision ever made!").

If your DS has been lacking the sustenance that new DS game cartridges provide, then you might be able to feed the beast with Circuit City's newest sale. For every DS game you purchase, you can get another game at half-off. Maybe you've been holding off on picking up Elite Beat Agents or checking out Sonic Rush, waiting for a more opportune time to purchase. Well, seems about as good a time as any to us.

[Thanks, Gabriel!]

Alex Ward isn't going to appreciate me saying this, but I recently beat Elite Beat Agents. In one sitting, I might add. If you've ever read one, you'd know that a typical video game manual generally frowns upon such protracted play sessions, urging you to take a break every hour and go stare at something that isn't comprised of polygons. That seemed like terrible advice at the time, and for two very good reasons.

The first, being the one most concerned with my personal health, was that severing the connection and stepping outside would result in a sudden depressurization and my intimate inspection of a churning jet engine. Perhaps this would have been the superior option had I packed Lost in Blue for the 5-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles, but I wisely went with Nintendo's music-and-rhythmer instead. The second reason then, was that I found myself far too enthralled to even consider giving up for a moment -- not even when I was losing.

Straight from ~Zsy's DeviantArt account, it's Elite Street Agents. Of course, without the outer circle moving inwards and hipsters in suits tapping funky grooves, the effect is lost. Check out the highlights for today:

Joystiquery
The Joystiq E3 2007 Awards
Today's newest input device video: Slide Adventure

News
Persona 3 delayed until Aug. 14
Variety: Ubisoft's Heroes game likely revealed this weekend
Xbox 360's Virtua Fighter 5 slated for October 30th
America's Army coming to arcades
Heavenly Sword demo in NA this week too
Richard Garriott calls for MMO devs to innovate
Sony's Peter Dille: 'We're attacking online very, very aggressively'
Project Sylpheed DLC: Free, but pulled; Vampire Rain DLC: Free, but pointless
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue producer reveals online features
Warhound: open-ended FPS headed to Xbox 360, PC in 2008
Shadowrun patched
PSP dev kits offered to universities
Sam & Max Season 2 starts this Fall
Lair is done, set for August 14 release date
GameFly expanding to Austin, Texas
Metroid retrospective explores first two games

Rumors & Speculation
Rumor: Xbox 360 gets $50 price cut in August

Culture & Community
Leipzig expects 200k people at Games Convention
PaRappa t-shirt contest got the got the funky flow
Xbox Live bringing Comic-Con home
Rockstar's rise and fall told by the common worker
N'Gai Croal vs. MS attack dog in PS3 bet
G4 makes Master Chief's True Hollywood Story
Space invading fashion hoodies
Disney press conference fails audience participation

The Japanese always luck out when it comes to games! From June 28th to July 11th, Japanese gamers with a copy of (deep breath) Moeru! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 will be able to head to the nearest DS Download Station and download the Elite Beat Agents characters, as well as Neko, for use in Ouendan 2. If we said we weren't jealous, we'd be bold-faced liars.

[Via NeoGAF]

The time has come, faithful readers, for us to settle something once and for all. It's bound to be a heated issue, but it's a question worth answering. If you had to choose (and we grow faint just trying to imagine the horror of such a situation) between the Ace Attorney series and the Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents set, which side would you pick? Hot rhythm action or shouts of "Objection!" and an endless cast of wacky characters? It's a tough choice. Let's fight it out.

Apparently, not everyone believes the language of music to be universal. Pro-G reports that Nintendo of Europe has rolled out of bed (which is the size of Manchester), grabbed a nearby megaphone and proclaimed July 13th as National Elite Beat Agents is Out In Europe Its About Time Seriously What Took So Long...Day. The streets would normally explode in a jovial mass of gyrating gamers at that time, but it's likely that most of them would have imported the rhythm game when it came out in the US eight months earlier.

Though some waiting period is to be expected for a continent home to as many languages as Europe, eight months seems an awful stretch for a game which primarily communicates through catchy tunes and brightly colored icons. As importers of Japan's recent Osu Tatakae Ouendan! sequel will attest, the game doesn't quite fall within the realms of text adventure or incomprehensible RPG. With cartridge space limitations working against the possibility of Nintendo recording different language versions of all the songs, it leads to the conclusion that the eight months were spent redrawing the game's many instances of "HEEEEEELLPPP!!"

Don't think this is the only case of a suspiciously long delay -- Metroid Prime Pinball also took eight months to make it across the ocean, and the Wii's Super Paper Mario is still without a release date. An instantaneous localization would be obviously be an absurd request, but perhaps it's time for Nintendo of Europe to take a few pointers from Square Enix, Mistwalker and Atlus. Starting the translation process during the game's development might just reduce eight months to something a bit more palatable to the impatient.