This session is in Japanese, translated on the fly by people "UN-style" into our headphones. So everyone is familiar with Loco Roco, yes? The jelly game for the PSP, allowing you tilt the world around to guide that big blob like a snot on a tissue. Okay? Good. Here's a mini history.

Tsutomu Kouno, the director, says that the three ideas that were integral to the game were it being easy to play, fun, and dramatic. Did that come across? Who knows, we (and by we, I mean me) haven't played this game before. We (again, me) are lost.

Now there's a Japanese lady translating the Japanese to English. We think she's missing something. There's about 3x less words when she's translating. There's no way for us to confirm without Ashcraft here, though.

So he and a two programmers made some crazy pre-prototype in March 2005.

The translator's breathy whisper is kinda sexy. "Ooooh, it's very good!"

Prototyping took 3 months, actual development took 11 months. So, there were various textures to the world being experimented, but many of them turned out to be "weird".

Back to the American translator. We had to say it, but Kuono-san is pretty boring. This is a packed house, actually, and has more in attendance than the Gears session this morning. Weird.

They spent a lot of time on the music, making it feel like "live" music, kinda dynamic. You know who would love this session? Mrs. Ashcraft. She likes Loco Roco. Not as much as Mario—she loves pot-bellied, hairy guys (which means I have a shot!)—but enough.

Anecdote: he sang his Loco Roco song on the train, and people looked at him like he was a weirdo.

Not sure if it's this guy being boring or the translators taking the fun out of his talk, but we're about to fall asleep.

You know what? I don't even have a PSP. Bet you didn't know that.

The most interesting thing to come out of this talk? That Loco Roco 2 is confirmed. Oh wait, you already knew that since last December, didn't you. Then yeah, we got nothin'. No wait, these things coming up are kind of interesting.

He wouldn't say whether LR2 was going to be for the PS3 or PSP or PSP2.

Loco Roco was actually best in Europe, and after that, Japan. That's not what you would have thought.

Someone just asked whether the development budget of the PSP impacted the development. Looooooooooooong pause. You can actually make PSP games "very sophisticated", but "the PSP is portable and easy to use". So that makes PSP games lower budget, but developed in a shorter span.

Doesn't the Loco Roco look like flan? We could use some flan right about now.

Aaaaand, we're out of questions. Oh wait, someone's asking about whether Loco Roco is going to be made into a cartoon series and whether Sony wants that. The answer? We want to do it, but it hasn't moved in any direction.

Someone's question was a wish for him to add a zoom-out feature in Loco Roco 2.

So yeah, look forward to Loco Roco 2 on some undecided console. Jason Chen