While in the U.S., Tsunoda showed off the controller-free motion controller with the help of a 3D brick breaking title and a build of Burnout, in Japan they brought along copies of Katamari Damacy and Space Invaders Extreme to show off to the press, developers and publishers.

Tsunoda, dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans and trademark over-sized sunglasses, first walked a small gathering of press through the concept of the project.

The device, which uses a camera and infrared sensor, not only detects movement, but the person playing a game, he pointed out.

To prove his point Tsunoda, who has long hair, had one of the press try their hand at the breakout game. When the writer started playing the transparent icon on screen changed both the hair and body type to more closely match the player.

Tsunoda said that the device doesn't require a special background or lighting to play, despite the fact that the game was set up in a well-lite, almost completely white room. In fact, he said, because it makes use of an infrared sensor, a person could play a Project Natal game in total darkness.

Because Microsoft is meeting with Japanese publishers and developers, Tsunoda said they worked up prototype ports of Katamari Damacy and Space Invaders Extreme that would work with the controller-free controller. That doesn't mean, he added, that those games will ever see an official release date.

In Katamari Damacy a player holds their hands out in front of them and slides them through the air in the direction they want the growing ball to move. A player holds their hands straight up in the air to shift the camera to the other side of the ball and starting moving in that direction.

Playing around with the game for a few minutes I was impressed with how responsive the controls seemed to be, allowing me to move around moving objects fairly deftly and pick up only the items I wanted to with the ball. It was a fun way to play an already fun game. One that would inevitably expand the potential audience for the game.

Next up, Tsunoda started up Space Invaders Extreme. In the Project Natal version of Space Invaders you have to shuffle side-to-side to move the defending space ship across the bottom of the screen. To shoot you raise both hands in the air. You can either hold your hands in the air, making the ship fire as if you were holding the button in, or raise your hands and drop them as if you were tapping the fire buton.

The game, with its more immersive play and increased physicality, was a delight to play. I've made no secret of the fact that I love Space Invaders, and this was a welcome addition to the already prevalent franchise.

The team on Project Natal have been busy porting lots of games over to the new control system, but not to release them. Instead, I was told, they're doing it to see how the controls translate and if it helps or hinders game play.

This seems like a great way to point point the strengths and weaknesses of a new type of controller. Hopefully, that will mean that when the device comes out less games will have this type of control slapped on and gamers will instead be able to choose from a more substantive selection of games with controls that make sense.

Not so, says Microsoft. The red jump suits had nothing to do with Natal's difficulty in picking up certain types of clothing or to compensate for the studio lighting, it was just a joke.

"Actually, the red jumpsuits were just for laughs," a Microsoft spokesperson told Kotaku. "The Jimmy Fallon crew wanted something funny for the guests to wear and decided on red jumpsuits and turtlenecks. We just wonder if the red jumpsuits will start a new fashion trend."

No. No, they won't.

"We are treating game openings like movie openings if they're cool," he told Kotaku. "Video games are interesting, I think it's something a lot of people do now.

"It's entertaining and it gets your mind off things like my life sucks, or I have to pay the bills. It's almost like meditation for me."

And Fallon's not just tapping into a hobby that he thinks he viewers might find interesting, he's a life-long gamer himself.

"I'm 34, so I think I grew up in that generation where video games were always a part of my life," he said. "Getting an Atari 2600 was a huge deal for me, I think I had that before I had cable."

The next big thing for Fallon was Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. an experience that made him a stalwart fan of Nintendo and their consoles. Nowadays he owns all of the gaming systems, including a modded PSP that he rarely touches and an iPhone, but rarely has the time to play on them.

He says that they have all of the consoles at the studio, but people rarely have the time to use them and when he's home he tends to spend his down time with his wife.

Fallon says he just landed a copy of Ghostbusters, but asked me how it was because he hadn't had a chance yet to check it out. (I haven't either.)

Growing up, Fallon said he never really stopped playing games. When he was at Saturday Night Live he was one of the people who helped get pieces on video gaming into the weekly show.

"I shared my office with Horatio (Sanz) and we had an Xbox," he said. "You're up so late at Saturday Night Live, it's kind of like a dorm vibe."

And out of that came several funny skits.

On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the crew doesn't really have time to play games, but Fallon still thinks incorporating gaming into the show is important.

Fallon played Punch Out!!! on the Wii on his show earlier in the year, and last week sent a correspondent to E3, SNL's Jason Sudeikis. Tonight he will have Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda on to talk about Project Natal, something Fallon had heard about but hasn't seen.

He said he didn't want to know much about the system before tonight's show so that he could see what someone new to the idea can do with it.

And Fallon isn't gun shy about having game developers and producers on his show either. He recently invited Double Fine's Tim Schafer to come on the show with Jack Black to talk about their collaboration on Brutal Legend.

That flies in the face of the argument that game developers may not be as entertaining on a talk show as a musician or an actor.

"I think it's all about how interested you are in talking to these people," Fallon said. "There are some really famous celebrities out there that aren't that exciting.

Tsunoda says he happy to see video games getting so much time on Fallon's show.

"I am really excited to be able to show him the Project Natal technology and how it works," Tsunoda told Kotaku. "We have been working on this project for so long in secret, it's awesome to finally be able to show it off. Hopefully, we can bring that same spirit of fun we had during E3 to the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show."

And what about showing the people at home what the bottom of an avatar's shoe looks like?

"That was something totally improvised," Tsunoda said. "I'm not even sure what possessed me to do that at the time. I'm sure something just as fun will happen tonight on the show."

You can catch Fallon and Tsunoda on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC tonight.

Check out our full coverage of Microsoft's Project Natal here.

I thought the system, as impressive as it was in letting me play kickball with virtual balls on a TV and no controllers on my body, might not be able to handle multi-player gaming.

Wrong, the project's director, Kudo Tsunoda told me. He had me look at a special display set up as part of the ball-ricocheting demo. What I saw proved how clearly Natal was easily reading both my body and his as we both stood in front of the sensors. We appeared on screen as simplified, mutli-jointed stick figure skeletons within silhouettes of our bodies. It clearly saw us as separate people. There would be no problem, he said, for the system to support a game that let us play at the same time and track our movements separately.

I thought Project Natal might be good for reading big body movements but not for finer finger movements.

Theoretically, I got that wrong too, Tsunoda told me, though he didn't have a way to prove it to me there. The stick-figure skeletons that Natal recognize us as did not have fingers. Each one had a short stick for each hand. I saw no fingers, so I assumed it could not see my fingers. There seemed to be no way for Natal to know, say, how many fingers I was holding up. If it could, then it could maybe read hand signs issued to squadmates in military first-person shooters. I questioned Natal's ability to detect those finer movements. Tsunoda said that such detection was possible, though the sensitivity would be different at different distances. He thought my fingers idea was do-able.

I thought that the Natal could be fooled to let me drive Burnout Paradise one-handed.

Wrong, for sure. Microsoft had EA's Burnout Paradise programed to work with Natal. As I stood in front of the sensors, I moved my right foot forward to accelerate, and moved it back to decelerate and reverse. I held my hands in front of me, pretending to turn a steering wheel. The Natal had registered me in under a second and was letting me control Burnout smoothly. I saw, in another monitor, how it read my stick-figure skeleton. I guessed that it was reading my hands as a single unit moving in space and that it wouldn't be programmed to know or care if I put one hand behind my back. It did. When I put my hand behind my back and just waved one hand in front of the TV, the Burnout car failed to steer. The Natal needed to see two hands. Maybe it's cooler to drive one-handed, but Natal not letting me do it was impressive in its own way.

I thought Natal had to be used in bright light.

Wrong? The demos I played of Natal were set up in dimly-lit hotel rooms, except for Peter Molyneux's Milo demo which was set in a bright room. Tsunoda said lighting was a non-issue for Natal. Maybe so, maybe not. But if it works in a dim room, that's not bad.

With Project Natal not due for release at least until next year, we'll all have plenty of time to question every aspect of Natal. The strong showing the system had in its first week in public suggests that it may withstand the skepticism. So far, it's fun. And it works.

In what was probably the most LOL-worthy use of Microsoft's Project Natal tech, Tsunoda asked, but didn't wait for a response as to whether you gave a shit about what lies beneath an Avatar sneaker. Instead, he kicked it with a "Well, BAM! There it is."

And that spawned our favorite video remix of the week.

From the hardworking jarosh of NeoGAF. Thank you, jarosh.

WELL BAM there it is - REMIX [Vimeo]

I think if you've played Gears of War 1, it's clear there's stuff you'd want to improve on in Gears of War 2. The story wasn't necessarily as robust as it could have been, and that's stuff we're really going to blow that out in Gears of War 2. We've got Josh Ortega who's a great comic book writer, and he's totally focused on the story. We want to do a much better job of that... If you look at the character line-up from Gears 1, they were very stereotypical characters. There wasn't much variety between the different types. That's something that not only in the development of existing characters we're changing up, but also adding some new characters that add their own individual flair to it... From a game-making perspective you want to get as much uniqueness and variety with the characters as possible, for them to have individual flair and for people to identify with them. You don't want to build stereotypical characters, not just racial stereotypes but stereotypes of any kind.

Seems rather retroactive at this point, but whatever.

Tsunoda Interview [Eurogamer] [Pic]

In the late 90s Rare established themselves as a top-tier studio, producing such classics as GoldenEye and Donkey Kong Country for Nintendo. But in 2002, Microsoft bought up the company and prepared to have the studio start work on some of the marquee titles for their upcoming Xbox 360.

I told Kim that back before the Xbox 360 launched I had heard that Rare's Perfect Dark Zero was meant to be the platform's launch title, the reason gamers would take notice of the 360 and decide to buy into the new platform.

When the game finally hit, with the launch of the 360 and Rare's other title Kameo, it was met with a mixed reception, certainly not the sort that Microsoft had bet on.

Is Rare, I asked Kim, a developer that better suited to the audience and platforms of Nintendo gaming?

The short answer, Kim said, is no. But he did acknowledge that Rare hasn't yet met it's full potential on the Xbox 360. Neither Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo were the massive hits that Microsoft expects and Viva Pinata, he said, was a game that attracted a casual audience but was much deeper than that sort of gamer expected or was interested in playing.

But Rare's upcoming titles could turn that around. Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, for instance, hopes to fix that disconnect between the audience it attracted and its accessibility by adding online and local co-op and tweaking gameplay.

And while Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts isn't a true sequel to the franchise, its concept, a vehicle platformer, was entirely the idea of Rare and its developers.

Hopefully today will give me a chance to see if Rare has been able to turn it around and get back to making games like Goldeneye rather than Grabbed By The Ghoulies.

Tsunoda, who was unfortunate enough to be sitting right next to me, spent much of the evening trying not to answer questions about Gears of War 2 and his new role as the game's general manager. He said he felt fortunate to be working at Microsoft Game Studio and in particular to be working with Cliff Bleszinski and the folks at Epic Games.

MTV's Stephen Totilo and I tried to pin Tsunoda down on how the game would fit into the Gears universe. Was it, Totilo asked, part of a trilogy. We haven't decided yet, Tsunoda responded and then tried to change the topic, saying that the game has plenty of things to do in the way of improving on the original title.

Multiplayer, for instance, has a lot of potential, though he can't talk about it quite yet. Cover will be destructible this time around, he added. And by cover he doesn't just mean the rock walls and building remnants, he's also talking about grabbing bad guys and hiding behind them, something Tsunoda referred to as "meat shields". And yes, it seems that these meat shields will be "destructible" too.

What are they doing for the ladies this time around, Totilo wanted to know. Are they going to make it more accessible or interesting to women somehow.

Tsunoda sort of ducked the answer, but when I asked him if they were considering perhaps adding a romantic interest to the plot, he said yes, there would be a love interest this time around.

Given the tone of the dinner, it was hard to tell if he was serious or joking, but either way it raises an interesting point: Should the Gears of War sequel have more interpersonal relationships, should there be a love interest in the game?

I think that one of the things that hurt the original title was its story, in particular its ending , so building in a relationship, one that could be used to make the game more emotion certainly couldn't hurt. At least that's my take. What's yours?

Check out Totilo's take on the dinner as well.

[Pic from MTV Multiplayer]

Shown only in trailer form, the EA Chicago fighter looked to bring Marvel mainstays Spider-Man, Dr. Doom, Captain America and the Hulk together for a next-gen fisticuffs-fest that saw the characters battling amid crowds of bystanders, toppling buildings and generally wreaking havoc. Marvel's other multi-character title, Marvel Universe Online, has also been the subject of cancellation talks. Maybe Marvel should just stick to movies.

Electronic Arts, Marvel Dissolve Game Deal [GameTap]

Tsunoda, best known for his fighting games, including a licensed Marvel Comics brawler that may have been scrapped, has been supposedly put to work on a popular franchise. A new Gears of War title is said to be his first project. An interesting fit. And by interesting, I mean, you better not screw this up, Kudo, or you're in big trouble. Oh, and congratulations.

Kudo Tsunoda Jumps EA Ship, Lands at Microsoft [GameTap]

Tsunoda—wearing sunglasses indoors—told the crowd that EA Chicago wouldn't simply be retrofitting an established fighting engine for the game, instead focusing on using the game's environment as a key component for battles. That doesn't mean that you'll see the beat bouncing, cracking environments from Def Jam ICON, though. Tsunoda said "ICONs a totally different game, but the basic premise in trying to incorporate the environment is a good one. I don't think we'll be going with a "Marvel beats" soundtrack, obviously. We're trying to open up the environment."

He also revealed that characters will be balanced in a fashion true to their Marvel Comics heritage, not simply "using three dials to balance them out." I assume that means that, in a one on one fight, Spider-Man would probably get his ass handed to him in a fight with the Hulk, but taking advantage of his surroundings will determine who is more powerful. "Debris", he says, "will need to be used in creative ways."

Visually, Tsunoda said of the game "We want high end next gen detail, but we want to have its own unique Marvel art style" adding that it "it's not going to look cel-shaded or anything like that." Expect "plenty of detail", but with a Marvel comic book art flair.

Asked by an attendee if the game would be similar to the PlayStation 2 game War of the Monsters, Tsunoda said that that "was a good analogy" but that the giant-monster scale of the new Marvel fighting game didn't apply. Instead, we'll see more street level battles populated with normal bystanders.

I'll be hosting a live chat with Fight Night Round 3's Executive Producer Kudo Tsunoda on Feb. 17 over on Freeplay.

It starts at 10:30 a.m. Mountain Time and I'm told only like 50 people can get into the chat room. So hit up the link next Friday to get you chance to ask the man behind the boxing game a question.

Feature: Chat with Kudo [Freeplay]