Earlier today, we pointed you in the direction of Joystiq's hands-on impressions of Guitar Hero: On Tour, itself on tour as various websites tried the game out for themselves.

One of those sites was ShackNews, which also got to speak to Vicarious Visions CEO Karthik Bala. And we had only just started reading when one of Bala's opening statements got our blood boiling: apparently, Guitar Hero: On Tour was developed to "see if it was even possible to do a really good music rhythm game on a handheld."

Altogether now: "WHAAAAAT?!"

We can only assume that Bala is totally unaware of the vast treasure trove of rhythm-based awesomeness already available on the DS -- never mind what is still to come, or even on other handhelds.

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.

We know this is a loaded question, and has been debated many times by many gamers. We want to know where our readers stand on the issue, though. So, what do you think is better -- Elite Beat Agents or the Ouendan games? And why? Normally, it just comes down to the music (American pop/classics vs. J-pop). But, is there another reason? Perhaps you enjoy the stories more when you can read them? Or maybe you like a set of characters better?

If you haven't played both titles, which do you think you'd like better? And if you haven't played either, why not? Do these rhythm games just not interest you, or have you not gotten around to it yet for some other reason?

Video game rental service GameFly has a pretty big year-end sale going on through January 4th for over 30 of its used DS games. Though the carts are all pre-played, each one will come with a new manual and case, so you need not worry about receiving an incomplete set.

As usual, we've picked the notable titles out of the bunch and listed them for you, except this time, we've done it in Christmas carol form!

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
DS Fanboy sent to me:

• Twelve Diddy Kong racers Racing ($17.99),
• Eleven Spectrobes for collecting ($15.99),
• Ten Hoshigamis a-SRPG-ing ($14.99),
• Nine Planet Puzzles Leaguing ($19.99),
• Eight Custom Robos a-fighting ($12.99),
• Seven Sim Cities a-building ($16.99),
• Six Bombermen a-touching ($22.99),
• Five of Sonic Rush's golden rinnngggggs ($17.99),
• Four Mana Children ($14.99),
• Three Elite Beat Agents ($22.99),
• Two Mega Man Star Forces ($17.99 each),
• And a Naruto: Ninja Council 3 ($17.99)!

[Via CAG]

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!