Giftpia dev, Spike and Nintendo DS game reports

Giftpia developer Skip and fellow Japanese firm Spike are both working on Nintendo DS titles, according to reports, while the producer of the Momotaro Densetsu video boardgame title reports that Nintendo is sitting on a rather addictive DS puzzle game.

Details on Skip's title are somewhat scant at the moment. However game director Kenichi Nishi indicated in his journal that it was set for release "around this Christmas sometime".

We know plenty about Spike's title, Tendo Dokuta, though. Rather like Atlus' Caduceus, it's about performing surgery with the stylus-cum-scalpel on the touch screen. The player controls a young doctor trying to make it at one of Japan's top hospitals, examining patients, writing up charts, and consulting patients and other doctors by dragging and dropping charts onto them to try and pick up tips to fuel the diagnosis. Once diagnosed, a patient can be operated on - although anime-style graphics should keep things getting visually out of hand.

However we're probably a bit more interested in Nintendo's unidentified puzzle game at this point, after Akira Sakuma, producer of the Momotaro Densetsu video boardgame series, reported that one of his colleagues got well and truly lost in it during a recent visit.

"I got to see a puzzle game that's currently in development [for the DS]," Sakuma writes in his online diary. "Doi just wouldn't stop playing the game, saying, 'I can't stop playing this game... it feels like popping bubble wrap!'"

As for Sakuma himself - apparently he was persuaded by Nintendo technology division's Masaru Yoshimitsu to make a Momotaro Densetsu game for the DS. There's no word on whether it will definitely happen, but we have a feeling not too many of you know much about the series anyway. For the record, it involves riding around Japan on railways and buying up companies, baseball teams and other assets.