An Xbox version of the arcade brawler SpikeOut is still in development, Amusement Vision's unusually talkative Toshihiro Nagoshi said in a survey of the Japanese Xbox market published by Famitsu Weekly this week. Development on SpikeOut is advancing steadily towards a projected release later this year, he said, and his development studio has two more Xbox titles in the works.

SpikeOut, released in 1997 for the Model 3 arcade hardware, earned a strong cult following for its unusual cooperative gameplay, which employed linked cabinets to let up to four players fight together in 3D street brawls. The game's fighting system also drew accolades for its balance between the complexity of a fighting game and the speed of an action game. An Xbox version, tentatively dubbed SpikeOut Extreme, was announced last year, but fell off the radar shortly afterward.

Meanwhile, the always-talkative Tomonobu Itagaki hinted that his Team Ninja studio at Tecmo has yet another Xbox game in development. For those who don't closely follow Itagaki's ever-fluctuating predictions, that adds up to five potential projects from Team Ninja -- Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive Ultimate, Dead or Alive Code: Cronus, the followup to Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and whatever this other game might be.

Norman Cheuk, the newly-minted studio manager at Microsoft Game Studios Japan, offered a few updates on Microsoft's first-party efforts in Japan. The Xbox Live-powered action title Phantom Dust is in the last stages of development, and we can expect to hear more about it very soon. Beyond that, Microsoft Game Studios is working on a twofold effort -- to develop original titles, especially in the RPG genre, that can appeal to a Japanese audience, while also concentrating on localization efforts to ensure the Japanese success of American-developed games like Crimson Skies.

The Xbox has chosen a difficult row to hoe in Japan, as the console's sales figures make abundantly clear, but some fine games have come out of Microsoft's efforts nonetheless. Look forward to more news on all of those titles later in the year.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in 1UP.