Our new Features Editor Christian Nutt has settled comfortably into the wide-ranging Gama interview style, and showed as much with the new article 'Feeling The Elite Beat: Keiichi Yano On Crossing Over', posted over at Gamasutra yesterday .

In it, the Tokyo-based iNiS founder and Gitarooman, Ouendan, and Elite Beat Agents creator is quizzed about "...his work with Nintendo, the sudden rise of the rhythm game genre, and most vitally, how Japanese and American developers and technologies interact."

As we extracted in a news story, Yano has also confirmed that the company is working on an unspecified game for the Xbox 360 - which is very neat! Not quite sure what it is, mind you - as we mention, "...the company's nFactor 2 graphics engine, which is listed on iNiS' official website as being Xbox 360, PC and Wii compatible, is public knowledge" - but the slightly Pikmin-like screenshots using the engine (pictured above!) are from 2005 or so, so it's probably not that. Also, the parrot on the iNiS site needs to not squawk so much.

There are lots of other interesting questions I could reference, but randomly, here's a fun one - Yano cautioning on a possible glut of rhythm games and associated quality issues: "I'm very concerned about the quality of the music games that are coming out and will come out, because again, I do feel as though it's kind of a special genre that requires specific knowledge of music and what makes music fun. Hopefully, the games that come out that are in that genre can take advantage of all that and do all those things right, and make sure that it's a really fun experience so that the genre itself can stay strong and not have a lot of bad clutter in it." Amen to that.