Nate Bihldorff played "Elite Beat Agents" on the Nintendo DS, and tears came to his eyes. This wasn't elation, it was sadness — a good kind of sadness.

One of the most clichéd desires in gaming is to create a game that makes players cry. Some people would say they've already played one. But for those who say the field has not quite been there, September brought the engaging and morose nuclear-war game "Defcon," and now "Elite Beat Agents" has brought tears to the eyes of Bihldorff. Games can play the blues after all.

But get this: Bihldorff got misty over a video game level in "Elite Beat" that involves a little girl and her mother baking a birthday cake for the girl's dead father. As a bonus, weird fact: The level is scored to the song "You're the Inspiration" from the not-quite-modern band Chicago.

Bihldorff, 32, works for Nintendo. He's a localization producer there working in a division called the Treehouse, which means that he sometimes writes Nintendo games and sometimes just makes sure the writing of games is good (see "Gamers Wonder If Nintendo Will Serve More Mustard Of Doom"). So Bihldorff's waterworks aren't coming from the most objective source. "Elite Beat Agents" came out last week, so anyone who doesn't believe him can try to keep a dry eye on their own.

For the uninitiated, here's a crash course in the game: "EBA" is the sequel to a highly regarded yet poor-selling Japanese DS game called "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan," which was made by rhythm-game specialists Inis. The game featured more than a dozen levels depicting people suffering a range of problems (not being able to impress a girl, suffering from sculptor's block or stressing about a rampaging monster). Each level played out in comic-book scenes in the upper screen while a Japanese rock song played from the speakers. Male cheerleaders showed up on the bottom of the screen and performed an encouraging dance that would improve the situation as long as the player tapped and strolled with the DS stylus in sync with the music.

Bihldorff remembers when the game first hit the Treehouse. One of the guys there imported the game, and the crew fell in love. But Bihldorff didn't know if his bosses would like it quite enough. "My reaction was, 'This is such an awesome and quirky game, there's no way in hell they're gonna greenlight this thing for the United States.' ... Male cheerleaders have their own special thing in Japan, but selling it over here was going to be a challenge."

There's a divide. In Japan, according to Bihldorff, one of the Nintendo project coordinators is a male cheerleader and actually led a motion-capture cheering session for the creation of "Ouendan." In America, the president of the country was a male cheerleader — but no one really talks about it or asks President Bush to cheer some more.

So shock came to the Treehouse early this year when a build for an English-language version of "Ouendan" showed up. The cheerleaders had become secret agents. The scenarios had been changed. The music was now going to be American and British pop. Ashlee Simpson's "La La" drives players and the Elite Beat Agents to help a sprinter named Bill Mitchell (no relation to the Pac-Man world-record holder) get over a cold and win a race. Madonna's "Material Girl" is used to help two rich, not-quite-Hilton sisters survive a shipwreck on a deserted island. The Rolling Stones' "Jumping Jack Flash" helps the Agents repel aliens who want to remove music from the planet Earth.

Bihldorff called dibs on the game. He wanted to handle the text. The director at Inis overseeing the game, Keiichi Yanno, went to school in California, speaks fluent English, knows how to write jokes and, when his English is laughably corny, it's intentional. There wasn't going to be a ton of work for Bihldorff, but he didn't mind.

As the months progressed, new builds of the game showed up at the office. In "Ouendan," there had been a sad mission — a somber session with a woman despondent over the death of her lover and the cheerleaders' attempts to help her deceased soul mate reach out to her from beyond the grave. The game forced players to face this mission on its own, blocking all future missions from the gamer until it was won.

Yanno told Bihldorff he was going to do the same thing to American gamers with a new sorrowful mission, the Chicago-scored tale of mom and daughter trying to reach out to dad. "I remember sitting down with a burn [of the game] and randomly getting on that level for the first time and [getting] tears in my eyes, man," Bihldorff said. "I got to the end, and you are emotionally invested in that mission like no other. You don't want to fail. This girl misses her dad. It's heart-rending." And that Chicago song? "It's a song that most grown men probably wouldn't be caught dead crooning along with maybe in their car late at night," he said. "It has that cheese power. You get into it."

Bihldorff has gotten emotional with games before. "I'm a big softie," he admitted. So maybe he's a sap. Maybe he's a shill. Or maybe, after all this time, a game can make you cry.

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In other gaming-sadness news, Nintendo's Nate Bihldorff recently made blog headlines when he addressed the status of the successful Japanese Game Boy Advance game "Mother 3," which was marketed earlier this year with the promise that it would be an emotionally devastating experience. Japanese gamers lined up for the game this spring (see "Where Does A Game Called 'Mother' Outsell 'Halo'? Check Out Tokyo's Coolest Street"). And hard-core fans around the rest of the world expressed similar enthusiasm for a sequel a dozen years in the making. But Bihldorff was cornered at a Nintendo event and gave up the glum word that he knew nothing of "Mother 3" being translated into English for an American release. He tried to open a window of hope when he spoke to GameFile. "I'm not working on it personally, but I don't know what else is going on," he said. "I generally know about 7 percent of what's going on here. I'm definitely not working on it now, but you never know what wheels are in motion. [Fans] definitely shouldn't give up hope." If Nintendo doesn't get its act together, a fan group at Mother3.org claims to be working on its own. ...

Motion-sensitive controllers aren't the only thing this week's new Nintendo and Sony game consoles have in common — neither is fully functional out of the box. To access the consoles' online services, including the PS3's online store and the Wii's cross-console exchange of Mii avatars, gamers have to download an update. Early copies of the Wii, including the one sent to GameFile, can't actually download the update, leaving the machine's full functionality a last-minute surprise. This is the modern state of game consoles: They're not done being built even once you've bought them. ...

Another Wii surprise awaiting consumers involves the system's classic controller. The device will be sold separately for $20 and is needed to play any Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis or TurboGrafx 16 retro games downloaded to the Wii (think "Super Mario 64," "Sonic," "Bonk" and the like). Truly classic controllers needed to be plugged into a game console. Truly modern controllers are wireless. The Wii classic controller has it both ways: It has a 3-foot cable that has to be plugged in to the Wii's wireless remote-shaped controller. Nintendo promised unusual controller setups for the Wii, but few were expecting this. ...

Amid the sea of games shipping this month are the "Lego Heroes: Bionicle" series made by Traveller's Tales, the studio behind the two "Lego Star Wars" games. Traveller's producer Nick Ricks recently stopped by the MTV offices to demonstrate a PS2 build that sported many of the same features that made the "Star Wars" games so addictive: infinite lives, action-packed gameplay and a heap of in-game Lego pieces available for compulsive collecting and midfight magical construction that resembles the other game's option to turn clumps of Legos into Imperial walkers, C3PO and lawn mowers with the use of the Force. Ricks said Traveller's Tales has even trademarked the ability to have Legos magically come together in-game and suggests that it will happen more frequently with his company's several-year exclusive license to make Lego games. The Internet rumor is that "Lego Star Wars" will now be followed with a game based on the Lego Batman toys. Ricks wouldn't confirm. He also wouldn't say that the "Lego Star Wars" series is done. But they've done all six movies. He was mum, but cautioned it's never safe to assume. What he would confirm — demonstrate, even — is "Lego Heroes: Bionicle" for the Nintendo DS. It's a first-person shooter, like the DS' "Metroid Prime: Hunters." Ricks said the team had been thinking of making the PS2 game in that style but that "the first-person shooter was just too intense for younger gamers." The DS Lego game is for teens, the PS2 for kids.

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