During the Grandia 3 part, they gave the same name to two different people. I wanted to see where the guy with the magnificent mane is now, but keep getting results for the mustache guy.
His name's Wataru Higuchi, who was a producer at Enix and Square-Enix. He now seems to work at Bandai and is in the credits for a few Dragon Ball games.
He's in the Special Thanks on this disc. Was hard to find much on him in English, but tracking down his name in kanji let me find some stuff like this press conference for Grandia 3.
Britney's Dance Beat was made by the Bust a Groove devs and it really shows, the game seems really competently made for a licensed pop music game thing. At least compared to the notoriously awful American Idol game around the same time.
Y'all noted it fairly on in this episode so I'll explain why:
Majima's use of "ya" instead of "your," his abundance of contractions and him dropping the last consonant are ways of localising the Kansai dialect into English. Osaka lies in the Kansai region whose residents have their own slightly different dialect of Japanese. It's why Majima will use the honourific "-han" whereas Kiryu will use "-san."
From my understanding, the Kansai dialect and the accents local to the region are looked upon similarly to someone with a strong Southern accent. Therefore a fairly easy way to localise a strong Osakan accent is to just turn it into that. That's not to say it's lazy, but it definitely is a common way of conveying that in the translation process.
For the record, some of the tracks seem to be Creative Commons and freely available on ccMixter. That said, the ska track (The Stylacja - Typ) doesn't seem to be, nor does the Dr. Gore 2000 track. Both seem to be Polish and I've only found them on YouTube.
I should write more about the games I finish, since the kind of thoughts you've put alongside these are things that I'd probably forgot just a few months later. Great idea!
Yeah, that was my main impetus for doing this list. I'm doing a pretty poor job of keeping it up to date but I like the idea of being able to go back and collate my thoughts. There's stuff I'd probably have forgotten I played otherwise!
Orbi's comments