April 26^th, 2006 (12:57am) - Kenichi Nishi, the producer of the niche GameCube game Chibi-Robo has left developer Skip to form his own studio, Route24. This was revealed earlier today at Nishi-san’s official blog page, in which he also revealed that he’s working on a new game for the Nintendo DS called LOL DS!.

Nishi is known for working on the popular SNES RPG Chrono Trigger, in which he was in charge of the game’s ’"Field Data" and soon after leaving Squaresoft Nishi went on to join Lovedelic. There he directed Moon for the original PlayStation, a quirky anti-RPG where the protagonist is sucked into his TV into videogame that vaguely resembles Dragon Quest. In Moon, you must save the world through communication and stop the "hero" from killing all monsters to extinction just to level up. Nishi then directed LOL (Lack of Love) for the SEGA Dreamcast, another quirky adventure game in which you were a Terra-forming robot on an alien planet and it’s up to you to decide how to best "adapt" the planet for the colonization of your masters. He then left Lovedelic and at Skip made Chibi-Robo and Giftpia for Nintendo.

LOL DS! is expected to be completely unrelated to Nishi’s previous LOL game for the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast’s LOL stood for "Lack of Love" but Nishi notes on his blog page that LOL also stand for "laughing out loud" (as everyone on the planet already knows). Anyway, this LOL DS! game is supposedly going to be a party game for up to four to eight players. However, we cannot be sure if this game will ever come into fruition at this current moment in time.