One thing I’ll mention is that the competitive Melee scene gets a lot of flack for how they’re so serious about what a lot of people think should be just a fun party game. Characters are “tiered” based on how good they’re perceived to be for tournament play (Sheik, Fox, and Marth occupy the top tier, I forget the rest), some stages are banned because they lend themselves to exploitative play, items are usually turned off, and whenever you see a video of a “tourneyfag” playing there’s a very distinctive “CLACK-CLACK-CLACK” of them twitching the analog stick to employ “advanced techs” (arguably exploits, a lot of them were fixed/removed from Brawl, but new ones are being discovered already) such as wavedashing, L-cancelling, SHFFL, etc. I don’t know how to do any of these, but… yea. Look up the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on “tourneyfag” if you want to know more…

Anyways, Brawl looks to be an awesome game largely because it expands on what made Melee awesome as well… tons of extra features. SSBB has 40+ stages, 35 characters, 100+ original songs, 600+ trophies, and a 10-hour single-player game in addition to the stage editor, increased customization options, wifi play, and all the old game options: Target smash, 100-man melee, event mode, All-star mode, etc. etc.

A lot of people were disappointed by the character roster when it became leaked because all of the most interesting characters were already known, and the secret ones are for the most part either clones (Ganon, Ness, Wolf/Falco, some say Lucario?) or old characters (C. Falcon, Game + Watch). That leaves…. ROB, who just made people go “wtf”. Sakurai did a great job of including popular characters (Sonic!), but a lot of the ones that were also hyped up (Geno, Krystal) didn’t get in, which disappointed players.. but you can’t please everyone, obviously.

One thing which kinda disappoints me is that the gameplay seems to be essentially the same as always. Sure, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… but at the same time, it wouldn’t have hurt to add some new techniques (not the tourneyfag techs) beyond Final Smashes.

Nintendo is indeed something special

No…

bad, bad, memories

I think it’s because I played as Pikachu, at a LAN party, and I never recovered from the horrific loss that Pikachu reigned on me. This was back on the N64.

Do I use the counter-attack? Yes, when it is advantageous to do so.
Do I use the charged sword move? Yes- generally as an ‘and stay down’ move after (by myself, not relying on other players) having tossed someone sideways to the limit of their recovery abilities.

But that’s not the point of Marth. The point of Marth is to dance around your opponent, catching them with only the tip of your sword as you twist, flip, and duck out of their way (often by going straight past them with a dodge so you can stab the poor sucker in the back).

I dunno, maybe I just like swords. Marth (like Link) takes zero skill to play passably, but requires a lot of work to play well.

Ice Climbers can really own and clean some house. they look useless, but in all honesty they’re pretty good. Without their weakness of losing one Ice Climber they could actually be considered to be on the borderline of being overpowered. they have moves that slow and freeze people, they can hit multiple opponents at once, their recovery is pretty good, and they have some good moves for knocking people out of the ring.

Bowser s lauded as the worse smash character, i don’t think that’s going to change in brawl. that’s not to say you can’t be good with him, but his flaws are easily exploitable. I.E., being huge, slower than most smashers, and having a weird mix of moves that are fierce, but too limiting.

I’ve been addicted to SSBM since I got it. When I played in Melee, I usually played with one character and one character only ( Shiek). In Brawl, I find the the Subspace Emissiary lets me play as all the characters, so I like a lot more of them. I also liked how there was a story line in the game instead of the annoying classic mode.

Anyways,

I’m out to go kick some butt.

roll on the 27th!!