Ah Smash Brothers, the pinnacle of success every nintendo character aspires to. Where the best of the best can meet, greet, and beat the ever-loving snot out of each other. I love the series so much because it’s such a free-form way to play all my favorite characters. And most of them get serious upgrades in terms of the graphic quality I’m used to seeing them in. I also love it because the designers don’t monopolize the success of the series. They actually approached fans about which characters we would want in brawl and listened to other game directors who wanted a spotlight on their characters. Thus, Sonic and Solid Snake were born…to the world of smash brothers.

Speculation about the game abounded until it was released on the 31st in Japan. Since then I’ve been trying to get my grubby little hands on all the information and videos I can. I’m one of those people who wants to know everything about it, including what characters will be playable, even if I can’t yet play the game. Some of their character choices are, well, unfortunate, but others make me giddy in anticipation of being able to play them for myself.

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While stumbling around youtube to find various mario paint versions of my favorite game songs, I happened to notice that I was running into a lot of random fighting game videos. I’m not talking about your standard Mortal Kombat supreme demonstration. I’m talking about Peter Griffin fighting the green power ranger. Or Ronald McDonald versus Haruhi Suzumiya. A lot of times it was on a Street Fighter or Darkstalkers background I recognized. Othertimes, in the case of Ronald McDonald, it was outside a burger king. I guess the King decided the best way to liven up his restaurants after that whopper debacle was to bring in some good old bloodsports.

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I recently tried out the upcoming MMORPG Tabula Rasa’s beta. For all the game’s flaws, and there were a lot, there was an absolutely stunning system for character customization. Nearly every feature of a character could be molded to your choosing, down to the color of sunglasses. This got me thinking—in this day and age, how much does character customization matter? How much of online video games are about aesthetics and how much is the actual gameplay?

In the past, customization wasn’t really offered to the gamer for various reasons, technology limitations being the biggest factor. Instead, it was all about gameplay and the storyline. In example, I implore you to look at Blizzard’s hit Diablo II. D2 offered no customization whatsoever; the game was about killing monsters, and having fun while doing so. Along the same vein, Counter-strike didn’t even have many options in terms of what your terrorist or counter-terrorist looked like.

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I was playing Mario Kart DS at the dentist’s office today when it hit me: I fucking hate Princess Peach. My hatred for her sort of confounded me and I was a little startled by my revelation. I started thinking about it later. As a female, I enjoy playing females when they’re available; I play Zelda in SSB, I play Chun-li in SF, I play Claire’s scenario first instead of Leon’s in RE:2, and I even play Xiao in Tekken. I don’t mind when the cast is males only–I have no problem playing a male in Counter-strike–but I do choose the female when I can. Unless of course, it’s MK, then I’m gladly anyone but Peach.

So why do I hate her?

Fuck if I know. She just bothers me. So instead of ranting more, here’s some of my favorite females in gaming, who are not only hot, but completely competent at saving the world or destroying it.

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