Dojo Day: Snake? Snake!? SNAAAAAAKE!!!!!!!

Snake, are you there? This is Otacon! Damnit Snake, pick up! The Piplups used their Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to remotely activate Metal Gear. Mission Failed.

Now that'd be a good story mode. Welcome to Dojo Day.

Golden Hammer: Just like the old hammer, but it hurts more, swings faster, and if you press attack rapidly, it can also make you move across the screen and glide over pits. Can sometimes be the Golden Squeaky Hammer, which does no damage.

Wi-Fi Play: Here it is, the news everybody's been waiting for. Super Smash Bros. Brawl has Wi-Fi. However, as we all expected, Nintendo hit itself in the knees with a baseball bat and decided to cripple its most anticipated game of 2007. When playing against friends (which I assume from the wording that you only need your Wii's code, not a new one for the game), you can only set 4 preset phrases and use those as taunts during the game. That's right: no VoIP or even text chat. When you play against random opponents, you cannot see their avatar or name, you cannot add them to your friends (we assume there's no rival system), and worst of all, the random battles are not ranked. This announcement is a punch in the face for anyone who considers themself a hardcore gamer or Nintendo fan.

The Enemies From Subspace: Lists some Story-Mode enemies: Roader is a robotic unicycle thing. Poppants hold recovery items but run away from you. Bytans are multicolored balls that quickly multiply. Trowlons are ribbony creatures that try to pick you up and fly you out of the stage. Shaydas is a blurry phantom with two huge blades as hands. Auroros are big white birds that dive bomb you with their long, sharp beaks. Greaps are giant wheeled monsters with two huge parallel axe-like blades. The R.O.B. Squad is a bunch of R.O.B. robots that shoot beams and missiles at you.

Piplup: It's this freaky little water-bird Pokemon or something. It uses Surf to pick up players and wash them off of the stage.

Snake / Snake-Special Moves: Snake is (obviously) confirmed. His Smash attacks include an upward rocket, and planting a mine. His side-special (Remote Missile) is similar to Ness' PK Thunder. His normal-special (Hand Grenade) is a simple throwable time-bomb. His up-special (Cypher) alows him to grab onto his surveillance drone, the Cypher, which will be well-known to fans of MGS.

MGS4 Love Theme: A pretty nice sounding piece from Konami's musical team. Plus, its music from Metal Gear Solid 4, a game that is a PS3 exclusive (as far as we know).

How about that online play... I can't say I wasn't expecting Nintendo to screw up online play, but this is pretty bad. In Metroid Prime: Hunters (rated T, just like Brawl will be), we had VoIP, complex rankings, a rivals system, and the ability to see names. Hell, even in MarioKart DS (rated E) we could see people's names and we got rankings. I can live without most of that stuff, though I'd much prefer if Nintendo would simply add in things like being able to see your opponent's name, and at least allow me to text chat with my friends. However, the lack of rankings in random matches is unforgivable. I've got news for you, Nintendo. Not only are you not protecting anybody by not allowing rankings, but the kids you're trying to protect are the same people who never even figured out how to activate the online features of their Wii.

At least try to make it look like you still care about us hardcore gamers, rather than adding stupid paranoid restrictions and then trying to justify them with BS lines like, "...So whether you win or lose, it doesn’t matter. Just sit back and play," or, "If you think of your opponent as a simple scarecrow, any psychological barriers may melt away." Just tell us that you don't care about real gaming, and that what matters is that you get the soccer moms to buy this game for their kids this Christmas. Nintendo has this paranoid fear that a pedophile will find a kid through NWFC, and they continue to take every possible needless precaution to prevent the inevitable lawsuit, even at the expense of having a better game.

Here's a suggestion, Nintendo: Integrate your much-vaunted Parental Controls into your games. Develop each game so that a parent can set the options for their kid's game. If they don't want them playing online, they can do that. If they only want their kid to play a restricted online, then they can do that. But I guess that'll never work, seeing as most parents refuse to do any actual parenting on their own. God forbid they have to actually pick up that Wiimote thing and change some settings for the good of their child. Everyone else should suffer so that my child has no chance of having his online nickname seen by a pedophile with no possible idea of the age, location, or appearance of my child. Thank you Nintendo for protecting my child.

Of course I'll still be buying Super Smash Bros. Brawl this holiday season, and I'm going to play it online both against random opponents and my friends. But that's only because I trust in the development teams at Nintendo and HAL. As we've seen with many of Nintendo's recent outings (Wii Sports in particular), a game that has been twisted to fit the casual demographic can still be great if the development stays high-quality. And that is the single reason why Nintendo has remained popular throughout their ups, downs, and terrible online modes: good development.

[via Smash Bros. Dojo]