Dojo Day: Real Men Use Items

You may or may not know this, based on the extent of your Super Smash Bros. dedication, but there is a large debate among fans on if you should use items or no items in a match. The items users claim that it brings variety and luck into the battle, while the items-haters feel that items are cheap, and diminish the effects of truly dedicated players' skills. On that subject, I actually know two people who have gotten into a physical fight over items in Super Smash Bros. Yeah, I'm completely serious.

One guys starts off with "Let's use items."
"No, I don't want to play with items."
"Dude, let's just use items."
"HELL NO!"
"ITEMS!"
"NO ITEMS!"
Punched.

I wasn't actually present for this battle of the ages (if ages is to mean over-testosteroned teen-ages), but I hope I was able to do justice to the epic battle. And that, my friends, is my lesson on how not to handle a friendly game of Super Smash Bros. Please play responsibly, and for God's sake, let the man use items if he wants to.

On another note, I'm sorry about being a little late, but I was at the New York Anime Festival all day yesterday. You'll just have to get over not reading my beautiful writing for a whole day. Welcome to Dojo Day.

Friend List: Besides getting a stunning revelation from one Nate involving the alleged manliness of items users, this update also included an explanation of the friends lists. Not only are still using friend codes, but there is also a 64-person friend cap. Luckily, the friend codes stay at 12 digits as opposed to the 16 of the Wii system. In addition, you can create a little comment that your friends will see when you're online, and your friends can see both your status (Online, searching, Brawling, etc.) as well as your connection rating (in the form of a colored dot).

Returning Pokemon: As expected, all the old Pokemon will make an appearance, though they sadly don't seem to have had their 3-D models changed at all. When Mew appears, it can drop things like CDs.

X-Tunnel Scene: This is some pretty sweet stuff. The "tunnel scene" music is from "X," the classic Gameboy game known as arguably being the first 3-D game on a handheld system. In addition, it was created by Argonaut Software, who later went on to develop Star Fox, and directed by Yoshio Sakamoto, creator of Metroid. The music is some awesome retro stuff, and while I've never played X, this definitely perks my interest in the old game. Also, you might want to note that there is no stage currently confirmed that would logically use this music. Is there some sort of retro stage in the game that we haven't heard about, or will this just be used in a Star Fox stage? Finally, I'll let everybody know right now that I almost had a heart attack when I read the title of Sakurai's post, originally believing Megaman X to be confirmed for Brawl.

The Battle for the Smash Ball: To make a long story short, when you finally break the bouncing Smash Ball, you can unleash your Final Smash with the special attack button. Enemies can hit you to make you lose this powerup, and sometimes when you're doing badly, the game will respawn you with Final Smash ability.

King Dedede-Final Smash: The King can summon an army of Waddle Dees that speed around the stage attacking opponents, and Gordos (those spiky enemies) can also appear.

With Anyone/Basic Brawl: Once you connect online, you choose "With Friends" or "With Anyone," and then choose Basic Brawl, Team Battle, or Spectator. Once you get into a room, you select your character (with a 45 second time limit), then choose your stage. The stage you play on is selected lottery-style a la Mario Kart DS or Metroid Prime Hunters. As you wait for the game to start, you can amuse yourself by hitting a Sandbag. Now here's where we reach the cool part: When another player disconnects, a CPU takes their place, and there is never any notification to give them the satisfaction of knowing that you heard of their desertion. That is a brilliant idea that will hopefully turn the disconnect from being what it is now: the sanctuary of sore losers and quitters. Your online matches will almost always have 4 players in them, and this might even open the possibilities of adding CPUs to matches at the beginning, a feature we never saw in the online components of most Nintendo WiFi Connection games.

There was just a little too much online stuff for me this week. Every time Sakurai mentions a "feature" of Brawl's online mode, it makes me angry as I remember all the awesome online modes we've seen over the past few years, and even some of the mediocre ones we've seen from Nintendo. That's why it's great to finally hear some good news among the slog that is Sakurai's online announcements. By replacing disconnectors with CPUs, Brawl will at least have an online mode that completely eliminates one of the few stains on most online games. The other small victory in the online arena is the ability to see your friends' connection levels. Meanwhile, I just can't get over things like the lack of rankings or any sort of chat. While you will likely lament the online mode if you are an experienced player, newbies to online play should find the little touches to be really fun. See everybody next week.

[via Smash Bros. Dojo]