Not much has happened recently, that I know of anyway. I've been in my room playing a certain game anyway that came out last week, so even if Josh had been announced as the new leader of the KFC religion, I probably would've missed it trying to hit over 500m in the homerun contest.
So instead, you get to read about me talking about Brawl, yay! Take a deep breath because by the time you have to let it out again, you may have finished reading.
So after getting past the initial problems with obtaining Brawl, I finally started playing. My first impressions were that they'd put a lot of time into it. Just from searching around the menu options, lots of things I'd forgotten about popped up.
Being able to play demos of old Nintendo games was the first to catch my eye. They give you about 4-5 I think, namely Mario Bros, the original Metroid and Lylat Wars for the N64. I gave Lylat Wars a go to see how it all went and apart from a frantic button spam to find out the controls, it was pretty good. Had the same feel as the original game, Slippy was still as annoying as ever and even though the trial finished pretty abruptly, I'd say it was a pretty good amount of time.
As you play through Brawl, more "Masterpieces" as they're called get added. There isn't a huge amount of trials to play, but a reasonable amount considering it's got really nothing to do with the main game. I did think half way through if all of these trials were available to download from the Wii shop (I think they are), so this was just a clever little advertising ploy by Ninty. You can tell because the trials are long enough to get some fun out of the game, but not long enough for you to go "Stuff buying the full version, I'll play this".
The next little thing I found interesting was the "My music" section. When you go into this option you can listen to all the music you currently have for all of the stages in the game. You can also set how likely they are to play when you select a stage. This is an excellent little option they've added as in melee I was forever trying to get people to hold L and R down to change the music on stages to what I preferred.
Again, as you play through the game you can collect or unlock more music which is added to certain stages. Music CDs can randomly drop in single player, multiplayer, anywhere really. They only hang around for a short amount of time but the computer players sometimes pick them up for you. Gotta say for Sonic's stage, the music they choose for that was brilliant, I was really surprised to hear tracks come up when I tested it out. The main one is the Green hill zone music from Sonic 1. It then has a track from Sonic 2, Angel Island from Sonic 3, Open your Heart - the main theme to Sonic Adventure, Live and Learn - main theme from SA2, Sonic Boom - the main theme from Sonic CD and more. I just randomly started up a match not knowing of the extra music and Open your Heart came on. Fitted perfectly and surprised me no end.
Anywho, I started up the subspace adventure expecting it to be like adventure from melee. It is. Kind of. Apart from it taking me over 8 hours to complete. Shocking to be honest, I really didn't think it'd last that long. It also tells you if you've collected everything from all the levels or not, so it goes on...with different difficulties as well.
Classic is similar to the old classic, except different difficulties mean different levels of the target smash stages. This is the only way to unlock them as well, so if you're a perfectionist it'll keep you at it for a while.
All star also makes a return. It's the same again, but it didn't really need to be different.
Stadium, multi-man melee and events are also here, with new events with different difficulties to keep you at it. Higher difficulties can also mean things being unlocked...although they used to and still do frustrate me no end. Homerun contest now has an invisible field around it to keep the bag in till the last second (or if you hit it hard enough), which was nice. Means causing more damage a lot easier. Multi-man melee is pretty much the same too, so using old tactics works perfectly here.
And that is just the single player.
Multiplayer Brawls are across a wide range of stages some involving annoying surprises (the spikes on DK's level always get me...) and some additions to make it more frantic such as in one of Samus's levels where a safety pod will come up which you have to get into to avoid being swarmed by a giant wave of lava.
Your item options are all the same and they've taken the special brawls and confined it to a single option were you can set all the parameters: damage %, giant mode, speed, all of those.
In the end, the multiplayer is pretty much an upgraded melee...but if you loved melee, that shouldn't really matter. In fact, it might be a bit refreshing like the change from the N64 version to melee.
Online works nicely, though if you want a match with your friends you'd probably have to organise it all in advance. Then again, who needs friends when you can play against anyone in the world? It's pretty much like offline Brawls but you can taunt with text.
Josh picked "DAVE SMELLS", "O HAI" and "HOST !!!!" as some of his. These can probably be abused, but they're still kinda fun.
You can spectate in matches and bet coins on who the winner(s) will be, with special "bonus" rounds showing up sometimes where you can double or triple your winnings to keep you interested. This is kinda nice when you don't really fancy playing or you've finished a session but still have the Brawl bug.
Oh there's a stage builder as well, which is likely to produce some interesting frays with some time put into it. The more you play the game, the more parts you get to mess around with as well. If it's anything like the Timesplitter stage builder, it'll be a bit of fun with your mates.
If you don't have either one hardcore friend to play this with at least, then don't expect the single player to keep you glued to it all day long. This is definitely, much like melee, a game for the three or four man frays. You can record matches too, if someone managed to pull off a 1 man show or just as proof that a certain player is a "dark side" (as Worms would put it) camper near an edge away from the action.
Hopefully, this'll have the life span that melee had with me. I can already see some immense days of Brawling ahead.
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