If I recall correctly, Sakurai said there would be a max of three third-party characters in Brawl since he wanted to keep the focus on Nintendo. We already have two characters that are pretty epic...will there be a third? Personally, I'm skeptical.

If my vote counted I would give it to one of the epic vampire slayers from the Castlevania series, though the popular vote seems to be Mega Man. Inafune said he wasn't in Brawl a few months ago...I doubt they had enough time to put him in, and why they would wait so long to add him would be beyond me. Mega Man is probably out, in my opinion. If it isn't Mega Man, who do you think the most likely candidate is for that third slot, or do you think they just stuck with Snake and Sonic in the end?

Let me just put it out there, I'm a big fan of the 360 and not of the PS3. Now that we've gotten that out of the way I still like to discuss the pros and cons each system has with as little bias as possible. No matter which system you're rooting for, this is both good and bad news for PS3 fans. While I personally think it should be optional, they must have had their reasons. The Blu-ray drive reads slower than the Xbox 360's drive so perhaps the load times were so bad they felt it necessary to require it since all PS3's have a hard drive. I'd like to know if this is an option on the 360 and how the load times are, but I've yet to hear any confirmation on that. Let's take a look at why PS3 fans should be happy...and why they should be sad.

The Good:

-No loading times.
-Only needs to be done once.

The Bad:

-Takes 25 minutes.
-Isn't avoiding installation at least part of the reason people buy console games?
-Takes up 5GB.
-If you uninstall it and feel like playing it again you have to reinstall it. The same applies to taking it to a friends house, you'll have to wait for that 25 minute install again.

Obviously there is no reason to go buy one system or the other over this detail. However, those who own a 360 AND a PS3 will have an interesting decision to make once we hear exactly how the Xbox 360 version function.

Source: NeoGAF

According to The New York Times, the DS will be getting downloadable content via the Wii. The article is mostly just fluff about sales numbers, the rise of the DS, basic functionality that we all know, etc. I was aware that we were going to be able to download DS demos, but I didn't imagine we would actually get new content. The first game announced to support this is Professor Layton. I don't know much about the game but the art style looks amazing, it's for the DS, and it's a puzzle game. I'm not seeing much that could go wrong there... So that you don't have to sift through all the crap, here's the part we care about:

Mr. Fils-Aime said that future DS device will be more tightly integrated with its Wii console. Complete games as well as game samplers will be able to be downloaded into the Wii using its broadband connection, and then transferred wirelessly to the DS.

A puzzle-solving game, Professor Layton, to be introduced next year, will be upgraded with new puzzles transmitted to the DS through a wireless download.

The other thing that caught my eye is the fact that it says we can download complete games. I wonder if this will be GameBoy ROMs, basically recreating the Virtual Console on the DS, or if it will be something along the lines of small (and cheap) games. Nintendo would then need to sell some kind of storage card for us to place the games on but this is great news no matter how you look at it. Now all we need is a release date for when this functionality will be fully implemented. Though the article doesn't explicitly state it, the feature will likely use the Everybody's Nintendo Channel that recently debuted in Japan.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/technology/31nintendo.html

I'm a huge fan of XBLA since the games are cheap, fun, beautiful, and I can buy them at midnight while sitting on my couch naked. Can anything beat that? I think not. While I'm getting kind of burnt on Metal Slug...this really appeals to me due to the ease of use that Xbox Live provides. You can see the full story here:

http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2007/12/28/555497.aspx

OK guys cut me a little slack here...I played the CoD4 beta and absolutely loved it but I didn't pick the game up until last weekend. Normally I'm on my PC playing TF2 but I'm kind of burnt and I want to get it on the CoD4 action.

Do we have a weekly host already? if not, I can take care of hosting...my connection recommends the max number of people so I can support it well and I'll play for a long time. I've already added the [TOID] tag to my name...am I behind on anything else? I just want to get up to speed with the 360 scene. How many are usually involved? I know our PC TF2 server is always full.

My GT is ShadowXOR (I use that name everywhere).

I'm not sure when this was posted but I just noticed it. The daily updates for Smash Bros. will be on a temporary hiatus as of right now. At least I'll be able to go to bed earlier instead of waiting for these things every night... From the official site:

All seven languages of Smash Bros. Dojo will take a year-end holiday break from posting following December 28. We plan to resume posts on January 7.

Have a happy new year.

I enjoy the updates but they've been pretty uninterested for the last few months and the game is so close that I'd rather just wait to play it now. I'm going to try and avoid Japanese spoilers since they get the game early. I'll be enjoying it a week earlier than most of you though since a couple of my friends work at Nintendo. And by the way, why the hell isn't the original N64 version on the Virtual Console yet? I liked it a lot better than Melee...