I’m friends with a guy with connections to Gamestop who is helping a local game center host Gamestop’s Brawl tournaments this weekend. He already has the game, and I got to play it with him last night.

Here are my first impressions.

- Ike is pretty awesome. He’s a lot more awesome than Marth or Roy, because he’s not girly. Also, he is not a clone. Praise jebus.
- Some of the new stages are incredible. Some are annoying, but are ones I see myself getting used to. In the WarioWare stage, for instance, every 30 seconds or so the stage “warps” into a mini game and all players have to do the action presented on screen, just like a WarioWare game. This could be anything from “don’t move” to “pop the balloon”. After each minigame, it shows which players successfully did it, but I wasn’t able to determine if there’s any sort of reward or penalty.
- The Final Smashes are cool, though some prove a little disappointing/anticlimactic. But the sudden fight over the Smash Ball when it appears is FUN. It has been a long time since I shouted while playing a video game. It’s a rush.
- There were no nunchucks available, only remotes, classic controllers, and gamecube controllers. I started with a Gamecube controller at first because I wanted to spend some time focussing more on the game rather than learning new buttons. But after a few matches I mixed it up. I swapped to using a a Classic Controller. I don’t think I’ve ever even used one before, so maybe that was part of the problem, but I found it rather awkward and hard to adjust to. Immediately after trying the Classic Controller, I went with the Wiimote-held-sideways method, and surprisingly found this a bit more easy to control.
- We took a short break from multiplayer to check out the Subspace Emmissary. We didn’t get far because we ended up dying trying to beat the giant Petey. But what we saw was really cool.
- Back to Brawling, we ended up unlocking both Ness and Marth.
- Some changes I noted: Link’s spin attack can be charged. The Zelda/Shiek transformation takes longer now (we’re talking 2 or 3 seconds). Shiek’s needles can be stored just like DK’s punch and Samus’s charge shot. Marth’s main Special (the charged-up slash) is no longer a vertical slash but a stab. Bowser’s claw-grab-chomp Special (->B) has been replaced by a kickass claw-grab-BODYSLAM special, but if you pay attention to the Dojo, you already know this.