I know many people quit visiting the Smash Brothers Dojo once Brawl actually came out, but I still check it most mornings. It has become such a routine thing for me, just like checking e-mail, that I gotta say I’ll miss Mr. Sakurai’s daily posts and cheerful, sometimes awkward humor. Even so, since Brawl hit the shelves in Japan, the updates haven’t been as intertesting or entertaining as they were five months ago. Today, however, I noticed something a bit strange. The update is another screenshot collection - evidently you’re able to send him screenshots you take in the game. Either that, or these are just collected from the Smash Service submission feature. Anyway, if you scroll all the way down you’ll find this note:

Thanks for all of your submissions!

Please understand that snapshots depicting inappropriate content or containing inappropriate comments will not be eligible for selection.

To this point, I’ve received a great number of screenshots that focus on peeking at the undergarments of certain Brawl combatants. So let me just say it again—shots like these will never be posted to the Dojo or sent out to users via the Smash Service.

Can’t say I’m surprised this has been happening, but I did have a laugh at the fact that he had to make this statement. But then I started looking a little more around the images. For whatever reason, Sakurai decided to separate photos taken by Americans and Japanese and then give each side a link to the others. I clicked to view the Japanese gallery and browsed and then I found this on the bottom of page 3:

I honestly can’t tell if this is just another joke or if it was honestly missed. I have a hard time believing that a man in his position in his type of career would actually be in charge of maintaining the site all by himself. It’s heartwarming to imagine the Dojo as being entirely his own blog, but to assume he does all of the web design, file maintenance, and translations (into five different languages!) himself is a bit farfetched. At any rate, I have saved the above image and I’m prepared to upload it and edit this post in the event that it gets discovered by somebody in charge and is taken down.

Dojo updates will be done on the 14th, which is Monday. It will almost reach its one-year birthday. Although I would imagine perhaps it already has, if you take in the period of time when all we got was a countdown to JAPAN TIME.

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.

This past weekend, somebody at Smash Boards posted a link to a torrent of the entire soundtrack for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, ripped straight from the game. The entire OST is over 300 tracks long. The original torrent doesn’t have correct file naming, however. You’ll get a long list of files named A01, A02, … B01, B02, etc. The lettering groups the tracks according to franchise, like all of the A’s are Mario tracks, B is Donkey Kong, C is Zelda, etc. Another person wrote a DOS batch file which automatically goes through the directory with the music and renames the files for you automatically (according to the titles listed in the Smash Boards thread). This does not, however, modify any of the meta tags of the files (like artist, track, title, etc) which is a problem for me because i’m very obsessive compulsive with my music organization. Since the original posting, I’ve found links to another torrent for the OST, advertising “correctly labeled” and that sort of thing, but I don’t know if the author of that torrent also editted any of the tags. Two of the tracks which are included, 00.mp3 and X24.mp3 are “empty” (as in, there’s no audio) which could have just been an error with the ripping. The torrent (the Smash Boards one) also includes various sound effects (such as unlock chimes, Game Over, etc). These and the two dead files are supposedly not included in the new torrent.

Here are some statistics:
Total files: 314
Tracks: 312 (2 “empty” tracks)
BGM: 285 (312 - 27 Victory and SFX tracks)
Runtime: 16hrs 7min 50sec
Size: 1.10GB

For the Smash Boards thread and the original torrent, go here.
To find other torrents, go here.

Update! - Sorry for the wait, but here’s the .bat file which will rename all the files for you: click here. Extract the file to the same directory as all of the mp3s and double-click it to run. The files MUST have the original names (A01.mp3, etc) for this to work! I actually made a few adjustments to it, correcting a couple tiny mistakes the original author made.