Brawl; the rush; RoboRally

So, Brawl is out in Japan, and the information comes across to us. I like the character list. I'm disappointed Mewtwo was cut, but that was expected. Also too bad no Samurai Goroh, but that we've known for a long time. We'll have to see what they've done with Ganondorf... also, apparently you can start as Zero Suit Samus, because, contrary to rumor, Sakurai does not, in fact, hate tournament players. (Hold R on a Cube controller or Classic controller, Z on the nunchuk, or minus on the Wiimote.)

Some of the stages (41 of them!) look pretty cool, pretty disappointing none of the N64 ones are coming back, not even Dreamland and Kongo Jungle. Well, there's always the stage editor (!).

Items look pretty meh. I don't expect to be playing with them aside from in 1-player.

So today I played Nexus Ops against Peter and Youlian and we got a pretty interesting distribution of resources. Basically, Youlian got nearly all the 2s, and I got nearly all the Rock Striders. Yay, I have no income! Well, I figure, my only hope is a rush strategy... but how can I possibly end the game that quickly? Youlian obviously has the inevitability here. Well, I take the monolith on my second turn, and I hold on to it for the rest of the game. Youlian doesn't want to take it because he's afraid it'll make him appear to much of a threat, and Peter doesn't want to take it because he wants me to use it to fight Youlian. So I gained a bit of inevitability of my own - 2 cards a turn! Still, somehow, that doesn't seem quite as good as, y'know, having actual board position. Youlian was often getting 15 or 18 rubium a turn, which you think would have been sufficient to crush me. But in my situation, there was only one thing I could do - just constantly attack wherever I could to get points as fast as possible. And you'd think Youlian could have put a stop to this by wiping me out, but instead I sufficiently disrupted him to prevent this. Meanwhile Peter was mostly fighting Youlian, so I raced my way to 12, slow as it was, before anyone got around to stopping me. Hooray!

Also today we (me, Peter, Youlian, Winston Castle Supernova[0]) finally got out RoboRally - turned out the rules weren't missing, I just failed to see them. I like it a lot, though toward the end we got spread out and I was able to get to the end without much interference. Still, that may have been more of a map thing. Options seemed kind of pointless, though, with them being so hard to get a lot of the time - also partly a map thing, of course, but Youlian, having looked up the rules because he thought they were missing, found the new edition rules (this is the old edition) and seemed to recall that in the new edition you also get an option for tagging a checkpoint. I've checked the new edition rules, and I don't see that, but what it does do is change double-wrench from "heal 2 or take an option" to "heal 1 and take an option". I suppose we'll have to try that.

-Harry

[0]He's not actually asking not to be called Winston anymore.