No, you can escape those. Bowser can grab from air/ground, and cover around half of Final Destination, without chance of escape.

C'mon! That's not half of Final Destination! And we still don't know if you can't escape it during the first frames or something.

I love how my namesake just screams his own fighting style in the ring -- Solid Snake was always about intelligence in combat in the Metal Gear series and it seems like SSBB somehow brought that smartass sneaky side of Snake to Brawl. I mean the way the explosives can be used to basically instill fear is just brilliant. Snake also seems to adapt a very fast/slow hybrid -- slow with the explosives, fast with just plain CQC. I can already tell the more tactical nature of Snake's gameplay makes him a character explicitly designed for my style of play; outsmarting opponents -- and not just mere button-smashing -- is what I'm all about.

A character I'm surprisingly disappointed with: Captain Falcon. Maybe the guy playing him against Sonic was just a terrible gamer, but if that's really representative of Falcon's moveset I wonder just how effective he'll be in Brawl.

I'm digging Luigi, too. He just looks extraordinarily fun to play. I know they went the more blatantly humor-laden fart-joke sprawling direction with Wario, but there's something more subtle-yet-zany about Luigi's approach that actually makes me laugh harder. I could see myself enjoying owning the crap out of Mario with Luigi -- even more so then I'd enjoy beating Mario as Sonic.

Since I didn't see any difference in him (except for the fact that he's a bit slower and his knee has been nerfed) in comparison with Melee, I would say he's as good as in there, which is good enough.

Not to mention whenever you equal out the stock difference but have a massive difference in damage, you can just go and equalize it.

The distance it travels with super autokill is really worrying.

Also I'm liking the Wolf vs Falco match a lot. They seriously seem to play crazy different.

FUCKSHIT

I always thought the only reason Sheik was perceived as a guy was because in OoT you simply weren't told otherwise. Which was kind of the whole point. I mean look by the logic some people apply to this you'd have to use the male pronoun to refer to Samus, too.

I think I was much happier when I glossed over that part of the post. Now it's horrible knowledge which won't go away.

As for all of the matches, I'm going to hold off making any decisions on who I'm going to main until I have a copy of the game in my hands. All the theorizing so far has been interesting, but I won't make a final choice until I've had time to screw around with the characters personally.

I just figured out why it was named something other than DK rap: that's the name of the melee stage it's from. I'm pretty sure it's the same recording as from Melee - I thought it was different because a.) it's been a while b.) I've never listened to it on headphones before.

Also! I think I've discovered the worst Smash Bros. stage music ever: B09 is the level music from the original Donkey Kong. As in, the one where Mario was still called "jumpman." No remix, no medley. The file 49 seconds long, in which time the song loops 49 times.

EDIT: KK rider is the only KK song arranged for brawl. There's also KK Medley, which appears to be original to Brawl. Cruisin, Western, Gumbo, Rocking, DJ, and Condor are taken unchanged.

He seems to fight like the classic kung-fu crane style. Dash in, hit, dash out, repeat. Everything for him is all quick, and if things get desperate he can still Spring out of the fight, giving himself high ground.

It seems a bit...erratic to me. I like close-range dancing.

This part makes me so sad :(... No longer Falcon is the "comboing to the knee man" that I once knew and loved... actually there will probably less comboing also.... guess that leaves him with "to the man" now :( Oh well at least his side B can now be used as recovery move as opposed to a horrible mistake made while trying to recover in Melee...