Dairantou Smash Brothers X! I finally got my hands on the Japanese Wii import about a week ago along with Mario Galaxy and the soundtrack I ordered from Club Nintendo. I have to confess, I haven’t even tried Mario Galaxy yet and I’ve spent time unlocking many of Brawl’s secrets ^_^;.
I have been waiting for this game since the summer of 2005 when I expected it would come out. It’s scheduled for release in America on March 9th and there is as of yet no known release date for Europe. My guess is it will be summer before the U.K shores see any sign of PAL versions.
The game is fantastic! It has a solid 1-player or co-op 2-player mode, as well as several event matches such as the classic Homerun contest and break the targets and other single player modes to work your way through on 5 difficulty settings. ‘Geki muzu’ (something like ‘ultra hard’) is something else. I’m re-living those frustrating days back when I used to play Super Smash Brothers on the N64 nearly everyday after school.
One particular vivid memory I have ended up with me venting my anger on a light switch. I was obsessed with beating 3 computer characters on the hardest difficulty setting with only 3 lives. I was pretty good at the game back then, but this task was pretty tough. I ended up smashing in one of those plastic covers that house light switches in my utter frustration one day after 3 pumped-up jigglypuffs succeeded in crushing me for the umpteenth time… o.O; My, I was empassioned back then…
My only problem with the game so far has been the lack of online play. It seems that because I am not in Japan, I am being blocked from connecting to other players online. Other people who have Japanese imports have reported success playing matches with people they have exchanged ‘Friend Codes’ with, albeit with a little lag across continents, but nobody I know of has been able to do the ‘free-for-all’ style random matches. Whether or not Nintendo is blocking all non-Japanese IP addresses I do not know, but I have tried for hours to try and circumvent it by using various Japanese proxy IP addresses.
Smilebanana also wrote about some error codes that appear when trying to connect online with Japanese versions of the game, but it seems to be more for problems connecting when in Japan. It doesn’t really solve the problems I have of never being able to find anyone to connect to…
Of course, the free proxies available are not really reliable, so that could be still be the problem. However, I managed to do everything else through a couple of proxies I tried, bar play Smash Brothers online. I can surf the internet on the Wii or download the weather reports through a Japanese proxy, but I just cannot connect to other people to play Brawl online. If anyone knows of a workaround, please help! Perhaps the problem will be solved when the game is released in America..? God forbid my Japanese import version can only connect to other Japanese versions of the game… I’ll never be able to play random matches online at all then… o.O;
Anyway, to make up for it, I’m hosting a Smash Brothers Brawl fest at my house this Saturday! If we get a good turnout, it should be great fun. Smash Brothers, after all, is made for multiplayer mayhem with friends! ^^
*Update 17/03/08*
I have finally managed to play random matches over the internet and also friend matches. My guess is that this happened because some people in the U.K have imported the U.S version of Brawl and so there are more people closer to me to connect to. It seems that Nintendo may be blocking by ping latency rather than IP address (discussed here on NTSC-UK). So, in other words, if the people you are trying to connect to are far away, there is too much lag and it won’t let you play. Seems sensible. Hopefully this will be retified when the game is released in the U.K, as I’ll be able to connect to other people closer to me.