Today, as usual, I woke up at around 7:30 am so I could shower and go to work. Before leaving my house I turned on my computer to check Smash Bros Brawl website, something I do every weekday. When I entered the site I was dazzled to see that Samurai Goroh had made it to the roster, but then I noticed something beside the post's title, instead of being represented by a characters icon there was an item icon over there! At first I thought it was a small glitch but then I scrolled up to check the other post of the day and realized that I was wrong, Samurai Goroh hadn't made it to the roster he was actually an item!!!!! I was obviously disappointed.

Samurai Goroh is one of the charactersthat canbe summoned every time you use a new item called the Assist Trophy which are like some Nintendo Pokéballs, the characters that will randomly appear will either come to your aid and damage your opponents or do something annoying. In fact, if you think from the battle standpoint,that's an awesome item, it may not be so inventive because as I have already said it is too similar to the Pokéballs, but it will eventually bring a new twistto battles and it will make them to be much more insane. But when I think as a player who wants to see a great group of playable characters I couldn't be more worried.

Let's analyze it. Samurai Goroh wasn't a character many people craved for and so does Hammer Bros who is another announcedassist character, but let's suppose that during one of the following weeks Sakurai announces Ridley as an assistant, and that's very likely, everyone will be so mad at him for not putting Ridley as a playable character, I'm sure a single character won't affect the general outcome of the game but those new assist thropies will allow Nintendo to put some awesome guys as just mere assistants.

But today wasn't all about bad news, Nintendo has finally dated The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass' release as October 1st, on the other hand Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was delayed, but let's not get mad, it was just for one week and now instead of coming out on August 20th Samus will face the Space Pirates once again on August 27th.

It was announced earlier this week that Nintendo is working on a new Wii channel. Finally!!! This channel will be called the Wii Ware channel which will be a place where smaller game producers can showcase their ideas and new games, big producers will obviously also be able to place new games on this channel but Nintendo stated that it was something they wanted to create for companies that most of the times don't have enough money to put a game on the market.

Those games will be available to download on the Shop Channel, and can be purchased using the famous Wiipoints. The bad news is that it will only be released at 2008.

I think it is awesome that Nintendo will finally put some more downloadable content for Wii owners and it is likely that we will eventually find many great games on this service since smaller developers can sometimes have the brightest ideas. I know that the XBOX 360 has a similar feature with downloadable games, I just hope Nintendo will get some better games becuase from what I have been told the games available for the 360 aren't that amazing.

IGN News

Have you read Gamespot's preview for The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass? It looks like it is going to be the best portable Zelda ever, I'm happy that not only is Nintendo keeping the Wind Waker's visual style but they are also maintaining many of the characters which are awesome, especially the Pirates crew.

I also like the fact that sailing is still there, although many people complained about how boring that was on Wind Waker I actually loved it, since while sailing you felt like a true sea explorer given the huge overworld. I loved to collect information from the fishmen and every time I saw the Ghost Ship I was so excited, even though I had no idea why was that thing on the game. But there are good news for the ones who didn't like sailing at all, this time the game will do most of the sailing work for you, I don't know how this will work but it will be perfect for those who even fell asleep while Link was heading to another island.

Based on the preview I can say that this game is going to have an awesome storyline, and the gameplay is, as expected, specially designed for the DS. You will use the stylus even for swinging your sword and performing different combos, I'm expecting that some of the puzzle designs will be changed because the new gameplay will allow Nintendo to create puzzles that are different from the already known "Light all torches on the room" or "Put the block on the switch" ones.

Nothing can be said about how long will the game last and how tough it is, since it is only out in Japan and it must be hard to go through a Zelda game without understanding a word of what people are telling you. I guess we all need to wait until the end of the year so we can discover those and many other secrets of Zelda latest game.

A kind of exaggerated title, isn't it? Well, I'm just writing to say that the time I spend playing games weekly will probably be shortened by much. Today was supposed to be my last day as a trainee where I work, but a few minutes before I could go my boss calls me and says that he would like me to work full-time instead of part-time, so which means I'll start working from 9 am to 6 pm next month.

It would be really nice if it wasn't for a small problem, I'll start at the University in two months, which means that if I accept his proposal and keep working I'll be completely busy for the next years of my life, I'll have to work until 6 pm and go to the University at night, it is going to be great because I will get some money and study but I mean, I won't have time to do anything besides those two activities.

I know I still have the weekends but as I won't have enough time to do my homework on weekdays I'm going to have to doit on weekends. It will be pretty tough to keep up with this schedule, but it will be really rewarding because as soon as I leave the University I will already have a great job and experience, I just hope I can survive.:)

If you have already been to Gamespot's main page today you have probably noticed on the latest news tab that Gamespot is changing both its game pages design and its rating system.

The game pages actually look pretty cool with lots of information, and it is always nice to see different things. I didn't like the changes on the rating system, if you are wondering what changes I'm talking about I'll explain.

First of all, the ratings will no longer be based on graphics, gameplay, sound, replay and tilt, all those categories are now gone, it doesn't mean that they will not evaluate those aspects of the games anymore, they will keep taking all those characteristics in account when giving the final score, the big difference is that without having to give score for each one of those categories they will have more freedom to rate a game.

Second, the scores will be given in half-point increments, which means that scores like 8.3, 7.8, 9.7 will not be used anymore, that's what I didn't like. I know it is hard to say that a 7.4 game is better than a 7.3 one, but for me there is a big difference between a game that scores 9.7 and one that gets a 10.

The best thing about this change is that games will now get emblems, similar to those on our profiles,based on their prowess and weaknesses, I liked it a lot, it will be much easier to decide whether you buy a certain game or not if you don't have time to read a full review.

The changes will be implemented on June 25th. If you want you can check Jeff's profile for more information.

Jeff's Profile

I'm wondering whether I should by this game or not, given that I have already finished the GC version, I don't actually own it, but I have played it at a friend's house. I wasn't too excited about this game before its release, honestly I only discovered they were making a new Resident Evil 4 version some weeks ago, now that it has been released I'm still not sure about buying it.

I have never been a great fan of FPS, the only FPS I can remember I like are Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime 1 and 2. So, those games aside I don't like this genre at all because FPS make me too nervous and that's not something I'm looking for when playing games.

I am already done playing my Wii games, I play Wario Ware daily but not for too long, I just try to beat my best scores, Mario Party 8 is great if you have someone to play with and so does Wii Sports after you manage to reach Pro status on all Sports, as my friends only drop by on weekends, my weekdays have been kind of boring, so I was looking for some Single-Player game that could entertain me for days.

Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition is not out here yet, I guess it will take one more week for stores to import the game, so I still have time to think if I should buy it. I want your opinion, is it worthy to get the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 if I have already played the GC version?

I haven't blogged for 5 days, which is not such a long time but I guess it is the my longest blogless span(Can I say that?) since March. The reason for this lack of activity are many, I'll rattle off some of them. First of all you guys may already be aware that I bought 5 VC games and I've been working on finishing them, I have already beat Ocarina of Time and I'll defeat the last boss of A Link to the Past as soon as the Yankees game ends. This will still leave me with three games to go.

I'm halfway through The Legend of Zelda, I can beat Donkey Kong Country 2 in a couple of hours given how many times I have finished this game on my life and Kid Icarus will take a lot of patience to be finished since it is as hard as a game can be.

So as you can see I have been playing lots of games, I'm kind of enjoying the end of my 7-month vacation while waiting for the start of the University, I will take the Computer Science course and I know I'll be really busy when August comes, since I'll have to study hard.

I have also been watching the golf US Open and rooting for Retief Goosen but right now it doesn't look that he will make the cut, it is pretty sad, I guess I'll have to go with Angel Cabrera for the weekend as he is the best south-american golfer, right now the dude is leading by one shot, I know it will be a tough weekend full of bogeys but I hope he does great.

Today I did a cleanup on my Gamespot's friends, I just noticed I had so many friends, I didn't even know about most of them, so I'm now down to 67, I guess that's a pretty good number.

Finally, today I had my first multiplayer experience with the Wii my friend dropped by and we played some Mario Party 8 and Wii Sports, I didn't think the Wii could be any better than it already was but it is awesome to play multiplayer on it, itis so thrilling. So maybe tomorrow I will post my Mario Party 8 review.

See ya.

My N64 had been broken for quite a while and yesterday I decided to take it downtown so I could find someone to fix it. Well, Iwent to a store and a guy told me he would try. I went back to the store a few minutes later and he said there wasn't anything he could do to fix it, it seems that my N64 had some kind of electric problem. If he tried to fix it it would cost me more money than if I bought a new one.

So next week I'm going back there to buy a new one. Hopefully I can get one and play all classics such as Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Star Fox 64 and many others all over again.

Today my copy of Mario Party 8 arrived, I must say I haven't been able to enjoy 100% of the game because I still don't have a second Wiimote, I went downtown today almost sure I would get one, unfortunately their Wiimote + Nunchuck prices are absurd, it can get over 150 bucks. There's one store, though, on which the controllers are sold for $90 but the saleswoman told me they were out off it because their controllers are the most unexpensive thereby they sell them really fast.

I invited a friend, the same who defeated me on Mario Party 6 some days ago, to come here and play some Mario Party 8, but sadly I had to call him to say he shouldn't come because I didn't get the controller. I'm going back downtown this weekend to try to find one for a reasonable price.

My comments so far on Mario Party 8 are, the game is great, the boards are awesome, I loved Boo's Mansion specially because of its changing path, the board is never the same. I heard some complaints about the graphics on both IGN and GS' reviews, but from what I've seem after playing it for 4 hours I can easily say that the graphics are fine, much better than the ones from its prior GC versions.

I'm just a little disappointed at the mini-games because it's hard to even compare them to Wario Ware's ones, since the latter makes a much better use of the Wiimote, but I guess the mini-games will be nicer when I play them with friends.

Now that I have bought Super Paper Mario, Wario Ware and Mario Party 8 I'm waiting for Pokémon Battle Revolution and Mario Strikers Charged, I was thinking about buying SSX Blur or Trauma Center, I'm more likely to buy the latter because I believe EA will eventually make a new version of SSX that will have improved graphics, controls and sound, so I'll wait for the next one.

The biggest gaming event of the world which is not that big anymore, but is still the biggest anyway, is just a week away. Many developers have already announced the games that will be shown at this year's E3, but the biggest developer of all, Nintendo, has once again decided not to say anything about what will be presented.

This obviously leaves room not only for speculation but it also allow us to dream about what surprises they are holding. Maybe a new version of Mario Kart, or release dates for both Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy. The only thing we gamers are sure is that between June 11th and 13th we will wake up one day and be completely striked by a new game or by some news.

I hope they will show a new Star Fox or Mario Kart, and, I know it is hard, maybe a new installment of the Earthbound series that only had one game released on the US.

Although the E3 has been downsized it still is one of the best parts of the year for anyone who plays games. What do you guys expect to be announced?