Nintendo seemingly sneaked this through.

May 10, 2006 - Nintendo just pulled a fast one on us. At an after-hours press briefing a mere minute ago, the company pulled another ace out of its sleeve: Super Smash Bros. Brawl -- the next installment in Nintendo's popular Super Smash Bros. series.

Shigeru Miyamoto himself has confirmed the following playable characters:

# Pit (Kid Icarus)

# Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid)

# Zero Suit Samus (the blue "no-suit" Samus from Metroid: Zero Mission)

# Metaknight (Kirby)

# Wario (Wario)

Under the direction of series creator Masahiro Sakurai, Super Smash Bros. Brawl will feature classic, GameCube-style combat -- not Wii-style motion-controlled combat. That means players who prefer to play the game with the traditional control setup can look forward to using the GameCube control-style they're already accustomed to.

"We found that trying to implement too much motion-sensory functionality can get in the way of the game. We're looking at keeping the control simple, as it has been," said Sakurai. "The Wii hardware has sockets for the GameCube controller, too. So I'll just say now that you may not want to throw away your GCN controller yet."

The game also features a range of new nasty toys, such as the ability to unleash a puppy from Nintendogs that will run up to the screen, put its paws up and obscure the view of the action. Mario, Kirby, Pikachu and Link have been confirmed as returning characters. Sakurai confirmed that Wario actually has a fart attack and that Solid Snake can use his trusty cardboard box. In the video trailer, Snake gets out of the box and says "It's showtime!"

"We thought a lot about what to do with Snake and his moves in Super Smash Bros. Brawl," said Sakurai. "As you all know Snake walks around with a gun, but with Super Smash Bros. I didn't want to bring in a lot of real weapons. So that was a real challenge. But conversely, if we could use things like rocket launchers and other explosives, not only would that be fitting for Snake, but it would work for the other characters. But who knows. Maybe Snake will exclusively use explosives throughout the game."

Sakurai said the decision to include Solid Snake when Hideo Kojima himself practically "begged" to include the Metal Gear character in the last Smash Bros. game. When asked about the possibility of Sonic the Hedgehod appearing in the game as well, Shigeru Miyamoto said: "There are probably possibilities for other third parties as well, and it maybe that even know there are corporate discussions going on about including some of these other characters."

Even better, the game will be fully online playable in addition to featuring a robust multiplayer mode. "My plan is to include Wi-Fi connection compatibility and online functionality. One of the primary reasons Super Smash Bros. Brawl was created was that Nintendo, when taking Wii online, wanted to have Smash Bros. to do that," added Sakurai.

The bad news is that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will no longer be a Wii launch title, but will instead be released in 2007.

Also, it seems Nintendo of Japan has put up a survay on who else should be added to the Work in Progress Wii title.

Nobuo Uematsu is also set to do music for the title.

Revolution.IGN

9th May, 2006 - GameEx 6.06

 

* The GameEx download has been reduce by nearly 70% to just over 11MB as the themes are now downloaded separately, and only 1 theme is included with the basic install

* However, by default the existing themes will be downloaded and installed when installing GameEx, and the extra download size is 18MB

* You can however tick the checkbox to not have it download the themes, say for example you have a low bandiwdth connection, or are already using a recent version.

* For offline installs the themes archive is also available on the downloads page

* And yes I completely understand how much a dial-up connection sucks!

* Hopefully this helps a little. In relation to GameEx this makes a 50KB connection equivalent to a 128KB connection or there abouts.

>> Get it HERE.

0.105u5

---------

 

MAMETesters Bugs Fixed

---------------------------

memory0105u4red [Aaron Giles]

 

Source Changes

------------------

Cleaned up the freekick.c driver [sonikos]:

- added 2nd button in gigas/gias2m/oigas

- matched the Z80 chip mhz to the "confirmed" mhz of gigas

 

Extended the gfxlayout structure to support "extended" arrays of x and y offsets. These are used for layouts that are larger than 32x32. This enables the standard structure to be smaller for the vast majority of games that don't require huge graphics decodes. The end result is that the MAME.exe is ~3MB smaller. [Atari Ace, Aaron Giles]

 

Added some Amiga enhancements needed for MESS Amiga and CDTV drivers. [Dirk Best]

 

Removed non-existant 3rd & 4th player controls from deadconx. [Don Maeby]

 

Improvements to the MACS driver: [Tomasz Slanina]

- fixed a couple of gfx bugs in st0016 video emulation

- added hacks to allow MACS games to boot

- removed REGION_DISPOSE flag from srmp5 and speaglsht (no more crashes)

 

Fixed/improved DIP switches in the powerbal.c, konamigx.c, and gsword.c drivers. [Twisty]

 

More improvements to the BFM driver and the 6840 timer emulation. [El Condor]

 

Improvements to the x86 drc engine and the Windows blitters:

- Blitter CPUID features now accessed by drc_x86_get_features() call

- Added win_blit_init(), to initialize the blitter

- Changes to DRC to support usage for things other than CPU cores

- Fixed drc_dasm() so it works once again

- Added macros for a number of MMX/SSE instructions

- Added a number of MMX/SSE instructions to the i386 disassembler

 

Actually applied the Marine Date fixes which were mentioned in a previous u release. [Aaron Giles]

 

Added experimental support for building using Visual C++ 2003/2005. To do this, you still need the mingw environment (ironically) because we rely on the mingw make system to call out to the MSVC compilers. Set the variable MSVC_BUILD=1 on the command line or by modifying windows.mak, and it will build using the Microsoft compilers. This works through the use of a stub program vconv.exe which translates gcc options into MSVC options. As a bootstrapping measure, vconv.exe is compiled at the start of a clean build by mingw. Most of the standard build options just work (SYMBOLS, MAP, DEBUG, etc). If you have a beefy computer, you can also set MAXOPT=1 and use link-time code generation for maximum optimization effect. [Aaron Giles]

 

Added preliminary support for 64-bit targets. A new makefile define PTR64 should be set if you are compiling for a 64-bit target. This propogates a PTR64 define into the C files as well. Made the makefile smart enough to auto-disable the drc cores for 64-bit, and removed most of the roadblocks to a 64-bit build, apart from the assembly blitters, which are currently undergoing a rewrite. [Aaron Giles]

 

 

New games added or promoted from NOT_WORKING status

------------------------------------------------------------------

Hidden Catch 2 [Pierpaolo Prazzoli, Guru]

Fishing Maniac 3 [Pierpaolo Prazzoli, Guru]

Yu-Ka [Tomasz Slanina]

Yu-Jan [Tomasz Slanina]

 

New clones added

--------------------

Greyhound Selection (Version 40.02TMB) set 2 [brian Troha]

Greyhound Poker (3 new sets) [brian Troha]

 

New games marked as GAME_NOT_WORKING

--------------------------------------------------

Master Boy [David Haywood]

Intersecti [David Haywood]

http://mamedev.org

Derivative Builds:

MAME32qa

MAMEplus!

MAME32plusSpecial

Dats:

MAMEinfo.dat

History.dat 1.06o

Notes:

MAME Plus! 0.105u5 2006-05-11

* 'View PCB Info' changed to MAME32FX style

* updated M68K DRC core to v105u2 C core

* added cps1/dinoha, dinohb [FBA]

* cps1/sf2m13 is working [iq_132]

* added neogeo/kf2k4pls, kf2k2plc, cthd2k3a [iq_132]

Acorn Archimedes Emulator

9th May 2006

 

* Improved video code - display always centred correctly, multisync mode support (eg 640x480, 640x512 and 800x600), borders always drawn correctly (eg Zelanites)

* Fixed bug with LDMxx!, !NewLook now works, Arthur desktop now works

* Fixed bug in WD1772 FDC, disc writing now works again

* Some improvements to ArculFS

>> Get it HERE.