As much as I am enjoying Metroid Prime, there is one game that I am looking forward to, a lot more. That is Brawl. Every day I check the website for new updates. Today, a Map Editor was announced. Not a little on the fly thing a la Halo, a full blown(ish) map editor. You can choose from all the backgrounds and then there are what looks to be a large selection of shapes, all of which can be coloured and skinned. Furthermore there are all the normal items you would find in a game of SSB. It really does look amazing.

Whats more, you can send your maps to friends and save them to SD cards (so no need to worry about size) But if this wasnt enough, you can submit a map (once per day) to Nintendo. Then every day, a new map will be sent to your Wii, created by someone else. You are then able to play on it for that day. Then the day after, the map will have changed. Apart from that being simply amazingly cool, that will be quite a technical feet also. As the Dojo says, "With a feature like that, won’t I be able to play this game forever?!" You can read all about it here...

Brawl is currently set to release in the UK at the end of February. And yes, I will have a counter.

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It has been announced today that Dawn of War 2 has been completed and is now moving in to production phase. The current release date is February 19th. I havent quite decided whether I am going to get this. On the one hand, I know they are going to bring out loads of expansion packs which I will end up buying because I want to use the Imperial Guard and I should just wait for the box set. Plus, Starcraft is coming out soon also. However, I really enjoyed Dawn of War and what they are doing with the campaign sounds really interesting.
One of things that did interest me in the press release was this:

"Disposable units will become a thing of the past as gamers feel the intimate brutality of war and develop a personal connection with fully customizable squads."

It is one thing to have customisable squads, but to actually make players care... Also, if you have spent ages levelling up a unit players will fear losing it. However, this could just mean that disposable units play an even bigger part, as you cannot risk your good units and so just chuck rubbish units at the enemy and only use your best units in the worst case scenario.

The campaign sounds really interesting as you have control over a very small number of units and there is no base building. This reminds me of a game I really enjoyed a while back based on the film Platoon. The problem I can see though is Platoon was built for this. However, in Dawn of War, the game has to be able to take standard base building skirmishes too. It will be interesting to see how it all fits together. It is easy to see how customisable units can work in the single player campaign, but in the skirmishes, will you have access to them?

What I would quite like is if you had a persistent army (tied to your GFWL[Game for Windows Live] Profile) As you won games, you could purchase upgrades.

For example, when you build a standard infantry squad, if you have upgraded one standard infantry squad to start off with grenade launchers, then the first one would have grenade launchers. All units would be standard after that, unless you had purchased identical upgrades, so you could have more than one unit starting off like this.

The possible problem with this would be balancing, if you win more games, you just become unstoppable. Perhaps to get around this, choosing your army would constantly require trade offs. Yes, you can upgrade all your units to have grenade launchers, but one of your tanks wont be available at all. This could actually work quite well as new players would have a well rounded army to suit any strategy, but then as you hone your strategy, you could hone your army to fit it.

And to think this was meant to be a quick post! Coming up, more on Fallout 3, got in to it and I am loving it. I have only done like the first part of the story, I just keep wandering off in to the wilderness!

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