Week End With October and Next Week's Predictions

September wasn’t nearly as quiet as I thought. But then again, I didn’t realize that the 100th update was coming, nor did I see the TGS stuff going down. Before I get to talking about the coming month, I’ll look back at the last prediction I did and see what I guessed right:

Although they didn’t go bi-weekly, they still have characters to show in October.
They did have two Final Smashes revealed this month
Diddy Kong’s Special Moves were shown
A veteran Special Moves article went up (not my guess of Yoshi, but still…)
A major feature at the start of the month (My Music)
Pokemon stage was shown, but not a non-Halberd Kirby Stage

So I did get some stuff right, but it really shouldn’t be that impressive, as a lot of it was pretty damned obvious. I’m really surprised we have yet to get a Metroid stage revealed. And with only two full months (9 weeks) of updates left before the game is out in the US (as much as people say the game is coming out in November in Japan, I will not be 100% sure until it’s put on the site), it seems like they’re kinda behind on certain things (Final Smashes most definetly). But that might be indicator of them stepping up in coming months.

Okay, as I said, we’re getting ever so closer to the release. So, there will be a sense of the updates heating up, but also a sense that things will be winding down. We have a lot of the major features in the game announced, but I’m sure there’ll be a few more that headline the next two months. Speaking of which, the brand new feature that’ll most likely be announced next week? Like I said before last month, these are pretty difficult to guess, because the people who make this game are far more creative than the people who play it. It might be something Wi-Fi-related, although probably not downloads (why would they have any examples of downloads available before the game comes out? Shouldn’t that be for later, when it doesn’t make them look like they left out stuff to be dicks?). A new type of single or multiplayer mode? I’m out of ideas.

It was neat how the in last week of September, the first and last update of the week were confirming the return of two key features from Melee. So basically, we only have a few more modes (the Classic and Stadium modes, possibly All-Star and Event battles) that can be confirmed to return. I’d say we’re probably be getting the single-player bonus type stuff in October, and of course more Wi-Fi features that may or may not be big enough to be the aforementioned early-month biggie.

Not much to say about the Adventure Mode, as it’ll most likely just chug along as normal. I’m kinda surprised by the format they’ve taken to release these updates, seemingly just introducing concepts or whatever whenever they like. These updates took a backseat in September, so maybe we’ll get more this month. Will they reveal another boss, or will they want to keep the rest of them unspoiled for the masses?

Ah, characters now. I suspect there will be only two more to show (there could be 3, but considering it looks like Snake is a starter after all, 21 seems to make a good three rows of seven on the select screen) before taking a break and waiting for the perfect time to start posting spoilerific stuff (I’d say about a week or two before American release). As you probably know, those two characters will be Captain Falcon and Ness. They might be shown back-to-back, or the site might show them bi-weekly to make it seem more fairly spread out. Either way, I expect only those two to be shown.

With those two, they’ll have 11-12 (depends on whether Zero Suit Samus has one or not) more Final Smashes left to show. Split that down, and we’ll probably half and half between October and November. I think Kirby, Fox, Peach, Wario, and Meta Knight are due. It works, too, as October will have 5 weeks, even though some might be bundled together into one week. We’ll probably get some Special Moves (veteran and possibly the two remaining Newcomers without their Special Moves up).

I noticed a pattern with the stages: there were 4 between May/June, 4 in July, and then 4 in August/September. That might indicate that we’ll get 4 stages this month, and it works well because they’ve probably got quite a few they still need to show. For the love of everything, they gotta show the Metroid stage, they just gotta. Alongside it, I expect to see Ice Climber, F-Zero, and Earthbound stages to go alongside it. We may get Shadow Moses, but something tells me they’ll wait for that.

One unexpected thing I suspect will happen in October: we’ll get one or more Notices. Apparently there is a Nintendo conference on the 10th, and I suspect that they’ll confirm the Japanese release date there. This could mean some sort of video update so that all the sites get something while the Japanese version gets a bonus (just like how they did the E3 update). A week later is E 4 All, which Nintendo is attending. I actually think it’s pretty likely Brawl will show up there in one form or another, possibly even playable. If it is playable, showing Captain Falcon and Ness in the first two weeks of the month would work out quite well, as then all the starting playable characters will be known before the show, and thus the demo wouldn’t spoil anything. They could also use this to do an update showing off the character select screen (wouldn’t that make a great Friday update?)

Last but not least, the Items and Music updates will not be going any significant places this month. We’ll get a new item or two, a couple of Assist Trophies and probably a Pokeball Pokemon now that that section is going through a renaissance. Music-wise, we’ll probably get a Donkey Kong and Kirby tune (Mario is also missing one, but I think it’d make more sense for them to post a song for Mario Circuit after that stage is profiled, as they’ve revealed most of the Delfino Plaza soundtrack in the My Music update), and possibly one from either F-Zero or Earthbound.

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Now that that is finished, let’s predict next week’s updates, but like Captain Falcon before it, I’ll refrain from saying a Metroid stage this time because I’ve been using it too much lately:

Captain Falcon
Adventure Mode update
A new item
A How to Play article (a technique)
Music