Predictin' November

We’re getting a half-and-half week, so I decided to start predicting November today.

October was a pretty important month. A ton of impressive features, third party references, returning game modes, and new characters and stages galore. Now, despite the fact that the game’s release date changing kinda moved some of my predictions from last month in the wrong direction, let’s see what I got right:

-Single player bonus stuff (Home-Run and Target Smash!) updates
-More Wi-Fi features (Sharing and co-op)
-Kirby, Fox, and Peach’s Final Smashes
-One of the two newcomers-without-them-at-the-times got their special moves (Zero Suit Samus)

Now, that new release date changes quite a bit. Where before November was the finale month, where they’d likely step up their updates and finish talking about most of the stuff in the game, now it isn’t really all that special, and they can go at a more leisurely pace. I don’t think November will be as overloadingly awesome as October, as it might take a break from really groundbreaking features just to catch up on some things (kinda like September, but even that had Wi-Fi play).

Single player game modes took a gigantic turn for the better in October. Tons of co-op modes, return of some Stadium modes and Classic, and the Stage Builder/Snapshots/Replay Record. They’ve been revealing so many modes as of late, I think they may need to slow down a bit in November. There may couple of returning modes left that can be discussed (mainly Multi-Man, which I still expect is back), and it’s possible they have a few more surprises up their sleeves, but it’ll be a solid stream rather than the avalanche that we’ve been getting. Despite what I thought before, Adventure Mode hasn’t been picking up…so I’m not sure if it’ll get any better in November. I do expect they’ll talk about that upgrade system, though.

Aw, characters. What they’ve been willing to show has continually surprised me. It seems, rather unexpectedly but not really when you think about, October was yet another Newcomer month, just two months after our last Newcomer month. If this is really a pattern, I could definitely see November as being like September character-wise; mostly stuff we knew was coming (like say CAPTAIN FALCON FINALLY OMG). But, unless they either decide to go biweekly or have some sort of surprise older character they feel the need to reveal (Luigi being the most likely candidate, but who knows with them), there won’t be enough characters to fill their recent average quota of three. So, it’s entirely possible that there will be another new character next month. If I could pick a possible new character for them to show, I’d say...Captain Olimar. He seems to be the type that would be a starting character, or at the very least a character they’d like to show before the game comes out.

More Final Smashes! Probably some Newcomers, especially more of the ones we know about like Sonic, Ike, or Meta Knight. We could also get some surprise ones, like Wario’s, Snake’s, and the Ice Climbers. I could also definitely see Lucas finally getting his Special Moves update’d. I think by the end of the next month, we will also know if Zelda can turn into Sheik or not.

There will be two stages this month. One of them will be Norfair. The second will either be for Sonic or Captain Falcon. That is all that needs to be said about that.

Items sure took a long breather last month. Could it be that they didn’t want to show too much of the stuff that was at E For All (could also be the explanation for Norfair’s absence)? Do they not have anything that hasn’t already been revealed since the demo? They still need to show the Smart Bomb, Urchin, Deku Nut (or whatever that stunning item some people saw in the game was), the Springboard, and the Lightning Bolt, as well as few Pokemon and Assist Trophies. I could definitely see more of these showing up in November, especially since the Game Modes updates will probably be scaled back, needing to be replaced by SOMETHING.

How to Play and Music will continue coming out every once in a while. We sure could use a few more techniques, though, especially since we know about crawling and wall jumping now. Also, if we get a Sonic stage during the month, I expect Sonic music alongside it.