GRANADA HILLS, Calif. -- Today might be the most important day in the tournament history of "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" in California.

You're probably thinking that's insane, especially since the U.S. version is less than a month old. I say this because it does not appear that Brawl will have a long tournament shelf life, the way things are constructed right now.

There are a lot of people that want Brawl to have a long tournament life, but there are others that want things the way they used to be, a…  More

There's plenty of characters in "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" that, at least for me, seem like you can just pick up in seconds.

I'm on the fence about Lucario.

The Pokemon representative is just ... weird.

A lot of his attacks are really good. I just found it somewhat difficult for me to pick up this character and start playing him.

I think it might have been because of his jumps. He had a different way about his gravity.

Also, his down-B, which is much like Marth's parry attack, threw me off a little bi…  More

Sometimes I wonder why I didn't go to college with an emphasis on learning mathematics. Everything I did in higher learning involved communications; talking to people, writing about people, talking about people.

I like working with numbers. However, I'm not one of those sabremetrics freaks who debate with people about which baseball players have a better on-base percentage when the count is 0-2.

Most of my stat taking involves just the basics.

And that's my goal in coming up with the Southern Calif…  More

Turns out, there are still people who care about Gamestop's "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" tournament series.

The four-tiered event continues Saturday with the final regional competitions set to take place. Those who have won the single-store events and then the first-regional tournaments are the only ones that can compete in Saturday's competitions.

The Gamestop tournaments? Yeah, those tournaments.

The ones where players were restricted to whatever weapon the store manager thought is appropriate. The…  More

I've been an M.K. freak since high school. And I'm talking about the M.K. as in "Mortal Kombat" in my high school days, and now the "Mario Kart" series.

In its attempt to find out whether items are bad for tournament play, Shoryuken is playing host to an online "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" competition tonight at 7 p.m. PDT.

Items will be set to low frequency for this competition; the two previous tournaments had items set to medium frequency.

Sudden death will be in effect as well for the double-elimination competition. Preliminaries are best-of-5, with the semifinals and championship a best-of-7 contest.

The tournament has 18 competitors signed up a…  More

The talk about items in "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" have now prompted some talk about "Mario Kart."

Are the items in both games similar?

If you look at the situations, the answer should be "No."

It's easy to look at it that way, because some items in both games are insane.

(I'll be speaking about Mario Kart Double Dash in this article).

= = =

Items in Brawl and Mario Kart range from the puny to the nearly insane. There's the Super Scope in Brawl and the banana in Mario Kart. But then again, there's the…  More

The Gamebattles accounts belonging to Michael Pulido and Alex Fuentes have been unlocked by administrators earlier tonight.

A "Super Smash Bros. Brawl" tournament scheduled for Saturday at Family Fun Arcade in Granada Hills, Calif., might be the most important competition held since the game's release.

There's been talk about whether items should be allowed into tournament play. Most competitors in the post-Tournament Go era have never played in a legitimate competition with items, Brawl or Melee.

Saturday's tournament at F.F.A. will have items in play.

Tournament organizers with the Evolution Fighting Game Championship…  More

What does it mean to create a fighting game that doesn't stress winning or losing? Why have a video game that's all about beating up the other player when, in your heart of hearts, you hope that other player and you battle to a draw ... every time?

I bring this up because of Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the "Super Smash Bros." series.

N-Sider translated a 2003 article from Sakurai regarding competitive play. When I read it, all I could think was, "Was he the wrong person to create the game?" I…  More