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Super Smash Bros. Brawl Blog Part 2/3
Updated March 20, 2008

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Blog Part 2/3
By Bryan Dawson

As I played through Super Smash Bros. Brawl, taking notes, unlocking characters and stages, and just seeing what the game was made of, a lot of things came to mind. With the number of characters and stages exceeding anything the series had seen in the past, as well as a huge Adventure mode, there were going to be some space issues within the guide.

So I began to work on condensing my text, focusing on the Adventure mode. When it comes to Smash Bros. people want to know about the characters, the stages, and multiplayer strategies. While everyone who buys the game will be going through the Adventure mode at least once, we all know that the longevity of Smash Bros. comes from its primary multiplayer mode.

I had been playing the game for a few days now and the character select screen kept shifting every time I unlocked a new character, so it was difficult to tell if I had everyone, and the game had simply failed to inform me. To be on the safe side, I asked my contacts at Nintendo for a head count on the characters and stages. When I got my response, I realized I was close, but not quite done yet. Unfortunately, along with this news came the total number of stickers in the game. The number was simply staggering, and it meant that I would once again be crunched for space.

When I first created my outline for the Brawl guide, I included a chapter on the stickers in the game. However, I expected this to be a relatively small chapter, just listing the stickers and maybe a few tidbits of information on each one. However, when I started playing, I soon realized that the stickers serve a purpose beyond just being collectables. Therefore, I had to document a good deal of information on each sticker, multiplied by the insane number of stickers that were featured in the game. The end result is a stickers chapter that’s nearly 20 pages in length.

With stage and character strategies, my mind is working to find the best strategy in the time I’m allotted. However, when it came to the stickers, there’s very little strategy involved compared to the characters and stages. For the most part, I was just copying text from the game to the guide. It wouldn’t have been that bad, but when you pick up the guide and see how many stickers this game has, you’ll understand when I say that it took me almost as long to complete the stickers chapter as it did to complete the characters chapter.