The Dojo's about to start up again, and soon we'll all be reveling in Sakurai's latest news on everyone's favourite game. But there are a few things in particular I'd really like to know that I figure I might share with you, since it's been so lonely here with the Dojo's doors shut. See if you agree with me, disagree with me, or think I'm a lunatic (or, all of the above)

I know people are going to agree with me on this one. The thing I want to know, first, most and as soon as possible: a PAL release date.

What's PAL you may ask?

In the 1950s, when the Western European countries were planning to establish colour television, they were faced with the problem that the already existing American NTSC standard wouldn't fit the 50 Hz AC frequency of the European power grids. In addition to that NTSC demonstrated several weaknesses, including colour tone shifting under less-than-ideal transmission conditions. For these reasons the development of the SECAM and PAL standards began. The goal was to provide a colour TV standard with a picture frequency of 50 fields per second (50 Hertz), and sporting a better colour picture than NTSC.

Wikipedia: PAL

These days however the overwhelming majority of TV's in PAL territories support NTSC's 60 Hz picture, thus making the need for a PAL system almost obsolete, but region locking is still around, meaning an Aussie Wii can't play American games (and vice versa).

There are many excuses as to why PAL territories get the games later than our American fellows, and language translation is the main one, since there's a number of different languages spoken in Europe. Nintendo of Australia (Referred to onwards as NoAus) doesn't do much localisation, since both Europe and Australia are both PAL, and usually just uses the version worked on by Nintendo of Europe (referred as NoE) Language translation is highly debatable as a reason for delays, mainly due to the sheer inconsistencies between games. Metroid Prime 3 was heavily text based and came out in PAL territories only 2 weeks after it did in the US, yet for Brawl, we're looking at maybe after July for a fighting game? Ridiculous!

The second thing I'd like to know about is the Smash 64 unlockables, and their appearance in Brawl. Jigglypuff has been traditionally the first unlocked character. Is she still in, or were the naysayers correct in thinking that 3 new Pokemon characters pushed Jiggs out?

What about Captain Falcon? Ever since Samurai Goroh was shown to be an assist trophy (the first actually) we've all been awaiting his arrival, especially as he was promoted to a Starter in Melee. Will he retain his moves? What about his final smash? (The Blue Falcon perhaps?) Curious is Luigi's moveset. Since Mario's old Down Special has been moved and replaced with F.L.U.D.D, will Luigi's be similarly replaced with the Poltergust 3000?

And of course the whole Ness/Lucas thing too.

The third thing I'd like to know about is clones, and if they're in Brawl. Some people seem against clones, which is a bit of a shame to me, as all of Melee's clones (with the exception of Luigi of course) were characters that had to be left out due to time constraints (like Ganon) or just quick and easy designs to fit existing movesets (Young Link, Pichu).

Why do I care about these leftover copycats? Because they give a new character a chance. And the more characters, the deeper the game gets, with more strategies to work out with characters with tweaked and changed movesets. For example, a move might be able to edgeguard Captain Falcon, but might not work on Ganondorf due to his slower fall time and extra jump from his Down Special.

Anywho, that's what I'm looking forward to hearing on the Dojo in the future. What about you?