I just feel like saying this, I think that Lucario should have a place in brawl, unlockable or not.
Why? Here's a list of reasons:

1: Very popular as of late
2: Fighting type pokémon (steel type as well)
3: Had his own movie
4: Humanoid shape ideal for battling in brawl
5: Knows Aura Ball, ideal projectile move
6: Nintendo promotes him somewhat, in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon the ultimate rank is the Lucario rank
7: The Lucario in the movie has telepathy, much like Mewtwo
8: High offence and speed but average defence in the games, this would be good for an even brawl character
9: 4th generation pokémon, would help Nintendo to promote Diamond and Pearl
10: Need I say it? Kick ass design.

So there you have it, I think that this character should be in brawl, and I've actually presented 10 good reasons for him as well. Does anyone agree with me? How about some character ideas of your own? With reasons and all. :)

Just today, Yoshi was announced on the Smash Brothers Dojo Website.
About damn time too, Yoshi is one of my favourite characters.

Anyhow, with Yoshi's introduction, this confirmed a starting roster of at least 14 characters, featuring:
Mario
Link
Pikachu
Kirby
Donkey Kong
Yoshi
Samus
Fox
Zelda
Bowser
Pit
Metaknight
Zero Suit Samus
Wario

And maybe Captain Falcon too, since Samurai Goroh's update featured the Captain Falcon icon.

What does this mean though? Well you may remember that Super Smash Brothers Melee featured 14 starting characters itself, and Super Smash Brothers just had 8, just how many more characters can we expect to be announced for the starting roster now?

Myself, I'm hoping that 3 or 4 are announced, this would make for a solid 18 which would be pretty nice.

Oh btw, Snake is not part of the starting roster, Sakurai stated that all 3rd party characters will have to be unlocked.

Apparently, you people can't read entire articles.

Ah yes, the world of DS homebrew, what a wonderous world it is.

My bet is that most of you here are completely oblivious to what that is, let me explain.
"Homebrew" refers to games or programs that have been created by hobbyist programmers, specifically for games consoles, in this case, for the DS.

You're probably now wondering, "Wait, how do I even play homebrew on my DS"? Easy, with a flash cart of some sort.
There exist multiple flash carts out there for the DS that can store your homebrew games and play them, I personally use one called R4DS because of how easy it is to use.
The flash carts are also usable for piracy, but I don't recommend, nor do I condone it.
If you don't own a DS, or a Flash cart, you can use DS emulators such as no$gba to emulate the homebrew, remember that emulators are entirely legal.

So, now that you're educated about the wonderful world of DS homebrew a little, why do I love it? Let me show you some prime examples.

GAMES:

WORDUP:
A favourite game of mine, this puzzle game features a field of letter blocks falling from the sky, and you have to touch the letters and make words out of adjacent letters, with a good vocabulary you'll get great at this game, and you'll even remember or learn some words.

MartianDS:
MartianDS is a game similar to Alien Hominid, it's a short game that was programmed in just 72 hours and only features 2 levels, but it surprisingly enjoyable to play with interesting artwork, a good weapon system, funny sound effects that were done with voices and a fantastic donut huffing boss.
Sadly, no music.

POPULATION: TIRE:
Homestar Runner fans will like this, this is a straight from Flash game to DS homebrew port of the tire bouncing game, basic aim is to not let the tire touch the soil for as long as possible, it's fun, try it out.

PROGRAMS:

PHIDIAS:
Phidias is a brilliant drawing application that offers a wide colour pallet, brush support, saving and loading and blur/smudging with brush size and pressure, you can paint some real nice images if you take the time and later, take the images from memory and upload them to your computer.

MOONSHELL:
This homebrew is so brilliant that some flash carts even come pre-loaded with the software.
It's a simple yet powerful media player that supports MP3s, OGGs, many Video Game music files including SPC for SNES music, DPG files (Video!), as well as text files for reading and image files for viewing, ideal for downloading some game guides to take with you on the road.
With a nice storage capacity, you can put some videos and music on it and replace your iPod nano, hell, you can pretty much put any youtube video on here if you know how!

BEUP LIVE:
I don't get to use this one often because it requires a wireless internet connection, and my Nintendo Wifi USB connector is only compatible with official DS games.
So what it is? It's MSN, or Live Messenger, right on your DS! It's fully compatible with your contacts list and has a great interface, complete with your display pictures and apparently even supports drawing! I've only used it once but it is highly recommendable.

DSORGANISE:
As the name implies, this gives your DS full Organiser functionality, including to do lists, text editors, scribble pads, calendar and even a simple web browser.

COMICBOOKDS:
This program is great for all of you who read a lot of comic books, with the use of a PC application to convert a zip file of comic book pages into a .cbds file, you can then read the .cbds files on your DS using this program, I've used it for a couple of Phoenix Wright mangas and it works very well. :)

EMULATORS:

LAMEBOY:
Lameboy is a Gameboy and Gameboy Color emulator which runs at great speed most of the time and has good compatibility as of right now, it features gamesave support, great sound, fake-bilinear upscaling, and even REAL TIME CLOCK, which means you can play Pokémon Gold Silver and Crystal with the clock working and everything! It also has speed up with the L button.
Right now, I'm playing Zelda: Ocarina of Ages on this and loving it.

jEnesisDS:
jEnesisDS is a good speed Genesis/Megadrive emulator for the DS, although the speed is inconsistant and no sound exists right now, this is a recent big step forward in DS emulation for this console. Still early, there is a lot of hope for this emulator in my opinion.

NESDS:
Gee, I wonder what this is?
Oh right, it's NES games on your DS. :P
It runs at full speed and features great scaling options to fit on the DS screen, additionally it supports savestates, fast forwarding, REWINDING and autofire, making this a highly recommendable emulator.
Not all games work, for example Punchout because of different NES mappers, but you'll be happy to hear that all Megaman games will work. :)

SNEmulDS
This would be a SNES emulator, it works fairly well with good speeds and good sound, there still a lot of work to be done but you can even emulate Mario Paint successfully.
Problems with layer ordering exist right now, and scaling does not exist, hopefully these will come later, but for the time being Super Mario All Stars and Super Metroid work great.

Do you see now the ever expansive world of DS homebrew? This is only a small sample of what you can get for your DS, it's all free too! New content is always being created and updated, if you really love what they've developed, maybe you should even consider a donation or two, I've already donated a little to Lameboy. :)

According to this spanish magazine:

"Sakurai: Good... It's a difficult question. ... Sonic finds himself in the videogame, but even ... the ultimate confirmation of Sega. Due to the next one of exit, the date limits so that Sega sends it with ... the 26 of this month, on that day he [Sega?] thinks to give an actual ... official on him [Sega?] including or not the mascot of Sega ... game. I in the personal I am crossing my fingers. "

Rumors are rumors, but this is extremely exciting details! The possibility of Sonic making his appearance in brawl have been greatly increased!!

Not ONLY is he already programmed in, whilst waiting for final confirmation, but now from what I've seen, Shigeru Miyamoto, Yuji Naka (Sonic creator) AND Sakurai want sonic in brawl, not to mention the thousands of fans!

At this point, it's all up to Sega to say yes or no, and it would not do Sega any good at all to deny Sonic of a true battle with Mario, unlike the Olympics.

This was announced quite a while ago, but details are finally coming to fruition about Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.
We've had a few screenshots, and even an E3 07 Trailer, but lets all be honest here, even with the amazing concept of Mario and Sonic finally going head to head, why the Olympics? You know that this is just going to be Track And Field, Olympic style games were never anything special.

I assure you, this game WILL sell as a historic moment, a clash of the retro titans. Though I hate Randy Solem with a passion, people have always wanted to see this happen. This submission alone is the first google result for Mario Vs Sonic.

But I can't say I'm overly excited to see Nintendo or Sega characters to compete in the Olympics at all, I don't think anyone is, everyone would rather that Sonic makes it into Super Smash Brothers Brawl so that he can finally duke it out with Mario.

I think this picture will prove a point, that mostly nobody gives a crap about the setting, just the characters involved.
It excites me to see Sonic against Mario, and Tails against Luigi there, along with Eggman and Bowser.

Really though, SONIC FOR BRAWL.

Seems just like yesterday, the portal was much more simple with the good old flash banner and fewer options, and the oh so useful castvote(5);.

...Well, more like 2 days ago actually, haha.

Regardless, as much as many of us love the new NG, do any of you yearn for the good old NG with simple 30 levels and design?

I personally am very thankful to see the stupid level 30 rule gone, of how he deposits makes the requirements go up for each level, this was extremely unfair especially since this one individual from many years ago was so badly effecting all of the newer members.
The old design in itself, was still extremely pleasing however, but I love this one even more.

Share your thoughts, I'm already interested in them.

Oh, and for your amusement, here's my cat.

Oh MAN, I had like, 15.57 voting power, now it's just 11.27.
Which actually, is still great and better than what I had before, but it seems so insignificant now in terms of change of the design, lol.

Other changes have come forth to me, now I can see which portal submissions of mine have new reviews, great since I don't have to manually check anymore, and it FINALLY tells me if there's a new PM when I browse any page at NG, thank god for that.

So, what nice little new features do you guys like?

After 8 long months, Newgrounds has finally gotten upgraded, and immediately the only thing that comes to mind, is AWESOME.

I was worried that I may've been disappointed in the new appearance, as I imagine a lot of people may have been, but the graphical appearance is both pleasing and easy on the eyes, whilst very familiar.
From my initial look around, there's been some great improvements in many places, you no longer get re-directed to another page after voting, you can load SWFs in the same page, and your vote is shown in the same page as well.
I don't like however that tons of NG characters are basically whored out on the portal header however, we should be instilling the idea of a flash free-for-all, not "Make movies with these characters and earn brownie points"

Individually, I'm really pleased with my level 31 icon now, the butcher's knife kicks ass.
Looking at the new level icons, they're incredibly kick ass and all, even Pimp, who's level 50, has got to level up now!
What kicks even more ass is my new voting power.

Thanks for voting, RupeeClock! Vote on 4 more submissions and you can deposit your 10 experience points for today!

Your experience gave you a voting power of 10.05 votes. Your blam and protection points gave you an additional 55% of your experience power, meaning that your total vote power was worth 15.57 votes!

HOLY, SHIT, that's a lot of voting power!
That's even MORE than what the previous highest voting power was!!

Moving on, the bytesize player is a great and welcomed addition, a miniature showcase for authors who wish to submit to it is very nice, you may have even noticed my clip on there, it's possible you'll see more in the future as well.

As far as the secrets go, I can see that they haven't changed, yet at least, hopefully soon.

I can see on the portal frontpage that there's an interviews box, makes me wonder WHY since so few are made that Legendary Frog and Pikanjo are still on there. The best of past dates is pretty cool though.

One thing I love is the inclusion of NG elements for the public to download, this will make authentic looking NG flashes look even better, haha!

I like how you can simply glance at your portal submissions now, and see if you have new reviews, I appreciate this feature greatly because I take the effort to respond to every last review, even some of the especially shit ones.

For the time being, it seems that many options under my account settings are greyed out, so I guess that they will appear later.

So, this is my first post for now, I'll be updating this now and then sharing opinions and updating you on my flash movies as I make then now and then.
Until then, here's a screenshot of my upcoming Clockday movie, SleepEasy.
You'll be able to find more in the NG Mag alpha here.

Hopefully, this unexplainable slowdown will go with time, the server still needs a lot of tweaking in many places.
Now if you don't mind, I'm gonna go customise my nice little user page and get right on back to animating this thing!

EDIT: And also, a big hello to Sonucais.