@premiersoupir: Get a Wii and Super Smash Bros Brawl! Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge amount of content, arcade and story mode, lots of extras to unlock.

Beyond merely that, it’s more about uniformity. The aesthetic of these games isn’t one person vs another. It’s this collection of “characters”. That’s why I never really got into Solid Snake in Brawl because having such a straight up human in the midst of pretty much every other character there just felt off. The same way some people don’t particularly like Yoda in Soul Calibur. I don’t think it’s just the height and hitbox issues. I believe it’s the fact that Yoda as a small green alien clashes with the rest of the Soul Calibur roster whom are all human. Even Spawn, Heiheichi, and Link are all pretty much standard human (aesthetically).

It’s hard to put the right emphasis on this in text, but when I say “characters” @Darrin I’m not necessarily talking about the personality of Mario and definitely not the personality (or lack thereof) of the Fat Princess. I’m referring to the general physical character design. After all in a crossover is the one time we don’t play the personality and only play the character design. I think the Helghast looks like a human. That may be great for a story, fantastic for Killzone’s story even, but I think that makes for a boring brawl character from a physical character design point, but that’s just my personal opinion. If you happen to think that the Helghast looks different enough from a normal human to make it interesting then that’s just where we disagree. People will buy a Mario button (as in a round metallic type button) for their backpack and that button will sell to all kinds of people based on the character design alone. That button can be Mario’s hat, Mario’s Head, or Mario’s full body. He has a distinct and attractive character design that people love. By contrast the Helghast buttons wouldn’t sell as widely. I think the Head one would sell because it’s an interesting design and the fully body wouldn’t because at full body it just looks like a normal person with glowing eyes wearing a mask and only a KillZone fan would want it. The Fat Princess would sell like Mario a full body, her chubby head, and possibly just her cake/crown for the people who know what it is. That’s the difference between a Chris Redfield and Sly Cooper. True people may not care about Mario’s personality but he’s practically a teaching manually on love based almost purely on character design.

Apologies for being really long winded here but I’m really trying not to be that guy who hates the Sony brawler because I’m a fan of the other one. That’s why I’m letting some stuff go. I’m entirely open to liking this game and one/two character/s does not a game ruin. It’s really going to depend on how the rest of the game unfolds. There are many aspects of this game I do unequivocally like. From what I could see it does look great. PaRappa is basically your Game and Watch and I think it would have been amusing for them to keep him in 2D but I’m actually very interested in how he particularly turns out. Of the six above I think he’s the most quintessentially “Sony”. I think it’s likely we get a Crazy Taxi driver and that driver could look like anything. After all it’s not like most people know who Captain Falcon was before SSB.

@darklurkr23 that’d be interesting wouldn’t it, but we’re a long way from having that particular mashup. The occasional Sony character is one thing.. that’d be up to a single publisher/developer but straight on head to head would require either cross platform game or one of them to let their characters go on the other console. Two very unlikely compromises. This guys are bull headed you know… still that might be a game I buy on week one if it ever happens.

I don’t think many people care about Nintendo’s Mario as an actual character either: people love the creativity that bursts from all the levels in Super Mario Galaxy, but no one cares about Mario’s dialog or the character itself. Mario is just the face of the games.

Same with Killzone or Buzz. No one cares about the names of the Killzone characters of the Buzz announcer as a personality. People like the games and the characters are just representations of the games.

The only real “characters” I like in the fictional sense are Rockstar’s characters like John Marston from Red Dead Redemption or the protagonists from Bully or Manhunt or the GTA games. And honestly, that’s not the kind of thing I want in a brawler. I’d rather have the Killzone guy fight Parappa.