Coming in late, didn't read the full thread.
I love the idea of this project. My suggestion is to introduce a Level 10 difficulty.
I recently learned that, abstractly, to make an AI, you have to program the CP to win the game -- which it will do exceedingly well (being a computer). Then, you make it *worse* so a human can stand a chance against it. With Smash 64, the AI just isn't that great, but it was nerfed anyway at all difficulties. Lame.
..However, I noticed sometimes when playing CPs that they were suprisingly hard, much harder than they are normally (about 2x as hard). If someone can figure out how to reproduce the bug and figure out why it works, now we've got a harder AI to play with. Bugged difficulty = Level 10.
Thoughts?