Aperson

Normally I just go out and buy games on release and get a physical copy. My reasoning is that with a digital copy you don't really "own" it, you license it. With a physical copy you own it. Also, I don't see much reason in buying a game digitally and take up system space over a physical copy unless the physical copy involves playing the game digitally anyway. I mainly only get old games and indie games as downloads especially if I don't own the original console (for example the DKC games on SNES I bought on Wii VC). For Smash I am considering the pre-order to get the Piranha Plant for free, especially since I will probably buy the DLC later down the line.

All Custom Charachters made so far:

I will agree with @Julius Caesar, gaming is so vast these days and there are so many good games out now due to the general development quality going up and the number of indie gamers inspired by Nintendo's philosophy to innovate and create their own unique weird and wonderful games as well as tributes to old classics that innovate in new ways. I think you have to really decide what type of games you really like. But because of the amount of games out there now, the chances that you and your friends are playing the same games isn't very often so it can be difficult to relate. I play a wide variety of genres from platformers, RPGs, Adventure games, racing games, fighting games, sports games and the odd game or two in other individual genres l enjoy. But generally these have been shaped by the kind of games I played in the first 10 years of being a gamer, with the only "new" franchises I've tried since having some tangible relation to stuff I used to play or related to interests I gained since (Ratchet & Clank is a platformer made by the same developers as Spyro so I naturally went into that, Kingdom Hearts is made by Square Enix and incorporates Final Fantasy characters plus it was a game series that I had been interested in playing for a very long time but couldn't get around to, FIFA came about after I started to get into football although Pro Evo was my initial interest there and the Indie games I've treasure picked have all had some relation to older games or been games I've generally heard good things about like Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, Shovel Knight, Freedom Planet, Undertale and A Hat in Time). Also, I have a lot of problems trying to convince people that certain games are worth playing, mainly because I don't really have a persuasive demenour about me and everyone has their own preferences. Especially when it comes to Indie games, Undertale's reputation as a good game has been soured by it having a bad fan base but I keep trying to tell people that A Hat In Time is amazing and well worth playing and nobody wants to really give it a go, in spite of the fact that I think it is one of the funnest games I've played and really enjoyable from start to finish, if only a bit short. So, videogames I feel are becoming a more difficult subject to relate over because there's so many games out there now and the chances of finding someone outside of the internet who shares your interests in certain video games can be difficult. It doesn't help that internet forums are dying in general because many "new" members that could replace old members are using social media like Facebook and Twitter as their primary source of communication with other people, leaving forums to keep on running with a few veterans. I can't vouch for how toxic things might have been here because I came over here from a different forum entirely (the old Official Nintendo Magazine forums) but on that forum things eventually nosedived when the veteran members formed their own group chat and developed a group mentality to bully the newer members and harass anyone who was deemed to be a "bad member" of the forums. OK, these newer members had some rather controversial views and were considered easy targets but it's not healthy for any forum to have veteran members who bully the newer guys just to get a kick out of it and because they have "objectively wrong" opinions. Although, being a relatively newer member to this forum I should probably be careful what I say here...

Still missing quite a bit from the 3DS version myself, I never got all the Mii Fighter outfits which is something I really wanted to do, but I don't think I'll get round to getting them all before Ultimate comes out especially due to the random nature of it all and the fact that there are at least two games I want to play and finish before Ultimate comes out, one of which I'm playing at this point in time.

Well I knew I sucked at prediction games but even so...

Hopefully there aren't any gamebreakers... but a 74/75 character roster will be hard to keep balanced with so many variables. I can see this game having many balance patches with so many matchup cominbations that could potentially become overpowered or underpowered. Pace being a bit faster is good. Often the best received fighting games are the ones that are of the faster variety and slowing it down can feel a bit of a step back. The first time I played the original version of Street Fighter II the slow pace struck me immediately.

Depends on how many people are going to buy Nintendo Switch Online, a service which has had plenty of backlash... but maybe more people will get it for Smash.

I have mixed feelings coming out of that Direct, but that might be my fault kind of. The fact that Incineroar was the last base roster character to be revealed was a bit disappointing but that's still a very solid 69 styles and 74 characters among the base roster. Piranha Plant is definitely going to top future "biggest joke characters in fighting games" lists. I mean, who would have predicted that a Piranha Plant would make the roster over many other highly requested characters? I also suspect Bandai Namco may have had a larger say in the creative process this time around. A lot of what I can see from Smash Ultimate is a bit like what has been used in their other fighting games which leads me to think that they may have a template which they use for their games with features put in and taken out to save costs and maximise profit on multiple fighting games. Obviously they are only a portion of the development of this game but... team battle was a feature that Bandai Namco themselves had added in to the Switch version of Pokken Tournament. A lot of modern fighting game trends are showing up such as revealing plans for five DLC characters and announced one before the game was even out to encourage people to pre-order. Something similar happened with another Bandai Namco game, Soulcalibur VI, when they announced a DLC character available as part of a pre-order for a season pass although that was handled in a much worse way as the full roster had yet to be revealed for that game at the time. Lo and behold, Smash Bros. has a season pass. However I think there is a lot more value to this DLC than SCVI as for slightly more money you are not only getting a character but also a stage and music. Thank you Sakurai for reigning in Bandai Namco in an attempt to keep things respectable, even more so than the fact that you've gone against tradition with every other game in your market by putting a 74 character roster on one Switch cartridge. The new World of Light mode looks like the single player mode 4 was solely missing and I'm very glad that they've got one even if it's not going to be as story focused... so I'm going to suspect that this may not be very cutscene heavy. There will be a few cinematics in the game at key moments such as the one we saw but I think this is primarily going to be a gameplay focused single player mode, not that that's a bad thing. The whole "RPG map" style thing where you travel around a world map and take part in individual fight events seems a bit like the Libra of Souls mode in Soulcalibur VI where in that game you have an RPG mode where you travel the world with a custom character and fight individual fights with different conditions which, if I'm not mistaken, is what World of Light is also doing. Not that that's a bad thing though, I think a mode like that would be very welcome in Smash Bros. One feature of Smash 4 I spent ages on was Mii Fighters. I posted the fruits of my labours in the previous pages of this thread... so I'm pleased to see that the aspect of that side of things is being improved to some degree with more outfits and most importantly, customisable voices so that you can hopefully get your Mii to sound like the character you are trying to make AND being able to change the colour of the outfits. That would be well and good but... I've been kind of spoiled by another character creator. So, personally it will be a bit of a downgrade to go from this: to this: But fair enough, Nintendo has an in-built Character Creator in their systems so it's not like they are going to let any of their first party games have too much more than what already exists. And it's Smash Bros, people are going to see your unique fighters anyway due to how easily it lends itself as a multiplayer game.

And now to acknowledge the best OST of 2018: OK, I can't claim to have heard every OST from every game that's come out this year but, this surely has to be one of the stronger ones right?

To be honest, I don't know why you would want to digitally download Red Dead Redemption 2 unless you want to completely fill up your hard drive. A game with that amount of detail must surely take up a lot of GB on the hard drive to contain the entire game? Might just be my own mindset, but I prefer buying physical games when possible, moreso for more graphically intense games, because it gives the system memory more room to breathe and allows you to ultimately store much more on the hard drive itself. Then again, maybe that's just a mentality I have picked up from playing Nintendo consoles with limited memory as opposed to the amount of space you get on a PS4 or Xbox One.

https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2018/10/30/inappropriate-soulcalibur-6-customization-online-ban/#/slide/1 RIP Dick Lizards online. On another note, I uploaded another custom fight, this time a Dark Souls fight between Ornstein and Smough:

This was one of the games I was looking forward to this year, but this whole attempt to swindle gamers and boost digital sales is laughable. Especially for me who has never actually played Spyro 2 and 3 and only played a small portion of Spyro 1, this trilogy was going to be my way of experiencing the entire thing. With Fallout 76 and Pokemon Let's Go having their own fair share of problems it seems like November is the month of "games which could be great but are being let down by minor things" month. I'm not quite sure if I will pick Spyro up now, especially given that I want to play Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance before KH3 comes out. But I still really enjoy platformers which is why I wanted to get the Spyro trilogy... decisions decisions.

Top 10 anime plot twists! It is a big shock. I guess the Red Dead franchise just doesn't carry the same brand name as Grand Theft Auto. I didn't buy RDR2 but that's mainly due to a lack of interest in Rockstar games in general, SCVI which I got last week is proving to be taking up all my gaming time right now though that game only got number 8 in the charts last week and has probably slipped out of the top 10 this week unless all the custom characters going round on Twitter convinced people to buy it just for the creator.

Pokemon Pinball was one of the earliest games I got and I absolutely loved it. After getting the game I played it to death, though to this day I have not been able to capture every single Pokemon. I did go back to the game recently after getting the means to play it again but I'm no longer as good as I was back then when I could rack up high scores and in general get a good feeling for where the ball was going to go when I flipped it. The main reason is that I feel the game is very unbalanced between the two tables, the Blue table was far easier than the Red and as such all the Red exclusive Pokemon were ones I never got, travelling on the Red table is very difficult too. As such I was never able to get anywhere near the 151 Pokemon mark and I never got the chance to catch Mew. I was very pleased when they made a sequel to Pokemon Pinball and didn't waste any time picking it up. It's a far better balanced game between the two tables and I liked how they were able to make them more 3Dish with the ramps akin to real pinball tables. The Egg Hatching was also a good way of getting around the fact that pre-evolutions had been introduced since and coming off Ruby the Pokedex was very familiar with me and I think Pinball R&S is why to this day the Hoenn regional Pokedex order is the one I remember most compared to others since. I got really close to getting all the Pokemon, far more than I did on the original. I don't know whether it's because the game was easier or not or if they tweaked some things behind the scenes but I eventually got 200 of the 201 Pokemon that would normally make up the Hoenn Dex... of course I had no idea that the Johto starters were in this game. I might have to look up how to get them. I was very disappointed that there was never a Pokemon Pinball 3. I really though the the DS would have been the perfect console for a pinball game what with the fact that you could have the entire table laid out in front of you across the two screens. The DS did get Metroid Prime Pinball which I picked up at a time when I was buying many Metroid games but unfortuantely that game does not have the lifespan of a Pokemon Pinball game, it's crazy how much lifespan simply catching all the Pokemon would take. I didn't know at the time that the series was being shelved due to lack of sales and thought it was a "standard" spin-off series that would keep going into new hardware. A dual screened Pokemon Pinball would have been a game I absolutely loved and it was the spin-off I was waiting for, alas it never arrived and I would remain a "main game" only player until 2016 when Pokken Tournament came around.

Anyway, finished the main story mode last night. Inferno was challenging for sure, even when I was using Kilik, a character which I am much more familiar with even if they have radically changed him for this game which broke some flow I had from him previously. I remembered to save video footage of the final boss fight but I'm not in a position yet to be able to upload the final boss fight to Youtube yet as I still need to upload the final part of Arcade mode with Groh, who has now replaced Kilik as my "main" in this game. I'm finding Soul Chronicle's story mode a lot better if you do everything in chronological order. Sure, you get multiple plotlines at once which can be hard to keep up with but within the general timeframe some character's stories lead into each other. For instance, one of Seung Mi-Na's story chapters picked up right after you face her in Ivy's story mode. Kilik's story also made the main campaign feel like more of a journey for him rather than just 20 chapters that take about 3 minutes each to complete. Not to mention that not all of the chapters have fights in which I understand, the characters can't always be in conflict but in a fighting game that does reduce the actual amount of gameplay that you do. If you were to just play the main campaign though I think it's about 5 or 6 fights before the story starts to climax into it's big finale and the multi stage boss fight against Nightmare/Inferno which doesn't even cover the final chapter of the game which is just simply the ending credits. I would recommend finishing the story mode though because you unlock Inferno if you do so. Speaking of Inferno, I love that they use Hellfire from SCII as the basis for an entirely new tune for the final boss theme.

Events like this put football into perspective really...

Of all the games listed so far, Pokemon TCG was the only one that I actually played. Was one of the earlier games I played and I got it at a time after a period of time playing the actual trading card game, so I already knew the rules. The cards obviously were a huge craze, so I was naturally interested in learning the game. I still have the cartridge but haven't really gone back as I haven't played it in years. I started to play multiple trading card games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, then sold all my Pokemon and Magic cards because I couldn't really justify playing multiple card games and wanted to focus on the newest one. Then I got bored of Yu-Gi-Oh. It is a bit odd though that there have been far more Yu-Gi-Oh games than Pokemon TCG games though.

This is a very interesting thread and I can understand where the OP is coming from. I've found something similar as I've grown older that I've gained quite a few more interests, but I have since had a different experience in that it took a long time to find a job so I had a tremendous amount of free time and was able to fulfill all of my interests with different regularity. Things changed around the time I got a job but I think the trick is to focus on shorter games and accept that you simply aren't going to play every game ever available, so decide what it is about video games that you really enjoy and focus on that. For example, RPGs and games like Dark Souls take an extremely long time to beat, so much so that I quit Dark Souls after getting stuck halfway under the premise of "I don't have much free time anymore and I have a huge gaming backlog, I might as well commit to my gaming backlog and finish that, because otherwise I've got a daily grind of a job which doesn't feel like progress and a daily dose of continually struggling on one game". So I changed course and started to try and clear games that I already owned and as a result I've beaten more games than many years in this calendar year out of wanting to clear the backlog. I don't game every day either, if there's a football match that's on of great interest then I'll watch that, if there's an F1 race on I'll watch that. Plus I might catch up with a few shows on a weekly basis in some of that free time. So, my approach in the DLC era of gaming is usually, focus on beating one game and then move onto the next. I get to experience many games as a result but never really get "good" at any of them. It doesn't help that I have found myself disinterested in online gaming in general which is where the direction of gaming has mostly gone. I think the only games I actually enjoy online are Rocket League, which is fun no matter what you do, and Mario Kart which I'm actually quite competent at. Despite all this, I feel a bit lonely as a gamer and desire some sort of multiplayer from time to time, but not being keen on online multiplayer because it is missing the atmosphere of a single player game. I have huge nostalgia for my teenage years where I could play video games with my friends, mainly Super Smash Bros. Brawl and since those ended I've been experiencing multiplayer withdrawal symptoms which continually flare up time and time again due to adult life not really allowing for such multiplayer. This came about again when the Nintendo Switch came out. Fantastic, a console built around multiplayer gaming but more suited to the modern adult lifestyle... but with a catch in that not all of the people I consider to be my closest friends now are actually interested in gaming and if they are they are more leaning towards single player games or online games which are different from the ones I'm usually interested in. I don't help myself by the fact I've become more stoic in my interests and have been less willing to adapt them to the interests of something else or will go off on my own tangent because, hey, the internet exists and is often key to introducing me to new ideas. But I guess adult life has not left me feelling satisfied enough for whatever reason even though I'm sure about 90% of the problem is me not being able to appreciate smaller things in life and being too hung up on my own interests to the point where I get bored if it's just "general" conversation going on. If we do anything other than talk, it's usually to go to the cinema once in a while. I tend to buy games with multiplayer modes because I don't want to just be a single player gamer, but then there's no one to really play them with. After that experience I was somewhat hesitant over buying Soul Calibur VI, knowing that I probably wasn't going to get the same multiplayer lifespan out of the game as I did with II... but I bought the game anyway due to the promise of some substantial single player content and I'm not really disappointed. It's also quite easy to jump out and jump in again with it's story mode, each chapter being about 5 minutes long and the custom character creator has been a blast. It's been like this for a while now, but heavy nostalgia on the games I used to play in the previous decade has influenced much of my thinking and of the types of games I've bought this decade while wanting them to co-exist with interests that have evolved me as an individual. Should you really drop something you're interested in when you gain new friends just because they don't match up with what your new friends like? I don't think so...

Some Nintendo themed custom fights, think of it as a warm up for Smash Aside from this I've been playing Story mode and been doing everything in chronological order, so I've stopped at Chapter 8 at the main story while trying to clear everything for all the characters that comes before it. About halfway through all the side stories under this criteria and catching up with the main story fast. Made a few more custom characters, including two Dark Souls ones: Also made a couple of characters from Xenoblade Chronicles:

Uploaded a few more fights to Youtube, both Final Fantasy based: Character creation is roughly at about 16 on file now, including these two:

OK, I've now officially seen the greatest custom character ever made:

Put quite a substantial amount of time into the Character Creator today. Made Zeke from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII and Xemnas and Marluxia from Kingdom Hearts. I even had Xemnas and Marluxia face each other Planning to make many more custom characters, including Pit from Kid Icarus and Smash Bros. Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls, Cloud, Cid and Terra from Final Fantasy, Dunban and Reyn from Xenoblade, Link and a Stalfos from Legend of Zelda and Papyrus from Undertale... along with recreating my character in Dark Souls for Libra of Souls playthrough.

Been playing Earthbound. Lots and lots of Earthbound, partly because I want to finish all of the main story before Soul Calibur VI comes out, a game I'm personally very much looking forward to as, Tira DLC aside, this is looking like an excellent game that has impressed everyone who's played it. Including myself when I played the beta a few weeks ago. Anyway, with a recently acquired Elgato I've been filming my boss battles on Earthbound, so I thought I would share my Sanctuary boss battles so far. Hopefully the video below works as a playlist My actual point of progress is having just recently rescued Apple Kid from the starmen and I'm about to get a book to take to Tenda Village. I'm somewhere between the sixth and seventh Sanctuaries but that stretch is very long. Hopefully I can finish the game soon. I've also been playing a bit of Pokemon Ruby (GBA) because of the Pokemon Twitch Marathon at the moment although all I've done was catch Pokemon and raise my old Leaf Green team up a few levels. I managed to catch Rayquaza which I was surprised I hadn't done yet on this playthrough (it was my second playthrough of Ruby), It happened in dramatic circumstances where he got confused with Outrage on red health... and then the very next Ultra Ball caught him. If he had hurt himself then it would have been curtains for that attempt. Finally I've gone back to Soul Calibur IV (PS3) and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Wii U) in order to prepare for the upcoming games in both new series. I made significant progress on the Tower of Souls in Soul Calibur IV, reaching Floor 42, which along with 43 and 44 are proving to be very difficult due to the enemies regenerating health and an incredibly annoying to beat Zasalamel on Floor 42. I see there are 60 floors of this in total but I don't think I'm going to finish this tower before VI comes out, as I will be invested in that game instead and likely may never touch IV again.

Truer words have never been spoken. The Pokemon marathon on Twitch is evidence enough for this. Speaking of Ash, he's one of the many Mii Fighters I've created on Smash 4 that I'm planning to bring into Ultimate. Just uploaded a video of them all below, sorry for the blurry thumbnail:

Not really a fan of double posting but... this game is out next week and there hasn't been any posts for this for a while. Anyone else getting it? I'm getting it Day 1, mainly because I think this looks like a genuinely good game regardless of all the Tira DLC controversy but... I don't know how many people here are still interested in this game. I played the Beta though and that got me really interested in this game even more so after getting my hands on it. They had a "Ring Out" tournament yesterday which showcased much of the game. Had some good matches https://www.twitch.tv/videos/321813530 Ivy seems a bit overpowered at the moment but there is a Day 1 patch that takes into account feedback apparently.