Hobby #1: M.U.G.E.N

What is Mugen (or MUGEN, or M.U.G.E.N), you may ask? Mugen is a wonderful fighting game system that is a) for the PC and b) 100% free!

Fight as or against characters from almost anything!

If you’ve ever played a fighting video game before, and were dissatisfied with the characters, the amount of characters, the overall style, the stages, etc, you will probably love Mugen. I, for one, usually despise fighting games and stink and them overall. However I really enjoy Mugen, not only because it is one of the best fighting games out there (as far as I’ve played), but also because I enjoy playing as anything I want, pretty much. You heard me right: there are thousands of characters out there on the internet made for Mugen, and while at the time of writing I only have a couple hundred in my game, the ones I do have are enough to make up quite a huge assembly. Also, there are many “stages” that can be downloaded. If there’s a certain character that you’re absolutely sure no one has made for Mugen, you could try your hand at making your own, though that’s pretty confusing and also

The character select screen is small to start with, but you can make it as big as THIS!

extremely time consuming, it’s worth a shot and is worth it once you have a character you can call “your own”. If you don’t like the style of Mugen when you download it, then you can download a “screenpack”, which is the style of your Mugen. Warning: the screen pack you start out with only comes with slots for 10 characters! Mugen can be downloaded at http://m-u-g-e-n.en.softonic.com/.

Pros:
Very fun, each character plays differently usually
Easy to learn but hard to master
Completely customizable, everything from characters to stages to screenpacks sound files can be changed
Co-op mode is especially fun, you can even do it without another player
Versus mode is not as fun with a lot of characters being broken (see below)
Most characters have good AI and present a challenge
 

Cons:
All the “arcade”-like modes ar a bit lacking
Single-player can be dull
Some characters are extremely powerful and are no challenge to play as but are impossible to beat

Overall score: 8.5/10