Well North East Championship 12; which is basically the most important tournament in North America for the Soulcalibur community is this weekend! Most are considering this the last hurrah for SC4 and this is also the first hands-on public appearance for SC5 and TTT2 in America.

Originally, we toiled with the idea of not doing a "team" tournament this time around... but after numerous complaints we have decided to bring it back; but slightly altered. We will be doing a team tournament, but the teams will be "random". Players name's will be placed in a hat, and players will be paired up at random.

Signup for the SC4 Random Team Tournament begins at 1:00pm on Saturday, December 3. Registration will close at 1:45pm; Because we need a number of players divisible by 3, if we don't get a rounded number of players, the last player or two will have their entries refunded... Signup for the SC4 Singles tournament will begin immediately towards the end of the Team tournament.

In honor of Thanksgiving (real Thanksgiving, not the Canadian knockoff) it seems appropriate to indulge in a bit of gluttony. There’s no turkey on the menu, however; today I’ll be barbecuing a sacred cow in the course of making a larger point. Specifically, I’m going to tell you why, frankly, Soul Calibur 2 isn’t a very good game in some key respects while suggesting a few ways to analyze games and refine your strategies in the process.

Veterans, all I ask is that you keep an open mind. New people, let an old man rant a bit—there’s probably something useful in here for you too, so hang in there.

Masakarijin, who runs MASTERCUP which is a Tekken 5 on 5 tournament series, and who today became a member of 8WayRun, has added match videos to the Media section from the tournament that was held at Tokyo Game Night 30. You can find the videos, which are in 1080P, after the break.

I'm also looking forward to the tournament series which also kicked off at TGN 30 called Strike. Strike will also be holding a final tournament for Soulcalibur IV before moving onto holding events for Soulcalibur V.

I've just finished upgrading our forum to XenForo 1.1! There are lots of new changes, so I figured I would make a new announcement thread to go over it all.

Before I get started though, I'm sure a lot of you are already wondering what happened to the dark skin. Well it's not gone permanently, I'm just waiting for an update to get issued for it and then it will return. Don't fret, it will be back in no time. In the meantime, there are a lot of changes of which you guys should be made aware.

Today, Alex Valle posted the official trailer for Southern California Regionals 2011, which is being held at the University of California, Irvine in Irvine, California on December 17-18, 2011, where Soulcalibur V will also be making an appearance at the event. If you are unable to make it to NEC XII, you now have another public event to go to to try the game out before its release.

I would also like to thank FilthieRich and Namco Bandai for bringing Soulcalibur V out to another event. You can find the trailer after the break or by clicking on the icon from the front page.

For those of you who may have missed the SCV Live stream this morning, you can now find it in the Media section and embedded after the break.

The developers created a custom character and played two matches with her before moving onto other things, which was casually mentioned at the end of the stream, is that the devs will also be attending NEC XII which is a week and a few days from now. Get hype and stay tuned to the 8WayRun.com for all the latest SCV developments!

While its nothing new that Namco has featured guest character designs in previous Soulcalibur games; this new one its a bit of a surprise, considering the source. In a new report from 1up; it has been announced that Mari Shimazaki has optioned to create three costumes for the game, including Leixia's 1P.

Mari Shimazaki was the character designer who came up with Bayonetta. The 1up article also features a bit more information about how Shimazaki found herself with the job, and a drop from Hisaharu Tago in how Bayonetta was one of their original guest character choices, but was excluded because of time constraints. Future DLC?