Fighting games are quite the genre of its own.  One on one fights in which you try to bust out absolutely insane combos and memorize complex button combinations make it one of the more difficult and more competitive types of games out there.  I remember back in the days; I was so bad with Street Fighter II that I couldn’t even throw a Hadouken.  The game when it initially made its way to the SNES was a hit with all the boys at school.  They would go home and that’s all they’d play.

Other companies started to break through the mold to try to challenge CAPCOM, and now we have quite the selection of different fighting franchises: SNK’s King of Fighters, Namco Bandai’s Soul Calibur, Guilty Gear and so on.  From that spawned crossovers into comic books (the ever-popular Marvel VS. Capcom) and franchise vs. franchise offerings. (Capcom VS. SNK)  However, as far as crossovers go, there’s a lot of untouched ground.  Enter M.U.G.E.N.

M.U.G.E.N. is a highly-customizable fighter; In fact, with the exception of one stage and one character, it’s all custom content.  Could you ever imagine Megaman taking on Sol Badguy in one of Tsukihime-inspired Melty Blood‘s locales?  Anything can happen in M.U.G.E.N.  If you look on YouTube you can find countless people boasting off their character roster that literally goes into the thousands, taking up gigabytes and gigabytes of hard disk space. (For the M.U.G.E.N. obsessed, you will likely need a good sized hard disk, or clear off a bunch of old crap.)  This started off as a DOS game; The developers abandoned a later Windows port that was eventually patched by the community to keep it going strong.

I mean, how else can you hold a “battle of the fatty foods” and pit Ronald McDonald against the Colonel?

A handful of characters and stages can be found anywhere online, as well as “screenpacks” that can change the look of the interface into something that caters to your interests.  Everything can be easily added into the game with just a simple file edit.  Many characters have been created multiple times for each version that they appear in. (Such as a Marvel VS. Capcom Ryu seen here.)  Some people even go out of their way to create characters that have never appeared in a 2-D fighting game before, such as characters from cartoons, anime, other games, and even (as you’ve seen above) fast food mascots.

There really isn’t much to say about M.U.G.E.N, other than the fact it plays like a whole bunch of 2D fighters put together. Like other games it follows a “6 buttons and a joystick” control scheme, although what the buttons do is different depending on the character and its creator.  Most characters come with a text file showing their commands, although you might have to sift through some Japanese on some of them. (As long as you can figure out each command, though.)  If you’re a fan of fighters and you haven’t heard of this game, though, you’re missing out.

Hyper Combo finish!

M.U.G.E.N. cannot be found “officially” anymore, but you can download any version (winmugen plus is recommended) from http://randomselect.piiym-net.com/

A database of websites containing characters, stages, and custom screenpacks can be found at http://www.mugen-infantry.net

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