Mugen

If anyone actually knows me, I am a big fighting game fan (street fighter, king of fighters, darkstalkers, etc.). So imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone created a copy-paste fighting game engine online called mugen.

The game is pretty much that, a copy-paste system. Users online would either create their own game character by hand/computer and create a fighting game character for only that engine, or they can "rip" the sprites of a character from the cd of the game that they love to play and edit/code so that they become playable for the game.

There are many good things and bad things about the game. For example, for the good side:

1) it allows users to create their own fighting characters and share it with the world.

2) it allows players to create the dream fighting game that they only wanted (either with one companies fighting game characters or a crossover fighting game)

However, there are bad sides to this argument as well:

1) The character is based upon the game he is from and the creator (editor) of the character, so there is a very large balancing issue with the game.

2) Licensing infringement. Some of these characters are major licensing materials for companies, and using them without their permission creates major disputes on distributing the character.

3) the game at times can get offensive (racial impressed characters, porn characters, evil figures from the past)

But you have to marvel the style of the engine. All that is really needed to import anything onto the engine is to drag a file with the music/background/character into their respected folders, and then change a txt file to include it. Then presto, the object is added the next time you load the program. It is easy and simple to load and play, thus allowing a creation of a fighting game based upon the characters that you want.

Overall though, it is a fun game, as long as you know which characters you want for it.