M.U.G.E.N. is a engine, nothing more, the characters made for it and the community it has has nothing to do with the fact that it is a very well put together engine. I’m speaking of 1.0 mugen of course. It’s like nails on a chalk board when people call MUGEN a game. It’s nothing more than a fighting game engine. The things you can do with it are vast and unique. Unfortunately not to many people try to be that unique which is why it has such the reputation it has today.
i agree the games are what is created over the engine.
the qualities of the engine define the kind of games that can be made for it.
what specifically do you hate about it?
well this no longer really applies, but i’ve been using and playing mugen since day 1; one of my earliest gripes was the fact that it was a dos-based program. then it moved to linux, and was like wtf. at this point i actually cared enough bout mugen to actually install linux just for mugen (sad i know). after elecbyte disappeared, i stopped caring for mugen. when the windows beta and user-made hacks came out, i tried them out, but i didn’t really feel like sticking with something that is not official and no longer supported.
electbyte is now back, but i’m still waiting for some substantial improvements for me to download it again.
MUGEN is fun to watch. Back when Evil Ryu and Evil Ken did retarded combos on each other.
Until people start collaborating on an end-to-end scaled original character set with some level of realistic tiering possible, this really belongs in Tech Talk and not “Fighting Game Discussion”, IMHO. 
I dislike MUGEN in that stuff like AlexLexus’ Third Strike rip-off is what people put forward. People worked their ass off to create those (copyrighted) sprites. I worked alongside the game animation teams at Sierra: there’s tons of heavy lifting that goes on there over time. If someone said “Here’s my comic book” and it was Superman #342 photocopied with new words crayoned in, I’d be pretty confused as to what value I was supposed to see in their work.
It’s been a long time now and I’ve still yet to see anything of any real value out of MUGEN. I’d be interested in knowing if anybody actually working on commercial fighting games now ever gained much value from tinkering around in MUGEN.
I like Mugen in that you can pretty much recreate entire games somewhat faithfully. Kof, Sf, Ngbc…I’d better go see if they started ripping kof 2k2 um characters yet.
That, friends, was the sound of someone never being taken seriously on this site again.
Strong words from someone who joined SRK in 2010.
As far as this thread is concerned, Mugen games are wannabe fighting games like the Smash series. You can mess around with it but if someone asks you what fighting games you play you can’t mention Mugen with a straight face.
Strong words from someone who has a Naruto avatar.
kof 97, 98, 99, ngbc, svc, MOTW, sf2 - alpha 3, cvs 1 + 2 as well as xmen vs sf, msh vs sf, and mvc2 (with tagging) say “fuck you”. All these can be put put together pretty accurately (3-character team games become 2-character teams, of course) in mugen, minus the “winner” and “next stage” screens in the cvs and snk games. The stages, screenpacks, characters, hitsparks, and lifebars have been ripped, and it’s child’s play to find mp3 soundtracks online. You need to actually know what you’re talking about before considering yourself qualified to talk shit. I actually put most of these games together using mugen since my old desktop wouldn’t run emus, (or in the case of my laptop, no emus were available for ngbc) and that shit was tight…except for mugen’s tendency to exhaust the desktop’s 312mb sdram, causing a crash every hour or so.
Well while you were busy compiling rips of these games, I was busy playing the real thing. And i’m just going to say that a game is more than just the characters/stages/music/presentation. Just because you can fit your rips into MUGEN’s engine doesn’t mean you’ve recreated a game. It just means you wasted an assload of time.
capcom and snk has no problem with it unless some form of profit is involved. That said I beleive what alex is doing is actually dangerous since he is promoting his game made of copyrighted characters!
i dont think many were paying attention when i said this isnt for profit and no way dangerous by any means. we are promoting creativity and what our community does. thats all. any profit nMo gets is base off of fighting game tournaments which has nothing to do with mugen.
this. they may seem similar at first glance, but upon deeper inspection you’ll find that they actually play out quite differently.
I don’t think you get what he’s saying. You’re trying to promote a game to rival Capcom, using Capcom’s own IP. Mugen developing is just a fun hobby for thousands of people, nothing more. But then you run around and say stuff like “We’re just giving people the game Capcom wouldn’t” when you should be grateful Capcom hasn’t sent cease and desists to every single Mugen site that contains even the smallest amount of their IP. They’re willingly allowing the Mugen community to use this massive amount of protected work, as long as we aren’t :
A.) Making a profit.
B.) Affecting theirs.
You’re most certainly attempting to do the second one, although probably not intentionally, by creating competition. If you’re that desperate for attention and recognition, make the game using your own resources and not stuff that belongs to a multi-million dollar corporation that would have absolutely no problem smacking you down.
sigh
People get so wrapped up in the absurdity/copyright issues/whatever of Evil Ken and the like that they miss the REAL value of MUGEN to the community – as a relatively simple and accessible tool to understand just what makes a fighting game work under the hood.
People can learn a lot about fighting games by playing a few of them long enough, but even with fancy Japanese guides or anything short of a debug build of a game, there’s a lot of subtleties that just might not click for some people until you’ve actually tried to make a character yourself. Half the things I understand about the properties of moves I’ve never seen before, I’ve gleaned thanks to seeing the guts of hundreds of MUGEN characters of varying quality and originality over the years.
Thanks to MUGEN, I understood perfectly how hitboxes operate and the weird things that they make certain moves do at a relatively young age with very little competitive experience. I learned to appreciate how character or game-breaking glitches can arise from something as simple as an incorrect value or a syntax error. I learned about jump gravities, juggle states, the importance of startup:recovery:pushback ratios to ensure that your character didn’t have infinites comprised entirely of crouching jab – and because of the clusterfuck nature of the companies whose characters were adapted (with varying success and integrity) to MUGEN, I learned how to at least mash out every motion known to man. Simple qcfs and dps, double qcfs and hcfs, charge moves, 360s and 720s, SNK motions (qcb, hcf + button, hcb, f + button), Raging Demon, Raging Storm, those hilariously obscure KOF 2k2 HSDM motions…by the time Capcom vs. SNK 2 hit, nothing surprised me anymore.
A lot of you guys, for better or for worse, will never get to experience the actual creative process of MUGEN, and I guess I can’t really change that. But I still think you don’t know what you’re missing. Even if you’re like me and never finish any character you start (helped immensely by my inability to animate), there’s a lot of pleasure attached to the pain of drawing/editing your own sprites. For every expletive you utter trying to get your dude’s face right in hit-crouching frame 2, there’s gonna be a satisfied grin as you slowly-but-surely pop in those completed frames and watch your once-static punching bag take on more and more life as you beat him up with Kung Fu Man to make sure everything’s flagged properly.
I don’t see any problem with what Alexlexus is doing with that Super 3rd strike game. I see it as I would see a bootleg remix of a song.
And I see MUGEN as an engine, not as a game.
I like the idea of MUGEN. The idea that it is an open source fighting game engine that has a lot programmers. However, if it’s not an official release from a big company… I don’t think it’ll ever be taken seriously.