Mugen was actually created using a game engine by Elecbyte that allowed users to create their own fighting characters for Elecbyte's fighting game. But the company disappeared and the engine was adopted by the open source movement for making characters. And make they did, we're talking about hundreds of characters. Mugen has now been ported to several consoles, but the PC version is the mainstay and best one.

What sets Mugen apart from other fighters is the huge number of characters. There are characters from every fighting game you can imagine and many from TV shows. It's almost ten years since Elecbyte first released the game engine, and the Mugen community has grown considerably thanks to Youtube videos and Internet forums.

Just like Streetfighter, you have three punch buttons and three kick buttons. There's also a taunt button. You can do combos and super moves, and you can even do team attacks. The game can be configured for kids or adults, and you can select the difficulty and handicaps for all players and the AI. The game features team modes, survival, team co-op, and the required single player modes.

If you've ever wanted to see Homer Simpson fight Peter Griffin fight Fred Flintstone, this game is for you. How about Sub Zero versus Ryu? It's in this game too. You can play as any of them, or let the AI handle everything in spectator mode. The stages are just as varied as the characters with plenty of great animation and details.

If you're wondering who creates all this stuff, the answer is people. Very gifted people that can be any kid or adult that likes to spend time creating characters. They share these characters online on various websites so you can enjoy them. Some of the characters are great, some are just plain weird. But it's all there for you to try.

Now you're saying this sounds great, but what are the problems? There are two. First, Mugen characters are highly overpowered. There's no balance because creators don't care, or know, anything about balancing characters. They are more interested in the coolness factor. This can make some fights ridiculously tough or easy depending on your character.

The other serious problem is RAM. All Mugen characters need to be loaded in memory. Now twenty or so characters isn't much of a problem, but when you have close to a hundred, we're talking gigabytes of RAM. So unless you have 4GB to spare, you're going to have to edit the config files and remove some characters. This can be a problem when the creators name them Ryu1 and Ryu2. And you don't know which one is the Ryu you want to keep!

Mugen has an online mode against other players, which is the main mode that most people pick when playing Mugen. You can play the many single player modes. We find that the huge number of characters and diverse set of moves make Mugen a blast to play. Yes, there's no balance to the characters, but when you have He-Man versus Optimus Prime, or Goku versus Superman, who cares. It's a fighting fan's dream team of fighters at your hand and it's all free! You can download Mugen here. But to really enjoy Mugen, you have to download additional characters either from a torrent, or from one of the character guilds.