The Mugen scene

butters · Post by **butters** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 12:01 am

After seeing some videos of Mugen with like 200 characters, I decided to look into it. I got turned off really quickly, because the amount of elitism that goes on there trumps anything I've seen in the emulation scene. They are hell bent on preventing their work from getting to warehousers - people that compile tons of people's characters and stages into archives people can dive in and play - to the point that they won't even release their work.

At this point I haven't even tried Mugen, and I'm not sure that I ever will, because that kind of elitism is a huge turnoff for me. These people need to realize that its this kind of exposure that gets their work seen by the masses, and they will go to them for updates if they really like it. Some of these people may even have the talent to create new work, but not if they hate the community from the beginning.

I know that this is a weird place to have this topic, but from what I've seen the big Mugen boards delete topics like this pretty quickly.

Lunchbox · Post by **Lunchbox** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 12:38 am

Usually those "warehoused" versionsof Mugen don't credit all of the work they contain, so it's no surprise why they don't want to be a part of them.

area · Post by **area** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 2:44 am

Lunchbox wrote:Usually those "warehoused" versionsof Mugen don't credit all of the work they contain, so it's no surprise why they don't want to be a part of them.

Even when they do credit them, however, they get shut down. And considering that many characters were originally hosted on Geocities websites in chinese which are now long gone, it is now insanely difficult to get hold of a large number of characters.

I keep getting tempted by the Xbox version of Mugen though.

Lartrak · Post by **Lartrak** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 2:46 am

It is an amazing pain in the ass to get characters for Mugen. That was one reason I lost interest in it fairly quickly. There are some truely fantastic characters that people have made - original and "ports".

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 8:22 am

Lartrak wrote:It is an amazing pain in the ass to get characters for Mugen. That was one reason I lost interest in it fairly quickly. There are some truely fantastic characters that people have made - original and "ports".

There was this mugen museum from a french website where a guy would email the characters you wanted to you. Fairly neat, if you knew what the name of the def file was.

Finding good characters is hard because of elitism. And all I want to do is sit down and play, not find good characters. If you have someone who can set it up for you, then you are golden. Else, stick to the official.

butters · Post by **butters** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:00 am

See the thing is, the develpers of Mugen made all the characters and levels programming plain text so that people could learn from each other. I think the warehousing side effect was intended. Regardless of how you feel about software ownership, the second you release your code in plain text, people can do anything they want with it and there's really nothing you can do about it.

Juan · Post by **Juan** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 1:43 pm

Elecbyte (MUGEN creator) is long gone. I think there's an Open MUGEN project somewhere, but I haven't tried it.

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 3:45 pm

Juan wrote:Elecbyte (MUGEN creator) is long gone. I think there's an Open MUGEN project somewhere, but I haven't tried it.

The Open Mugen project is coming along, but nowhere near playability. The best is the cracked XP Mugen, which there is some dispute about but what can you do?