4/11/2009 - Mugen - The Super Mario Bros. vs. RonaldMcDonald

Because of Super Smash Bros., it's not unusual anymore to see Mario and Luigi in a fighting game. But Ronald McDonald? Yeah, that's pretty strange:



Boy, these MUGEN programmers can be really strange. I mean, I don't know where anybody would even get the idea to put Ronald in a fighting, much less giving him a Japanese voice... at least I think it's Japanese. And you have to love Grimace and the Hamburglar surrounding Ronald's fallen body when he's defeated. Sometimes I think the MUGEN people put the strangest characters they can just to make a YouTube video out of it and get more viewers. And you know what? It works.

1/6/2008 - SF2Nes V 0.92 gameplay video

It always surprises me at what lengths people will go to bask in their retro memories. I've mentioned the MUGEN system before when I featured the Optimus Prime vs. Megatron video. MUGEN is mostly used for integrating sprites from different fighting game franchises so that you can have dream matches like Ryu from Street Fighter vs. Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. Most of the time, MUGEN modders will use the latest versions of the characters so that they have the most animation frames to work with. However, that's not always the case as this video shows:



So what the modders tried to create here is a Street Fighter 2 experience on the NES! Using smaller sprites, only two attack buttons, and 8-bit graphics and music, this succeeds where the other bootleg versions of SF2 failed. Of course, the NES couldn't possibly reproduce the fireball effects or voices in this MUGEN mod, but a pure 8-bit experience probably wouldn't look and sound as dynamic.

5/27/2007 - Optimus Prime vs. Megatron (2 videos)

Transformers The Movie (animated) came out when I was ten years old, the perfect age for getting sucked into the cross-platform marketing hype that was Transformers. The synergy of transformable vehicles, robots, and the cartoon that featured these action figures is something that the advertising geniuses of today cannot recreate. Oh, they're going to attempt to do so with the new live-action movie, but kids just don't have as much interest in action figures in general as we did back then.

I didn't get to see Transformers The Movie in the theaters due to circumstances I cannot remember, but I do remember renting the movie three times (purchasing movies were crazy expensive back then) and watching it over and over. People generally focus on how unusual it was for major characters to actually die in the movie, but for a Robotech fan like me, it was nothing new. What hooked me in was the animation... it's something that you just won't see these days because of CGI. It's my theory that animators hate drawing the straight lines that are necessary to portray these robots. It's a shame since all of the recent "animated" Transformers shows pale in comparison to the old-school animation.

The highlight of the Transformers movie was, of course, the epic fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron. This was the fight all the cartoon fans were waiting for but never really got a chance to see. I'm not sure if the movie got it's PG rating because of this fight, but it's pretty brutal for a kid's movie:



SPOILER ALERT: Yes, Optimus Prime did die as a result from this fight. So did Megatron, but he was reborn as Galvatron soon after. Of course, that caused a lot of controversy back then because Optimus was a good guy... not just that, he was the LEADER of the good guys! It was a lot for us pre-teens to accept.

But I digress... as I've said before, we have so many tools available to us to pay tribute to our nostalgic whims. One of them is MUGEN, a PC program that is sort of an open-source fighting-game engine that allows people to customize sprites and animation to use them in their own fighting game. You want to see Ryu (Street Fighter) vs. Scorpion (Mortal Kombat)? No problem! How about Hulk (Marvel vs. Capcom) vs. Thing? Just draw your own Thing sprites! Of course, it didn't take long for someone to recreate the Optimus Prime vs. Megatron fight on MUGEN... and here it is:



It was a nice "touch" to include the Stan Bush music!