I'm not normally a fan of crossovers. In my honest opinion, most crossovers are stupid, ruin the series' respective canons, and only exist to appease idiot fanboys who wanna see, "Who would really win, Bowser, or Ganondorf!?" There's only two crossovers I've ever seen done right. One of them being Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. The other . . . that's an article for another time.
Of course, I'm just talking likable crossovers story-wise. Gameplay, that's different.
There's a lot of fighting game crossovers. I mean, just look at the success of The Only Nintendo Series Anyone Gives a Shit About Anymore(tm), better known as Super Smash Bros. Or all those Capcom versus Marvel versus SNK versus Namco versus whoever else. Since fighting games usually don't have storylines, crossovers are much easier to do. I'll admit, I was hesitant to play the N64 Smash when it first came out; all of my childhood icons fighting one another seemed sacrilegious. But then, I realized, these games, they're basically combat simulators; what would happen if Mario did fight Pikachu to the death? You can find out in these games. And luckily for me, N64 Smash was a decent rental. (However, I still maintain that the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja games are the only one-on-one fighters that I have truly loved.)
However, what if someone were to take that idea, to the next level?
Someone has. In the form of MUGEN.
Mugen is a freeware game I recently discovered. It's a fighing game where you can import custom-made fighters, stages, music, graphics, et cetera. It makes sense, since Mugen is Japanese for "infinite." The possibilities are endless.
It's only a bummer that I CAN'T WORK THE PROGRAM PROPERLY! And even when I can get it running, the game just plays like a Street Fighter knockoff. After having played Ultimate Ninja to death, I just can't go back to other fighting games anymore.
But, I can still enjoy Mugen, for you see, Youtube exists for a reason.
There are youtubers who are also devout Mugenites. They do videos of characters fighting each other. I have seen some weird matchups. Here's one, I saw a video where the player was Deadpool, from Marvel Comics. Guess who he was fighting?
Miku Hatsune.
Swear to God. It was as crazy as you can imagine. I laughed quite a bit when I saw that. It seems the most popular characters are anime characters, fighting game characters (a lot of Guilty Gear fans on youtube), as well as characters from DC and Marvel publications.
But you know what else they have? Beatdowns of crappy characters.
Not crappy characters per se, but rather poorly programmed characters. Mugenites call them retarded characters. Mugen, being freeware, means anyone can upload content, regardless of how bad it is. Boy howdy, there are some glitchy "tards" made for Mugen. There's a video where Peter Griffin fights a poorly programmed Peter Griffin. It was surreal, yet really amusing to see Pea Tear Gri Fin fighting a half-assed version of himself. I also saw another one where an original character, namely, a Japanese pop-up text block, fight a poorly programmed Digimon, a buggy rendition of a boss from the Streets of Rage games, a horrible rendition of Silver Surfer, and a Klonoa who was clearly pre-alpha. And the background? The food level from Earthworm Jim 2. With music from said level.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been mindscrewed. But I mean that in a good way.
Ah yes, where else can you see Haruhi Suzumiya lay the smack down on Duke Nukem? Or see Konata Izumi do her hurricane kick on Tifa Lockhart? Why Mugen, of course! Provided you can find all the characters and whatnot from the web. Good luck with that.
Oh, and there is a Mugen version of most of the girls on my Insanely Cute Anime Girl list. I won't go through them, 'cause that would just fill the rest of this entry with a bunch of huge bolded text filled with exclamation points followed by italicized text reading, "Oh yes! It was her!" followed by anime-esque smilies. So I'll spare you . . . today.
