This week’s edition of the weekly freebie may seem little late, but it’s still Tuesday in some parts of the world so technically speaking we’re right on schedule.

We’re not featuring a game per-se this week. M.U.G.E.N. is more of a set of tools for aspiring artists and programmers to work with to create their own fighting games. Luckily for those of us who prefer to just play games, there are tons of great characters and levels freely available.

M.U.G.E.N. has been around now for almost 10 years. It was originally released for DOS, but the developers, Elecbyte, eventually switched to Linux before dropping off the map completely a few years ago. Luckily there’s still a thriving M.U.G.E.N. community creating new characters and stages every day. There also happens to be a Windows version called WinM.U.G.E.N. available.

I was a little skeptical about the quality of a homebrew, community driven fighting game, but it turns out M.U.G.E.N. is great. Ever wanted to see who might win an a battle between Sub-Zero and Guile? You can easily set it up with M.U.G.E.N.. Want to see Peter Griffin duking it out with Homer Simpson? No problem. You can even have them on tag teams with Megaman and Captain America if you like. We’re not sure how the respective copyright holders feel about all this, but M.U.G.E.N. is all community driven and non-profit so there’s very little they can say about it.

Graphically things are kind of hit or miss based on the relative talent of the developers, but most of the hardcore M.U.G.E.N. sites have a rating system in place so you can see what people thought of a given character or stage before downloading.

M.U.G.E.N. has solid joystick support, an endless supply of new characters to try out, it’s a small download, weighing in at only 2.6 megs and around 1.5 megs per character and best of all, it’s free! Give it a download and pick up a few characters/stages here. The Mugen-Infantry page also has a handy “getting started” section available just below the downloads. You may want to take a look while it’s downloading as adding characters isn’t as intuitive as it could be.

Happy gaming. See you all next week.