Avengers United Battle Force - Information page

If you liked the Avengers Arcade game from the early 1990's, you can try this fan-made game.  It looks awesome! You can play it on Windows or on Android





Avengers United Battle Force - Information page



Here is the facebook page https://www.facebook.com/brazilmugenteam

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Trailer for Street Fighter IV

Here is a trailer for one of the characters in Street Fighter IV named Gouken. Gouken is interesting because I have never seen him before in a game. He is huge and he is the one who taught Street Fighter staple characters Ken and Ryu all of their moves. Fighting Gouken will never get old.

Street Fighter II is the seminal video game of my life. Without it,I would not have gotten into video games or engineering. It was the first game of its kind. There had been other head-to-head fighting games but I bet that most people would agree that Street Fighter was the tipping point for that genre of video gaming. Combining large characters, 6 buttons and a control stick, great music and graphics, with interesting characters made the game series a success. This success lead to all the other great fighting game franchises. Thankfully, Capcom followed up Street Fighter II with more games in the series. The lastest is Street Fighter IV and to be honest I'm excited. Makes me wanna run out and buy a PS3 right now (I won't). In terms of a legacy, I think Street Fighter may be one of reasons I am so attracted to MUGEN. Much of MUGEN is based on the look and feel found in Street Fighter II. Well, while I wait for the opportunity to own Street Fighter IV, let-alone play the game, I can enjoy the earlier versions of the game I do own and enjoying MUGEN.

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Mugen Character Development Part 1 - Black Panther

Disclaimer - I thought I would start posting the development process for making my first development character. If you are not interested in mugen or video games please feel free to ignore these.

Still here? OK, good. One of the first things you need to make mugen characters is what are called "sprites" the art of the characters. They are typically several pictures of the character is various poses and positions that can be animated together. This for me is the hardest part because I'm not much of an artist. Sometimes sprites are posted by people that can be used. I thought that I could use some of those to make my own characters and save the hard part of art later. Much of these completed sprite sets are of characters that are already complete. I have been thinking about what the Black Panther character should be able to do. The suits claws on his costume is made of vibranium so when he blocks he should be able to cancel out energy based attacks I'm thinking about a few special moves right now:

1. Double -strike Claw to his opponent - high
2. Double -strike Claw to his opponent - low
3. He runs up to his opponent and throws multiple combinations of punches and kicks for several seconds causing maximum damage.
4. He flips backwards over his opponent striking high with the claws
5. He flips forwards over his opponent striking high with the claws

As of yet. I have been able to find only one Black Panther sprite. It is pictured above and I found it at the Scrollboss website.

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New Tekkaman Blade Gif

Good news! I've found a way to update the previous gif I made by getting rid of the Black Background! I used Paint.net and it took all of a minute on each image to pull off.

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Animated Gifs

Back in the day (say 1996) when you didn't have access to streaming video technology and FLASH, but you wanted to show moving images on a website what did you do? You used an Animated Gif. An Animated Gif is just a collection of images that the web browser plays to give the impression of movement...same way television and movies work. Today, we have many more options. Do you use a Java Applet? What about FLASH? Why not just stream the video over the Internet in real time? How do you know which to use? Everyone has their own opinions. If the media is short and doesn't need sound, I like to use Animated Gifs to save on bandwidth. They are perfect as avatars on social networking sites and forums. If I need sound but it's still short, I like to use Java applets because you can even have interaction. I think more people are using FLASH in this situation but I am personally more familiar with the applet route. If I don't need interation but the media needs to be television quality or better in audio and video, and the media is several minutes long, I like to stream it over the Internet from YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, GodTube, and VM Direct or from a site or blog that allows embedding. In this day and age you find that you sometimes have a file in one format but you need it in a different one. No Need to panic because somewhere somehow someone has written software to do the converting for you.

Here are some animated Gifs I created:

So what is the difference between and Animated Gif and an AVI (video file). Look below




The Gif is on the left. The video is on the right. The video can be longer and moves a little smoother.

I decided to go back to animated gifs when i realized that they could be used to make mugen characters and vice versa. I've decided to make a character from which I can get sprites before I try something like Black Panther that has fewer than no sprites. I like the Anime series Tekkaman Blade. I have found no Tekkaman Blade character but I did find a Super NES video game based on the series. I can get my sprites from there!

Here is an example of sprites gleaned from the game and about 11 of them animated together. I still need to learn how to make the background transparent. Mine is on the Right.

Here are some informative links for learning how to create Animated Gifs:
So, You Want An Animated .gif, Huh?
Tutorials: Sprite Ripping
Make Animated Gifs
Ripping and Using Sprites

Software that you may want (Just "Google" them):
ImageTasks
GIF Construction Set Professional
Easy Graphic Converter
Ulead GIF Animator
Free FLV to AVI Converter
Any Video Converter
Free FLV Player
SWF and FLV Toolbox
Camstudio

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My Second Animated GIF

Here is my second attempt at making an animated GIF. It's the same except I made the background transparent. I plan to make more of them in the future. Especially when I get my Black Panther mugen character working.

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My First Animated GIF

I have been practicing making animated gifs. The hard part is most definitely getting the images. I found a great little program for generating these called GIF Construction Set. This particular gif was generated using sprites I downloaded from the internet for making a mugen character. The sprite set I found is not a complete set, but the introduction sprites worked great. My one worry is that I'm not much of an artist, but I would like to get better at using the computer to make great 3D and 2D images

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Mugen Project

I'm interested in learning how to use my computer programming skills to write video games. Thankfully, I can use Mugen to practice. So far I've been finding content that others have created and using them to make my own fighting games. Now I think it is time to make my own content. - characters and stages. Also thankfully there is so much tutorials and tools available. I want to create a Black Panther and a Blade characters because as far as I can tell no one has released those. I guess the first thing is to take a character that already exists and see what how it is put together. I want to make a couple of characters and corresponding stages that work on the Windows Mugen of Windows. I'm excited at the prospect of releasing them for others to play. I will post tests and demos as they become available.

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Black People and Comic Books

I have been a fan of science fiction for about as long as I had tastes and could choose to like this and dislike that. Fans and creators of science fiction in general comic books and animation in particular are assumed to white, male, and geeky. Being a black man I don't fully fit that description (okay I'll cop to the last two). The perception that comic book fans are by definition "white and nerdy" is changing. Nowadays you can be any race or nationality or male or female and be a comic book/science fiction fan. Okay so we are still trying to live down the "geeky" label (or embrace it in some cases). As I have grown older I have met many more and more diverse people crossing color and gender lines at conventions, stores, and theaters. Part of the problem why I think that superheroes in particular have not been hugely popular among black people is because of the lack of serious black characters and black creators. While the main publishing housing for comic books have always had black characters since the 1970's, it is only now that some of these characters are becoming mainstream, especially among folks who know nothing about comic books. As of now everyone knows about Storm and Blade from marvel (they've been in movies) and people know that there is a black Green Lantern because of the Justice League television series.

I want to do a series of blog articles spotlighting various comic book creators and comic book characters that happen to be black. I intend to talk about how their work has impacted me and the characters. And combine my interest in the Mugen fighting games because many characters are available to play in mugen. Please see my articles on mugen for more information. I have also come across a great index of black fictional characters covering all of my favorite mediums. The site can be found here at the Museum of Black Superheroes.

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