Ever play a videogame and think you could have done it better? If so, then get hold of M.U.G.E.N. The popular development platform allows you to port classic games and rebuild them or create your own adventures from scratch. Many people are put off by the engine's complexity and the fact you need a decent knowledge of DOS programming to achieve good results. However, there are plenty of useful sites about M.U.G.E.N that can help you.

Whether you want to simulate Sonic or resurrect Ryu, this handy character creation tutorial will show you the ropes, walking you through the process of ripping sprites from original games before importing them into M.U.G.E.N to play around with. Sykotik's guide goes into a little more detail, explaining the ins and outs of making colour palettes for your characters and making a state in the CNS file.

Once your characters are ready for action, you'll need a backdrop to set them against. Samus's MUGEN page is a great source for downloading backgrounds and includes a raft of famous stages from the likes of Street Fighter, Final Fight and Mortal Kombat. Another important thing to take care of when building M.U.G.E.N games is something called background parallax. You'll need to master this in order to ensure that characters don't slide along the ground in 2D scrolling games. There's some good info on this here. Finally, to present your game in a stylish way have a look at this font creation tutorial to get your type looking tip-top.