It's a good week for PC gaming fight fans -- first the release of Street Fighter IV, and now we learn about this just released 2D freeware game Vanguard Princess (VP), which features some very high production values and is based on the Fighting Maker 2nd engine, said to be like the popular MUGEN but much better.

VP is created by Sugeno Tomoaki, who is credited on some Capcom titles including The King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. You can choose from ten female fighters, each with unique moves; also featured is local online play, gamepad support, loli assist characters (really), and of course, panty and boob shots galore.

Note to play it, you must have the East Asian language pack installed, and your non-Unicode language set to Japanese -- in XP, this can be done by going to Control Panel > Region and Language Options > Languages and ticking the appropriate box at the bottom, then clicking the Advanced tab and selecting Japanese from the dropdown menu (your installation disc and/or a restart may be required for this). There are other ways of getting it to run, but they aren't as reliable according to reports, so we'll leave it at that. A fan is currently working on netplay code for the game, so hopefully more support gets behind it for a translated release, too.

A translated readme can be found on Shoryuken, and the game itself on Vector (click the large blue button in the middle there). A patch is said to be released this week.