Windom XP (no, that is not a typo) is a doujin series of
Fighting Games by Y. Kamada that
borrows a few pages from the
Gundam Vs Series. The premise is as simple as the plot is non-existant: select a
Humongous Mecha and a pilot, go to the cities/an undescript arena/the Moon, and blow the crap out of every other robot on the battlefield.
And it's quite
addictive and extremely competent for a clone.
The first release in the series was the
Freeware Game Bootfighter Windom XP SP-2, which features 14 mechas and 4 game modes: Survival (fight 'till you drop), Team Battle (And by "team", we mean "a big horde of robots"), Blitz Tactics (Destroy the enemy warship before the opposing army wreck yours) and online multiplayer. It was subsequently followed by a
commercial Mission Pack Sequel,
Ultimate Knight Windom XP, which adds 3 new robots, a fairly difficult Arcade mode, equippable items and general tweaks and balancing to the roster. As of now, the latter version is the only one that continually receives updates. An
Expansion Pack, the
Powerup Kit, adds a new stage, the two stages from
Boootfighter that were formely absent from
Ultimate Knight and 5 new units (3 mobile suits and 2 Linux units), and was released at the 77th Comiket.
And for those of you who fancy customization, both games support pilots, which are custom avatars with personalized voice/sound effects for the mechas. Somehow, people have run with them and made characters from everything
but mecha series for the games, allowing for downright insane crossover battles.
Bootfighter can be downloaded
here
(with menu translations courtesy of Mirror Moon, known for their
Nasuverse translations). The official website for
Ultimate Knight is
here (providing the latest patches, obviously). As for pilots, look up
the Bootfighter Pilot Database and
the Mirror Moon forums' topic on them. (See? We weren't making that last paragraph up.)
These games provide examples of:
- Attack Drone
- Beam Spam: Several special attacks invoke this.
- BFS: XP-SP3 and Lycoris wield one. BlackComb and Ranunculus wield two.
- SwordFight: Except for Windom Vienna
- Captain Ersatz: Linux Primula ressembles a mecha Marisa *
So Nitori desgined it?
, while Linux Lycoris in the Power Up Kit is an utterly blatant robot Shana.
- Character Tiers: Deliberately invoked with the set amounts of lives that each mecha has; those at the top have two while those at the bottom have up to five.
- Cherry Tapping: Defeating someone with MS-98 or a Millenium robot.
- Double Weapon: Linux Black Selena's melee weapon. Can also double as a Shout Out to Darth Maul.
- Game Mod: Pilots.
- There are also texture/model mods that change the looks of the mechs themselves, usually to more closely match the Gundams that the games took much of their inspiration from.
- Gun Kata: Vienna. Only bot in the game that has unarmed melee.
- Guns Akimbo: Blackcomb and Vienna, with dual beam rifles and beam pistols, respectively. Antherium also does this with a beam rifle in its right hand and a combination projectile/beam cannon in its left. The new expansion introduces the Talisker. With the Strike Gundam's IWSP Striker pack, it wields the standard beam rifle in its right hand, a combo shield-gatling on left, and two rail cannons on its shoulders.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Lycoris wields a heat katana like its origin, while Talisker's armaments include the Gerbera Straight.
- Macross Missile Massacre
- Most Annoying Sound: Most pilots have up to nine vocalizations avalible through keys 1-9. There is no limit to how many pilots can speak at once. There are always a massive number of mechs on screen at once in single player Team Battles. The final result can be seen here.
- Punny Name: The Japanese used for Bootfighter, which literally translates to "Startup Warrior/Fighter", is pronounced as "Kidou Senshi" (as in Mobile Warrior/Suit).
- Spell My Name with an S: One of the new mobile suits from the powerup kit has 2 different references depending on how its name is rendered. Rendering is as "Talisker" fits in with the Theme Naming below, while rendering is as "Triske" makes it an anagram to the Strike Gundam that it's heavily based on.
- Sky Surfing: Windom XP and XP-Type B.
- Theme Naming: And how! Every mecha is named after a Microsoft Windows OS, except for the Linux units (6 of which have feminine designs, the other one merely has a feminine name. All but one of those have flower names, none of which are used by any existing Linux distro.)
- Take That: 3 of the 4 weakest robots are named "Millenium" after the notoriously buggy Windows ME. The fourth is named MS-98. Go figure. The powerup kit introduces another Millenium variant, the Millenium II, that's got 2 beam sabers as opposed a single beam saber carried by the 98 and the other ME units.
- Genius Bonus: Four of the mobile suits' names are less obvious and require some research to get their signification —- The mobile suit that's now known as "Vista" used to be called "Longhorn", the original codename for the OS. "Blackcomb" and "Vienna" were codenames for Windows 7, and "Talisker" in the powerup kit was the codename for Windows CE 4.
- Transforming Mecha: Asteroid Windows 2K and 2000 SP-1.
