Lithium Leaf

Link: http://homepage3.nifty.com/alexholth/

Bootfighter Windom XP SP-2 a game by Y.Kamada. It's a mech brawler where the characters are inspired by Operating Systems.

You get to choose from a number of versions of Windows and Linux in the form of robots. And the developer's preference over the two is quite clear. As Linux robots are all glowing and are tremendously overpowered with respect to Windows robots, there's a few versions of Windows that are glowing and are also overpowered with respect to the rest. There are 8 Windows robots and 4 Linux robots. The one the game is named after, Windows XP, is pictured in the screenshot above. The one bellow is Cymbidium Linux. There's also 2 player faces to choose from, less angry cat pictured above and more angry cat pictured bellow. Alright they have names, the less angry cat is named Ace Cat but I cannot read the name of the second cat.

Okay, lets explain a bit of the gameplay.

There's 5 modes of play you can choose. The first one is a simple brawl, you fight against 2 enemy robots that respawn everytime you kill them (as a different kind of robot), the aim of this mode is to kill as many robots as possible, rise your score and make it to the leaderboards. The downside is that since it's 2 against 1, they will split constantly attacking you from both sides of the screen. You get 3 lives yourself, after that is game over. The funny thing is that if you choose a either Windows Millenium or Windows 98 you get 6 lives because they are so underpowered.

The second mode is training. You get a punchbag that doesn't do anything to test your robot against. The third mode is team battle. Which can be renamed as War, because there's about 20 robots per team (you can't change the settings). The 4th one is called Blitz Tactics, plays similar to team battle, but there's a lot less robots per teams and you get 2 battleships per team, which work as respawn points and can be destroyed, but they are not defenseless eihter. The last one is online mode, which I haven't tested yet mayorly because my computer is quite old and when things get busy in either the 3rd or 4th mode it panics and runs at about half a frame a second.

Let's go on to the control scheme, which is a bit complicated at first specially if you aren't used to PC gaming. To move you use the arrow keys tap them repeatedly for a quick dash to dedge stuff or approach your enemy. Z jumps and uses the boosters to fly around, if tapped repeatedly you robot will dash in the air, there is a bar for the booster's energy (the orange bar) so that you cannot fly or dash the whole time, one you touch the ground it refils quickly. X is used to fire weapon 1, which is usually a simple gun. C pulls out your sword and swings it. V is used to shield, but while you maintain it it drains energy from you boosters, so you cannot guard the whole time, you can guard in the air but as you use the same energy bar for flying and shielding, it decreases the time you can be guarding. A shoots weapon 2. S changes the target you have locked on. D shoots weapon 3 and F shoots weapon 4. The power of the weapons increases as their number increases, weapon 4 being the most powerful and can sometimes kill enemies in one blow if used well. But the more powerful the weapon the longer the cooldown time, showed in the botom left hand corner of the screen. The weapons have an energy bar as well (the blue one), the more powerful the weapon the more energy it drains, I believe to prevent you from using all the powerful weapons at the same time.

Your score is written in the top-left corner, along with the ammount of robots killed. The ammount of lives left is pictured next to the energy bars. There is no life bar to know when you are going to die, instead the orange numbers at the left-bottom side of the screen tell you how much armor you have left. When it reaches 0 you die.

The visuals are quite outstanding with a lot of nice laser effects and a lot of effort has been put into the robots. The music is cool too but gets quite repetitive.

Overall, it's a fun game and if your computer can run it without problems you at least should give it a try.

Download the game.

Source: Kobedenshi

Notes:
To play the game you will need the .NET framework.
There is a thread in the author's page to make requests, you can add them in English and they will be translated to Japanese.