X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.
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On 4th October 1980, the X Bomber preview documentary premiered on Fuji TV in Japan. |
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As part of my clean up of the file 'structures' on my laptop (which is progressing quite well), I have been adding quite a lot of material to the site in various areas.
The toys and merchandise folder, for example, has received a few new additions.
I also found two renders by an unknown artist, that hadn't been added to the site previously.
As you can see, by feeding the original filename into nitter, you can pull down the original files, but there's no way of tracing the file back to its creator.
I tried image-searching via tineye and google and neither were able to identify the images.
I have noticed that nitter, or perhaps twitter's own engine, causes older results to resurface randomly, when nothing's been added under a hashtag for a while.
So the answer may present itself in due course.
This is a developing problem where images are effectively hidden by publishing them on walled-garden platforms that search engines are unable to index.
To try and increase the project's focus on this problem: of a slowly-increasing body of work on the site that can't be attributed to any handle or name, I moved all 'unknown artist' work to its own folder.
If anyone can identify the artists of any of these works, it would be great to hear from you.
... a newly revised version of Nopple_1000's Dai-X illustration on nitter.
There seems to be a recent focus on the X Bomber comics: both Shonen Jump and TV-kun on twitter in Japan.
You don't have to venture far from xbomber.co.uk to see the whole lot, and my mighty and venerable Epson V750 Pro has done a much better job of the scanning.
In other news, the SFXB forum has been given some upgrades, in the form of two extensions to help bring the functionality of the PHPBB more into line with modern expectations:
- Thanks for posts
- Avatar resize
I've given both of them a test out and they seem to work nicely. I've finished my work for now on the new, updated links page.
I managed a bit more on X-Bomber the Game over the weekend and will try to get back to it again tomorrow.
On the subject of the links page: especially its section on Star Trek, I came across an impressive site, which looks to be a step on from the discontinued LCARS 47 project.
These graphical interfaces are remarkable, but they concentrate a bit too heavily on the nutrek LCARS appearance, which lacks the appealing colours of the '80s/90s originals.
Andy Thomas has posted an informative vid about the VHS capture process that fed into the creation of SFXB.
It would be interesting to see a few more of these.
On another note, we run a Star Fleet Teams/Skype every 6 months, which might be a good forum (alongside the actual forum) for any questions about the history of SFXB and other Star Fleet sites. 
To try and make the site a bit more friendly, I got it to piggy-back the forum login cookies and look up usernames and avatar images (if people have them) in the database and display them on the front page.
The links page has been quite-a-bit re-worked and expanded.
You might find some interesting new things in there.
A few other commitments have broken my stride a bit but, I've been working on X-Bomber the Game earlier this week.
I'm trying to get this feature finished, which has been on my to-do list for a very long time.
The sprites are coming along quite well but are taking a little while to convert and improve them so that they'll look in-keeping in the game.
I doubt that it'll take much programming to get them working. 
On the subject of Interster, I saw that it was being discussed over twitter in Japan.
It looks that not many people there had heard of it.
Anyway, it looks as though all-but-three episodes of this have been found and uploaded to youtube, although, helpfully, 10 videos seem to be hidden.
For me, it could definitely use some subtitles but it has a nice theme tune.
When I looked more closely at the image featured in the twitter post, the model of the Impala ship that features a lot in the show is a papercraft model, made by this very talented artist on deviantart: ThunderChildFTC. 
Thanks again to Dan Hitchin for providing me with photos of Gary Cass' 3D printed project of The Skull.
I really like the subtle update that's been given to the ship during this excellent-looking project.
I posted an update about X Blogger on Tuesday. Today a new article is available:
Episode 12: Our Mortal Enemy is Captain Carter
This episode is a memorable one but, to me at least, they pretty-much all are, in their own ways.
This is a particularly great write up though, with some fantastic screengrabs, as always, which make the best use of the new 720p upscale to bring out a lot of new details.
The colours of these screenshots really stand out as well.
It wouldn't surprise me if the time had been taken to run these captures through photoshop to get even more out of them.
This is a truly great project that's being done for the show.
The article raises the question of what fuel type the ships use in the show.
In the UK Look-In comics, both Earth and Alliance vessels seem to make use of a liquid fuel called eurydium.
The Alliance can definitely make use of it, since they take the trouble to steal it using their own tanker ships.
You encounter a number of these in level 5 of X-Bomber the Game, where the assumption was made that, when released and detonated, the fuel would create a lingering napalm effect.
I took the trouble to sprite the EDF large shuttle and space tanker ships that appear in that story, back in 2004, for use in the game, but those sprites were lost when the hard drive failed in my then-new PC.
One day, I'll get around to re-doing them.
You can find the previous episode's write-up, the second part of which was made available in July, below:
Episode 11: Farewell the Eternal Battleground
Part 1 | Part 2 
Well, they took our power out last night.
Hopefully, I can get something done on the game tonight. 
When the domain for Shane Perry's Big Dai-X website ran out in 2013, I figured that the best thing was to merge the content into xbomber.co.uk, since there'd been an idea for quite some time in the Star Fleet fan community to amalgamate Star Fleet sites together (when there were more of them).
After doing quite a bit of online archaeology with the help of the wayback machine, as part of my article on the SFXB forum and its history, I feel that this probably wasn't the best decision.
I have a backup file, which has now been re-instated and put on the server.
Big Dai-X was well-designed, so all the links still work, even though the absolute URL has changed.
There are a lot of changes going on around xbomber.co.uk, although the activity is a little unfocussed.
I have been working on the game itself last night, and will be turning my attention back to it later today. 
While we were on our recent travels, we put CBBC on for an hour in one of the hotels, for our daughter.
The programming on CBBC is generally very poor in my view, but, this time, we came across The Deep, which is an Australian CGI underwater exploration and adventure show that ran for 4 seasons between 2015 and 2022.
The show is a Lost in Space/Swiss Family Robinson-style show, but with a beautiful and advanced submarine and support vehicles, which they use for marine conservation and adventuring.
Anyone that has a liking for Stingray, SeaQuest; or could use an optimistic, hard sci-fi/fantasy adventure will probably find a lot to like here.
The website for the show is still available and contains some nice games and activities for children.
Meanwhile, the show can be watched (or downloaded) from youtube.
The third season seems to be hidden there, but it can be found on dailymotion, albeit not in 1080p resolution.
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An interview with, ah, me?! Contains a small amount of Star Fleet but it's wider ranging!
An interview with, ah, me?! Contains a small amount of Star Fleet but it's wider ranging!
An interview with, ah, me?! Contains a small amount of Star Fleet but it's wider ranging!
An interview with, ah, me?! Contains a small amount of Star Fleet but it's wider ranging!
Star Fleet episode subtitles
Star Fleet episode subtitles
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