HomePage Logo The Game Star Fleet Other Forum
Article list

X-Bomber the Game

Introduction »

Random Screenshot

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.


News »

Robot Wars

News image

Due to a lack of anything new worth watching, I started watching the 'new' 2016-2018 Robot Wars.

One thing you notice is how much faster, more deliberate and more destructive the robots were, 13 years on from the end of the original 1997-2003 Robot Wars.

That being said, the new show is strangely charmless compared to the original.
The lighting is terrible. A lot of the interesting challenges like the gauntlet are completely gone. The presenters are awkward compared to Craig Charles and Philippa Forester.

In the current, American Battlebots incarnation of Robot Wars, you may be struck by the sheer scale of corporate sponsorship and enormity of the resources that go into most of the new robots. One machine even had AMD sponsorship.
The charm of the original Robot Wars by contrast was how many of the robots were built in garages by hobbyists with donated or salvaged parts and materials.

There is a colossal playlist on youtube with all episodes of the original show.

The other thing that sets the new and original shows apart is that the original show has some good music that really sets the pace. I particularly like the Road to Armageddon and Battle themes.

2026.07.07 X-Impulse / like icon 1 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Star Fleet in Look-In

News image
Ben's review of the Star Fleet Look-In comics has been expanded to 3 articles.
Please find the links below:
	Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 
2026.07.05 X-Impulse / like icon 36 Comment icon 2 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Game Content Migration

All content regarding X-Bomber the Game itself has been moved to my home box. This way, all versions released since the very beginning of the project, 24 years ago, are now all accessible for download, in the same place, where anyone would expect to find them, rather than having to look for them on a different server, along with all source code for the game, and more gameplay videos than I was comfortable uploading to shared hosting.

The Large File Area link, pointing to xbomber.com, which I am using to direct traffic to my home box, has been removed from the right-hand menu, which tidies things up there a bit.

Additionally, I have been testing running phpBB on the home box for a number of weeks. I deployed a new phpBB with a database and a MariaDB user that mirrors the SFXB Forum deployment.

Since I want to minimise resource wastage when running the site from a home server, it was essential to see if the AnubisBB phpBB extension would work on it as well. I got the sodium PHP extension enabled and AnubisBB ran great after that.

This weekend, I exported the SFXB Forum database and the file structure across to the home box and, after a little bit of playing in PHPMyAdmin and data_global.php, I have a clone of the SFXB Forum running there happily behind the scenes.

I have a little mail relay from Dynu set up to handle password reset and registration emails.

In the meantime, the attackers seem to be starting to get the message that they will be getting nothing out of the SFXB forum whatsoever with AnubisBB standing in the way. Server CPU and bandwidth utilisation has seen a huge reduction, and is continuing to tail off.

I don't plan to move the forum anywhere at the moment for a few reasons, but the migration of a copy of the forum database is needed to allow the final phases of migration of the site across to its intended new home.

2026.07.05 X-Impulse / like icon 13 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

X-Bomber Trailer

I found an early trailer for X Bomber on nitter.
As noted in the comments, the 17-second clip seems to be made up mostly of footage from the 'preview show' and looks to pre-date the airing of the show by quite a bit.

The voice-over is apparently done by Yuji Mitsuya, who played PPA in the original Japanese version of the show.

I have added the video file to the Star Fleet ยป Videos folder for safe keeping.

At the same time, we have a nice, in-depth conversation going on about the show on the forum.
It's good to see that getting quite a bit of use.
It's an honour to host the forum, which I inherited from Andy at SFXB.
Its continued availability is in no way contingent on its activity, but at the same time it's gratifying to see it not acting like a read-only resource.
2026.07.01 X-Impulse / like icon 16 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

SFXB Forum Updated

The Forum has been updated to the newest build.
There is a nasty security hole in any prior version.

That means we can happily carry on with our Star Fleet re-watch.

The developers at phpBB have done a great job of patching this and the upgrade mechanism is excellent these days.
phpBB gives you lots of good tools and diagnostics to help get the job done.

I added some nice new images from Paul Wilson of another X-Bomber created in No Man's Sky, which can create ships for the player in a quasi-AI, procedurally-generated way.
The resulting ships normally look as though they're designed by committee but I like to add these to the site all-the-same, because the modular style matches the EDF design ethos.
You might see a ship like these if EDF later decided to build a mass-produced ship based on X-Bomber.

2026.06.25 X-Impulse / like icon 34 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

TwistedPinnacle3D

I came across this interesting find on Etsy.

I really like how these figures have different poses and carry different weapons that look authentic to the show.

On a separate subject, the linking between the media and news parts of the site wasn't made to work across two domains.
At the end of July, I will migrate the whole site across to the home server so that everything sits on the same domain.

2026.06.25 X-Impulse / like icon 27 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Star Fleet Section Migration

The Star Fleet section of the site has been replicated and switched over to being hosted on the downstairs PC.
As a result, the 720p upscaled DVD rips of Star Fleet have been moved from the large file area to here, which is where it would have made sense for them to have been since the outset.

Getting all the Star Fleet data was a bit of a procedure and had to be done in two stages.
The site has over 9,009 files, 252 directories and 10.7GB of stuff about Star Fleet.

2026.06.20 X-Impulse / like icon 37 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

New Project

Hi All,
cpltony2006 could use any suggestions on the forum around the idea of a new, fan-released DVD set.
Please take a look and make your thoughts known:
Star Fleet 'Upscaled' DVD Project - SFXB Forum

2026.06.09 X-Impulse / like icon 62 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Evolution Dai-X Instructions

News image
I had a request come in from Dan at the SFFB to see if I could get a scan of the instructions for the 2014 Evolution Toys Dai-X figure.
This is a very clever idea because it clearly should be on the site, but it had never dawned on me to scan it.
This is a new, straighter version from just after the scanner plate got a good clean.
2026.06.06 X-Impulse / like icon 58 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Daft Ideas

Folder preview

I received some very interesting information from Daft_Ideas (aka. Grey Area) about the history of the available X-Bomber 3D models, and the people that were involved in making them:

Daft_Ideas created the model that Dan used as his template and which Nick Cass took further and developed as well.

I've summarised part of one of Daft's emails:

It was nice of Dan to credit me, and I feel proud that my simple model (I am in no way a designer!) started off this craze...well - there were two predecessors, on opposite ends of the scale; one by Dorian Sherratt who I fear may have passed away (his model was beautiful), and the simpler "benheu" version.
I found some links and now that I have a much better printer (my first prints were on an ANet A8!) I've decided to spend some time on it again; but since I can't go "Better" than Gary or Dan's version, I have only one choice.
I'm going bigger.
I hope to joint the body into as many parts as possible (currently looking at 16), and I think on my printer I can get a 75cm model (I was hoping for a round metre I'll be honest, but the biggest jointed part would be the neck at just over 40 cm, and my printer tops out at 35.

I included here on the site some screengrabs of Daft's current work on X-Bomber and Dai-X.
Hopefully, we'll be seeing some more.

2026.06.04 X-Impulse / like icon 65 Comment icon 0 comments Forum icon Start a forum discussion.

Navigation

⇤ Newest ← Previous Next → Oldest ⇥
Jump to page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Records per page

Latest Version

v0.84m
314 MB
2025.07.07
Download
More downloads

Scores

Highest
v0.84mrrtsks 652399
Newest
v0.84mrrtsksret 48501

SFXB Forum

Sean Barrett Bits & Pieces
Sean Barrett Bits & Pieces
Sean Barrett Bits & Pieces
Sean Barrett Bits & Pieces
Rewatch Observations
Rewatch Observations
Rewatch Observations
Rewatch Observations


Comments

Crash
Suzy J
Suzy J
Crash
Crash
Dr. Ben
Crash
Suzy J

Quick Links

Contact
Links
Article list Star Fleet Teams
Theme Select

This site and content is unofficial; © 2002-2026 Piers Bell and other authors.

Star Fleet, X-Bomber et al. © Enoki Films.