Xeno Fighters

Xeno Fighters is a freeware Shoot Em Up fan game designed by Alluro (whom you may know as JudgeSpear from Mushroom Kingdom Fusion and MUGEN) drawing from Raiden Fighters primarily, but references to and bosses from other shooters are rife throughout the stages.

The current iteration in development is Xeno Fighters R, with vastly improved engine, art, and game mechanics over Xeno Fighters EX, released in 2003.

The forums for the game can be found here. The wiki can be found here, which links to videos, and general information. The Shmups forums thread, which is the original online discussion about the game's development, can be found here.

Xeno Fighters contains the following tropes:

 * Asteroid Thicket: Part of st. 7 in the original. A similar situation appears in the middle of the remake's st. 6-B, although that place happens to be inside an alternate dimension.
 * Battleship Raid: Dreadnought Echidna, the boss of 8-2.
 * Bittersweet Ending: In the 8-END scenario,
 * The original ends this way too, except there is no true final stage.
 * Bonus Boss: Any boss in the optional EX stages.
 * Bonus Dungeon: The EX Stages, reached through finding all the Miclus in certain levels and getting the EX Medal from the last one you destroy.
 * The Cameo: The guest roster of playable fighters, along with many bosses of the game. The guest fighters and the EX stage bosses have no connection to the plot.
 * Dynamic Difficulty: As of v0.10 Beta.
 * The Empire: The Keto.
 * Easy Mode Mockery: In the original, if you're playing on easy mode, you're not going any further than stage 4, even if you win. You need to be playing on normal or higher to see the rest of the game.
 * Escort Mission: 5-B requires you to keep the F-117 Nighthawks assisting you from getting torn to shreds by the BRES navy, if you want to go on to 6-B. Consider how hard the original level was...
 * Face Heel Turn: A war hero of the first war with the Keto
 * Frickin Laser Beams: Amada Vipros's Serpent Seeker subweapon, Zaiva's Fragarach's Gale, the Pollux's (AKA Gemini Red) Cyclopean Laser, and the Raiden mk-II's Plasma Lock-On Beam.
 * Fun With Acronyms: Black Reach Eternal Stratocracy. Derived from Bres, a major leader of the Fomorians in Irish myth.
 * Guide Dang It: Some Miclus locations and some of the stage branching objectives.
 * Heel Face Turn:
 * Humongous Mecha: 6-B boss Dullahan, a semi-autonomous unit that can perform dimensional jumps completely on its own.
 * Intentional Engrish for Funny: An optional setting to further emulate the arcade experience. As of yet, it hasn't been implemented.
 * Joke Character: The Galaga ship and its clone, the Hoplon from the old arcade game Phoenix. Becomes a subversion when fully powered up.
 * As of v0.12, both have now been cut from the game for balancing reasons.
 * Leitmotif: A number of the guest fighters have their own stage clear music, primarily from their source games. Some of them go so far as to have their own theme
 * Lethal Joke Character: The 194x series P-38, and the Gyagara from Galaga.
 * Lethal Lava Land: The second section of 4-B, underneath 2035 Iceland.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: There are just four original ships. However, the cameo ship roster is something to speak of, bringing the total number of unique playable ships to 16.


 * Marathon Level: The true final stage, Stage 9 (BRES Colony) lasts over seven minutes from start to boss appearance. Compare this to other stages that are about two minutes to four minutes long.
 * The original's levels could be quite long too. 2035 Iceland was about the same length as the BRES Colony until the remake's version came along.
 * Multiple Endings: Three endings are planned. The worst is . The medium is  . The best is.
 * Nintendo Hard: Being a manic shmup, even the easier difficulties can be overwhelming to newbies.
 * Puzzle Boss: 5-B boss Citadel Geryon. The only way to hurt it is to get the support aircraft to crash into it.
 * Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Keto again.
 * Theme Naming: Most bosses have a name consisting of (metal/gemstone) (Greek or Celtic mythical creature). Silver Banshee, Jasper Gigas, Jade Hydra, Obsidian Peryton, etc.
 * Zaiva has a similar theme in its weapons, taken from legendary weapons from Irish myth--Fragarach, Brionac, and Caladbolg.
 * The Phyxius' weapons are named after various references to Hell.
 * The two ships from Gemini Wing are given the names of Castor (blue) and Pollux (red), who are twin brothers in Greek and Roman mythology who became part of the stellar constellation Gemini, becoming the two brightest stars in the group: Castor (Alpha Geminorum) and Pollux (Beta Geminorum).
 * The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Stage 9 is accessible only by completing all the objectives in the B-stage path, or directly from.
 * Timed Mission: In the original, fourth stage boss Orion XD-6, a massive bomb complex found deep underground in 2035 Iceland, has to be destroyed within two minutes and thirty seconds, or else you're punted directly to a Nonstandard Game Over.
 * The same deal with the remake's new version of 2035 Iceland. The bomb complex has become a three stage rocket, called the Orion Arrow, and must be crippled before it arms the geological destabilizer. You will gain more time for destroying each part, to simulate the mechanism being crippled. Unlike the original,
 * Timey Wimey Ball
 * True Final Boss: Balor, the control center of the BRES colony. Expect this thing to be quite difficult once it's made. Until then, Ziyudee is a placeholder.