Memories of Axis

After reading Gwenster's article on Bootfighter Windom, I checked it out. I agree 100% with his review the game is a ton of fun and very reminiscent of the Versus series of games, maybe even better in some ways.

Seeing such a fun and exciting, yet totally free game really brought me back to when I was heavily into PC gaming and especially the mod scene in the late 90s. Those where heady times with many free mods coming out that often had far more innovative gameplay than the commercial products they were based on.

It also reminded me of a very special time in my gaming life. The time I met my bud Gwenster. Back around the end of 2000 or early 2001 I somehow stumbled on a forum devoted to an obscure Korean Mecha game called Axis. I was, and still am a fanatic for Japanese style giant robots. I had cut my teeth on the Armored Core series on PSX, but at that time was heavily into playing online PC shooters like Quake 2-3, Half-Life, and UT. Axis was a Hybrid of those two types of games.

Axis was a frantic and fast paced First person game that controlled like an FPS, but your robot also had thrusters and could fly around in space. The Mecha was highly customizable like in Armored Core, albeit with fewer parts. An entire community sprung up around playing the demo on the Axis forum at The Junkyard. That's where I met Gwenster. Back then he was known as Biohazard. And I was known as The Pacifier (This was years before that shitty Vin Diesel movie) At first I thought he was just a cocky little loudmouth but I soon saw that he had the skills to back it up. Eventually we became friends.

Back then I still only had a 56k modem so I regularly got my head handed to me, but I still have a lot of fond memories of epic battles in the starfield map which always reminded me of Gundam 0083.

A few of us went so far as to import the full game from Korea. It came with a really cool full color manual which I treasure to this day. Eventually the game even got a limited release in the US through Gamespy's, way ahead of it's time, and sadly half baked, Arcade service.

Eventually the Axis fandom began to cool off. Gwenster and I moved on to other games. Jamie systems, the company that made Axis had plans to make another mecha game but that never came to pass.

Like Windom, Axis was an easily mod-able game with it's assets unprotected and accessible. At one time I had an anime sound pack up for download that made the game feel more authentic. I intend to do the same for Windom when I have time.