Money, Money, Money (Image Fight, The Immortal, Incredible Crash Dummies)

Sorry about that. Had a little breather. We're back with more Nintendo games that start with I and we are starting with Image Fight. Our first shooter game. Oh, joy. All that talk last time, about the dread beast GREED? It feels like his gluttonous spirit is still lurking, waiting to gobble up more fake money. I was thinking about this, and I was going to talk about how the shmup was a genre born from the dread beast GREED and his perverse lust for quarters. Then I realized that all console video games were, in essence, born from the coin-op days of the arcade. The dread beast GREED, then, is the dark half of us all. Everything in the Nintendo Project has some of his power within it. Here, then, I have found it. The Qlippoth of video games. Our secret Silence, guiding us along before the fire, building power and munching quarters. This explains so much about hard games. I'm on the verge of an epiphany here.

So, uh... Image Fight! It's a vertical shmup by Irem. Their gravitational field extends to things like R-Type. R-Type is an example of something which embraced the forbidden principles of GREED. It was a horizontal, though. These primitive worlds are still in two dimensions. Flying through the third, along the Z-Axis... it was beyond us just yet. Image Fight is okay. It's a little difficult, though. I will admit that shmups are not my speciality. Part of the problem is that failure is a death sentence in these things. They even have a name for it. "Gradius Syndrome", they like to call it, after that one planetary system. It's just how these things work. You power up as you survive the waves of things. You become a tiny god. One stray bullet, and you are powerless. The waves don't get any easier. You are now an ant trying to dodge a tsunami. That's all it takes in life to take out a man with delusions of immortality. One stray bullet. Image Fight, ever the realist.

Delusions of immortality abound in The Immortal. This man is nowhere close to immortal. To be fair, he is stuck in one hell of a place. Some sort of trap-filled dungeon. There's fire shooting everywhere, and goblins ready to beat the crap out of you with their maces. You are some sort of wizard and you can shoot fire... on the overworld. When you encounter a goblin, you enter this weird battle mode thing. Here is what happens; you try to attack, and miss. You try to dodge, and get hit. Part of me feels there is some risky dodge-and-strike mechanic I am missing, but another part of me feels that this is just a slog. Whoever Will Harvey is, he's made something that can probably be enjoyed by very strange people. It's just on the cusp of being worth looking into, but the hell with it.

"The hell with it", oddly enough, could be taken as the slogan for the creators of The Incredible Crash Dummies. Who are they? LJN Ltd. Gravity once again comes in as we hear James Rolfe echoing in our ears, yelling about putrid rainbows and cheap licensing knock-offs. The dread beast GREED, living on in the hearts and minds of many. HUNGRY. MORE MONEY. MAKE GAME BASED ON FRANCHISE. QUICK GAME. HUNGRY. Of course, LJN was merely the publisher for a lot of these... but whatever. Let's play this damn thing for as long as we can stand. Video games under the LJN banner have a... reputation. This is our first, and what do we have?

Nothing worth mentioning. Well, there is the fact that "Don't be a dummy, fasten your safety belt" is trademarked. Yes. We own a trademark on telling you to buckle up when you're driving. The dread beast GREED is strong with this one. Additionally, we're in 1993 now. The end times for the NES. Trenzalore has not arrived yet, but it will. So you're on a unicycle constantly for some reason, and anything that hits you sends you flying into a wall where you explode. Cute. What made me stop was a part where you jump over platforms, and failure to do so puts you back down onto old ground. I hate that shit. Especially in a game that doesn't control that well. I'm beginning to think the I's aren't going to give me anything good or fun to talk about. These games just exist. They were products you could buy. Feed the dread beast GREED.