Thank you ININ Games for sending us this game collection to review!

Irem is most famous for their seminal shooter series, R-Type. I have reviewed several of those titles over the years, and I have enjoyed them all. Those are horizontal shooters, and known for their punishing difficulty. Irem Collection Volume 1 is the first of several collections announced, and this one focuses entirely on shooters from the same era as the early R-Type games, letting us see what other ideas Irem Software Engineering had for shooters at that time.

The games (and versions) offered in this collection are:

Image Fight (Japanese and Worldwide, for Arcade, PC Engine, and NES/Famicom)
Image Fight 2 (Japanese for PC Engine CD)
X Multiply (Japanese and Worldwide for Arcade)

Image Fight is a series of vertical shooters that are fun to play - and I could see the familial resemblance to R-Type at first glance, since the design of the ship resembles that used in R-Type somewhat. Interestingly, one of the founders of Granzella, a company founded by former Irem employees, has said that Image Fight is his favorite shoot 'em up.

In Image Fight and its sequel, aliens are heading on a direct course to conquer the Earth. The human race has pooled all of their resources to make a ship capable of fighting off this enemy, but they don't have very many. So, they test pilots in a simulator first. They have to not only clear the first four levels, but also need to make sure their average kill rate is higher than 90%; if so, they will be allowed to fly a real ship to take out those aliens. The games also feature pod pickups, which greatly increase firepower. You can also upgrade your main weapon, but getting hit from the front destroys it.

The original Image Fight has several versions; the original Arcade, as well as the PC Engine (aka TurboGrafx 16) and NES/Famicom versions. While the Arcade version certainly looks the best, the home versions do feel differently with wider and larger play areas. Sadly, the NES version has a laughably bad color palette, but otherwise plays really well.

Image Fight II: Operation Deepstriker was a home console exclusive release on the PC Engine CD (the Japanese name for the TurboGrafx 16 CD). It plays similarly to the first game, with its own set of levels. There are anime-like cut scenes in between each level, and they look really nice, but sadly are in Japanese with no subtitles. Despite that, it is fun to play.

X Multiply is a horizontal shoot 'em up, like the R-Type games are. The game takes place inside of a human body, and features lots of organic enemies and environments. What makes X Multiply unique is instead of your more typical orb upgrades, you instead have two mechanical tentacles that extend from your ship and fire weapon shots from them. It looks and plays unique, even if there is overall a lot otherwise in common with R-Type. There are speed and bomb upgrades that let you drop bombs from your ship repeatedly while pressing/holding the fire button, and speed upgrades let you move faster. The weapon upgrades are the most unique, in that they behave quite differently from each other.

The Blue upgrade offers homing shots, though rather than every shot homing it's just some of them. The red upgrade shoots lasers, and is the most predictable attack type and my favorite. The yellow upgrade shoots out balls that go in all different directions, and it's the most difficult type to focus fire, unless you just shove a tentacle right into the target area, which you certainly can do.

In all three games, there is something aimable. For the Image Fight games, you can aim the orange turrets. For X Multiply, you can aim your tentacles. In both cases, by default, their movement trails your ship. However, with this version of the game, you can also aim them with the right stick. Being able to aim fire with the right stick is a serious game changer (and it can be turned off in the settings, but I recommend using it!). These games are obnoxiously difficult, and being able to manually aim helps a whole lot.

Speaking of which, there are all kinds of cheats available, which I personally needed. Perhaps the most important and useful of those upgrades is the ability to rewind time to avoid that shot or ship or wall that just destroyed you. Yes, it's cheating. Yes, it's also cheap. But I don't care, because without it, I would never get through the games in my natural lifetime. And respawning has you restart a section of the level in at least some of the games, rather than respawning with progress intact, so I just have to accept the cheats if I want to see much past the first level on these punishingly difficult games. Standard mode supports all cheats, while Arcade limits them, and disables save states, but in exchange enables Achievements. Thankfully, rewind mode is still available to use when playing in Arcade mode, so not all is lost.

Morally, the games are pretty much what you expect: spaceships (or inside body ships?) shooting things. I did not notice anything else, but the ESRB notes mild blood, so I'm guessing there might be some I didn't notice in X Multiply. The emulation is also competent and I didn't notice many major bugs.

The Irem Collection Volume 1 is a collection of classic shoot 'em ups that are fun, if obnoxiously difficult, and largely stand the test of time graphically and otherwise. If you are a huge shoot 'em up fan, perhaps this collection is worth getting, but it's not exactly inexpensive, either. At first I was unhappy with the games in this collection, but over time they did grow on me. I would say that this collection does have good games, but they are probably a better choice for the more hardcore shoot 'em up fan rather than a good introduction for a first-timer, since this collection of games pulls no punches on challenge.