- Irem Collection Vol. 1
- Irem Collection Vol. 2
Following on the 2023 Irem Collection Vol. 1, this follow-up includes three more Irem arcade titles, as well as one of its home ports.
Air Duel
Air Duel is Irem’s take on a Toaplan-style vertical shooter. You can pick from two fighter craft – a plane with forward shots, and a helicopter that lets you fire at an angle as you move back and forth. Both only have a single weapon, but you can upgrade them a few times. You also have limited use bombs which explode directly in front of your ship.
Irem is known for some hugely influential shooters like R-Type and Image Fight, and some other pretty decent ones like X-Multiply and Dragon Breed. Air Duel is not one of these, because it feels like they’re just playing catchup with another company. On its own terms, it’s not even a particularly exciting game. The bosses look excellent, featuring the densely detailed pixel artwork that Irem’s artists are known for, but otherwise the visuals are bland and most of the levels feel empty.
Irem’s Contra clone offers some fun weapons, including a flamethrower, as well as a handful of rideable vehicles, including cars, tanks, and boats. It would almost be a pretty good game, but movement is a little slow and your jump feels incredibly sluggish, resulting in a game that doesn’t quite feel right. The copious amounts of stock digitized yells makes for some amusement, at least. Also included in this release is the SNES port, but it’s filled with slowdown to the point where it’s unplayable junk next to the arcade version. It’s neat to play as an origin point for better games at least – people muse that GunForce II is like “Metal Slug 0”, so that makes this one something like “Metal Slug -1”.
This is the real business. GunForce II is such a monumental improvement on its predecessor that it’s hard to believe they’re related. Characters move smoothly, weapons are satisfying, and things explode nicely. You can also see the roots of the Metal Slug series take hold here, with a similar visual and music style. The vehicles from the original GunForce have evolved into even cooler machinery that are clearly the predecessor to the Slugs. Rather than rescuing bearded prisoners, you save damsels in distress. There aren’t any grenades, but instead your character carries two guns even in their default state, allowing you to aim at additional angles.
Unfortunately, the emulation here suffers from some visual glitches, particularly some flickering that’s mostly noticeable in the status bar but also sometimes affects the backgrounds. It’s not prevalent, but it’s just enough to be distracting. MAME does not have these issues so it’s not unreasonable to expect a commercial product to be glitch free.
There’s also a complete lack of bonus material. Perhaps there isn’t much art or supplemental material for these games, but it would’ve been nice to have some of the official backstories. Air Duel and GunForce II are actually related in that they’re part of the DAS (“Destroy and Satsujin”, or “Massacre”) tetralogy that also includes In the Hunt and Undercover Cops. There’s no actual relation between these games other than villainous organization that you fight in each of them, but it helps contextualize why these particular games were released together.
Altogether as a package, this is another middling Irem release. The first one felt redundant because the arcade releases were already available in superior form as part of the Arcade Archives. None of the games here have seen other releases, so at least there’s some exclusivity. But Air Duel is underwhelming, GunForce is just okay, and while GunForce II is doing all of the heavy lifting, the shoddy emulation makes it hard to fully recommend.
