Image Fight is a vertically-scrolling shooter, released into arcades in 1988 by Irem.

What I like about this game, and I think where it innovates, is in it’s use of bolt-on ship upgrades. You can have up to three of these upgrades and they sit either side, and behind your ship. Each upgrade gives you a separate gun that can fire in eight directions, while you continue to fire forward.

This is done by making the upgrades fire in the opposite direction to which you are moving. Which I think is a genius move as it allows you to bombard something as you run away from it! It also makes it easy to fire diagonally too. That feature alone makes this game unique as a shooter.

The graphics in Image Fight are finely detailed and beautifully-drawn. They’re also not too garish, which is great, because many games like this do have terrible colour palettes!

Gameplay-wise: it’s got some good ideas in it (the spinning blue circles when you fight the boss at the end of the first level comes to mind), and it’s not painfully difficult to play. Which is a blessed relief…

Sound-wise, it’s got some decent synth tunes. Nothing that I would say stands out, but definitely suitable for the game.

So Image Fight – in my humble opinion – is still well worth a blast in this day and age.

Image Fight did receive some conversions to home systems, including for Sharp X68000, NES, FM Towns and PC Engine/Turbografx-16.

More: Image Fight on Wikipedia