Mikie, Movie and Target Renegade but i'm struggling with the order...
Target Renegade
Movie
Mikie
I don't have anything cool to put here, so i'll just be off now to see a priest with yeast stuck between his teeth and his friend called Keith who's a hairpiece thief...
1. Target Renegade. So colourful, and scrolling too!
2. Movie. I remember getting this one on a MegaTape and played it for a long time. Isometric, and it felt really big.
3. (Bad Dudes vs) Dragon Ninja. Always loved looking it on the arcade machine but it was too hard there.
Some great games in there but Renegade wins for me as it is the game I still play today. Target Renegade was good but too easy and the weapons were pointless. Also, the music was good but just didn't fit the action.
Imagine does seem like a strange label, focused on Konami arcade conversions at the start, but then also weirdly MOVIE is in there which probably should have been on the Ocean label like it’s sequel Phantom Club and the likes of Nightmare Rally.
Another weird one is Victory Road. The sequel to Ikari Warriors, which was really highly regarded when released. Here you have a sequel written by the exact same team using what looks like the same engine and yet it’s almost entirely forgotten about.
You also get the feeling that Ocean signed up certain arcade publishers, like SNK, and just took any old crap from them and subsequently outsourced the development to randoms with no real quality control. It made the Imagine label very hit and miss at times. Were you getting an Arkanoid or where you getting a Galivan?
Towards the end it was like they couldn’t even be bothered getting Bob Wakelin to make the covers, games like Guerrilla War or Victory Road just had a photo of the arcade machine. Dragon Ninja and Typhoon had some random painted cover which just looked a bit naff in comparison to Bob Wakelin’s awesome covers.
I also just noticed Typhoon has the Ocean name in the menu and main screen, it’s almost like at that point the Imagine label was seen as for games that weren’t good enough for the Ocean label.
You also get the feeling that Ocean signed up certain arcade publishers, like SNK, and just took any old crap from them and subsequently outsourced the development to randoms with no real quality control. It made the Imagine label very hit and miss at times. Were you getting an Arkanoid or where you getting a Galivan?
I was told that was part of the deal when they signed on the dotted line. Something along the lines of “You can convert this selection of games of ours that did really well but you also have to convert this selection of others that were all flops”
