The Incredible Crash Dummies
Sega Genesis
One of the great things about reviewing games is that every once in a while someone takes notice and asks if I want to borrow one of their games to play and review. Which is exactly what happened with the Incredible Crash Dummies. I had never played this game as a kid. Heck, I didn't even know the Crash Dummies had a game. But a friend of mine at work told me that he had this game for the Genesis. While he still had some of his old games, he didn't have his Genesis console anymore. I gladly took it off his hands, temporarily at least, so that I could play it and review it for my blog.
I liked the Crash Dummies as a kid. I had some one of the action figures (I remember hitting a button on their chests to make their heads pop off). I had the car. I had the "Crash Center" which was like a control room with a wall that you could drive the car into. I remember the commercials. I vaguely remember a cartoon. I was not as big into the Crash Dummies as I was, say, the Ninja Turtles. In fact it wasn't even close. But I did find them amusing and I did like their toys. I have no idea what happened to those toys. A solid twenty plus years has passed since I last laid my eyes on them. Hopefully they went to someone who played with them and loved them as much as I did. Although I had really enjoyed all those toys, the Crash Dummies video game somehow escaped my attention.
Fast forward to the year 2017. My friend at work (his name is Jon, in case you are wondering) tells me about this Crash Dummies game. I immediately say yup, I want to borrow it. He brings it to me, I take it home. I try playing it a couple days later only to find that the game won't load. I just get a black screen when I attempt to turn the game on. I tried the ole Nintendo "blow in the cartridge" trick. Eventually I got the game to work, but it ended up freezing just a few minutes in. I tried it again with the same result. I threw another Genesis game in to see if it was the console that was malfunctioning or if it was the Crash Dummies cartridge itself. This game, however, (Batman Forever) worked fine. I played, beat, and reviewed Batman Forever. On a limb, I threw Crash Dummies back in to check one last time if it would work. And it did! I don't know what was happening and why it hadn't worked before, but now everything was A-OK.
As much as I didn't want to review two Genesis games in such close proximity to one another, I knew that it would only be polite if I played and reviewed Crash Dummies quickly so I could get it back to Jon. Plus, who knew if it was going to stop working again? Might as well play it while it was functioning properly. I finished up Gears of War, which I had started earlier in the week, and posted my review for that game. Now I could devote my full attention to Crash Dummies.
The story for the game is told through little subtitled scenes in between stages. In these scenes there is an evil robot out there that was built by the same old dude who created the Crash Dummies. This old dude is worried that the robot will find out just how powerful he is and clone himself and the technology used to build him to take over the world. Just when you are about to go take the robot out yourself, the old dude is kidnapped by the same evil robot he had just been talking about. Well, now you really have incentive to go wipe this thing out.
Like most titles in the Genesis library, this is a 2D side scrolling game. Nothing too fancy here. You start at the beginning of the level and must progress to the stage's end within the allotted time limit. In true Crash Dummies fashion, you lose limbs when you take damage. You start out as a full dummy, but each hit you take costs you one limb. The first two hits take out your legs. The next two take out your arms. When you are just a head on a torso, that means you are down to your last hit. Take any more damage and you die. The game starts you with five lives to work with. You can collect extra lives as you progress through the game, but there are no continues. Lose all your lives, and it is game over.
You can hurt your enemies by throwing wrenches at them. Most enemies just take one wrench, but the deeper into the game you go, the more difficult the enemies become. You can also hurt enemies by simply jumping on top of them. Some enemies will hurt you back in return, but I am glad that wrenches aren't your only means of defeating enemies. Because I found myself running out of ammo quite often. Power ups in the game are plentiful, however. Even though you burn through the wrenches pretty quickly, at least there is ammo all over the place. You take a lot of damage in this game, but at the same time it does offer you a lot of health items in return. You can also collect little yellow Crash Dummy circles which give you points.
Every once in a while the game will throw a bonus stage at you. In these stages, you are crash-testing a vehicle that you must drive into the wall at high speed. Hindering your progress are little barricades that you must avoid or they will slowly you down immensely. I never made it through a bonus stage flawlessly, so I don't know what the reward for it is. All I earned were points, which seemed useless to me because I don't believe the game ever gives out extra lives when you hit point milestones. So what is the purpose of having points to begin with? Eventually I just stopped trying with these stages. I'd put the controller down while I went to get a cup of coffee or something.
Graphically, the game looks really good. Especially for a Genesis title. The colors are bright, the characters are big and cartoony. The cut scenes with their horrible safety jokes are a little hokey looking, but I can't complain at all about the actual game's graphics. This is one of the better looking Genesis titles out there. I am going to guess that it must have come out towards the end of the system's life span. The music and sound effects, while not horrible, are nothing memorable either. I just finished the game a few hours ago and already I can't remember a single track from the game.
I thought Crash Dummies would be a breeze but it was actually a bit of a challenge. You take a lot of damage as you play the game. If you aren't cautious, you are going to be finding yourself getting hit and losing body parts left and right. Couple this with the fact that you have to start back at the beginning of the game every time you use up all your lives. It took me a LOT of trial and error to finally make it to the end and beat this game.
I appreciated the game's challenge as it kept me playing and coming back for more. The game isn't very long, so it needed to be difficult. If I would have played the game and beat it in one sitting, there would not have been any reason to come back. I would have given it a shit score for my review and moved on. But instead the game forced me to spend several hours with it. I became really good at the game the more I played, breezing through all the stages I thought were so difficult the first few times around. But then I'd make it to the challenging later levels, die, and have to start over again.
Eventually I finished the game. I felt a feeling of great accomplishment as it had taken me many many attempts to beat the game. It was no easy feat. What I had originally thought would be some cheap, easy, poorly made attempt to cash in on a hot 90's property actually turned out to be a pretty decent game. I know this is probably sacrilege to some, but I enjoyed it just as much as Aladdin, which gets rave reviews from pretty much everyone who played it. I didn't grow up with Aladdin as a kid. In fact, I didn't even play it until the age of 35, just like with the Incredible Crash Dummies. So I don't hold the same sentimental feelings for it that other people do. I had just as much fun with that game as I did with Crash Dummies. Sue me.
I am not naive enough to believe that this game is an all time classic, though. There is a reason I had never heard of the game until I was 35 years old, despite the fact that I was a huge Genesis freak as a kid. I am sure other people don't like this game. It has its flaws, true. But I had fun. I will probably give it back to my friend and never play it again, but I had a decent time.
Overall:
B-
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