The Incredible Crash Dummies SNES

If you're looking for genuine altruism, check no further than your local society of crash test dummies. These men and women are so utterly selfless that they voluntarily test car safety for us humans, knowing full well that the cars they are getting into are going to crash and shoot them through the windshield like a cannonball.

The Incredible Crash Dummies for the Super NES lets you control Slick, one of the smarter dummies in the group. Naturally, his job is to perform an altruistic feat. However, instead of merely testing a car, he must rescue Dr. Zub, the leader of the dummies.

Dr. Zub has been kidnapped by Junkman, a deranged dummy who wants to make the world an unsafe place. If your rescue attempt is unsuccessful, Junkman will drain the Doc's memory banks and steal the top secret design for the TORSO-9000. With this in his position, Junkman can create a dummy body so durable that it will make him unstoppable. You must prevent this from happening.

For a dummy, Slick is quite talented. With your help, he can walk left and right, and he can duck, skid and jump. He can also find air bags that enable him to float and lightning bolts that give him super speed.

To ward off enemies, he can jump on them or pick up wrenches to throw at them. Other pickups include yellow crash targets, which are worth bonus points, blue crash targets, which add 10 seconds to your time limit, and dummy heads, which give you extra lives.

The Incredible Crash Dummies, which contains 16 stages of action, takes place in Crash Town, USA, where you'll maneuver through a crash test center, a construction site, a military testing zone and a junk yard.

You must avoid numerous obstacles as you progress through game, including crash cycles, barbed wire, circular saws, light bulb-dropping toy planes, oil slicks and a cement-firing wrecking ball crane. Enemies include Junior Junkbots, who ride motor-mono-cycles, Sideswipe, who rides a Whiskmobile, Jackman, who was the first Junkbot Junkman created.

Unlike most games of this type, there is no health meter of any kind. When an obstacle or an enemy hits you, you lose a limb! If you lose all your limbs, you can maneuver as a torso and head. Lose your head and you forfeit a life. If you find a screwdriver, you can reattach the last limb lost.

At the end of the first three zones of play (there are four zones in all), there is a vehicle bonus stage in which you commandeer a tank, crash car or other vehicle. In these stages, your job is to jump over obstacles and ram a wall at top speed. One of the vehicle bonus stages has you trying to smash up a Turbo-Boosted Bulldozer. At the end of the game, you must defeat Junkman by destroying his toughest creation, his Jumbo-Junkbot.

Controls: Gamepad/Joystick