A playthrough of Capcom's 1991 shoot 'em up game for the Super Nintendo, U.N. Squadron.
Played through on the hard difficulty level with Shin.
U.N. Squadron is a port of an early Capcom CPS1 arcade game from 1989 (released just a couple of months before Final Fight's coin-op release on the same hardware) that was based on a manga named Area 88.
It's a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up that has a few cool features that you don't normally see in shooters from the late 80s: you can play the stages in whichever order you choose, you have the choice of three pilots with different abilities to make use of, and it had a life bar. These all work in the game's favor, making it feel pretty player-friendly in the amount of power it gives you over how to approach each stages. The game play changes a great deal based on the strategy you go with, and gives it a pretty long pair of legs for an arcade shooter.
The presentation is really done well here - the graphics are a pretty fair comparison for the original coin-op's, and everything is fast, smooth (with surprisingly few spots of slow down - probably because the two-player option was cut), and colorful, and the music (which is excellent, no matter which version you're playing) is arguably better than the arcade's because of the SNES's use of samples over FM.
The SNES version is a good adaptation with the original added features it gives, and it keeps the difficulty pretty stiff. Thankfully, the cart doesn't cost quarters, because this would mow through them mercilessly. I've never gotten through the hidden "gamer" difficulty level - I'm not good enough at it to attempt that - but the hard mode provides more than enough challenge to keep you at it for awhile.
I really like U.N. Squadron. It's a really fun, challenge, fresh take on the classic shooter, and the adaptation was handled pretty well - especially when you compare it Super R-Type and Gradius III, the other shmups released in the SNES launch window. Both of them, while great games, were utterly plagued by slowdown issues and inconsistent controls, while Capcom pretty neatly sidestepped that issue.
Totally worth playing if you haven't - it's one of first-wave classics for the SNES.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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