U.N. Squadron
Mega Cruel Game #1
Type of Game
A horizontal-scrolling shooter that serves as a front for managing ultra-top-secret military funds... which we'll never get to see in their entirety, because this game was driving me crazy with its insane difficulty! ***** for Christ's sake!
Release date on our machines
August 1989 for the original Arcade version, July 1991 for the Super Famicom (in Japan), and December 1992 for the PAL version (in Europe) - it was about time!
Developer
Capcom CO. LTD. because Arcade, because 80/90s, so Capcom. And Yoshiki Okamoto as project manager, because C.V. with Final Fight on it, and Street FIghter II too, and Resident Evil, and a thousand other things.
Publisher
Capcom too for the European Super NES version, a port co-directed by Hisashi Yamamoto, who will also be in charge of Street Fighter II and Bloodborne, among others. Yep. The terms have been said, I think.
U.N. Squadron : available on... no legal or official platform. Deal with that.
My cousin (the son of my father-in-law's twin brother, a family subtlety simplified to ‘cousin’) played a vital role in my videogame education. This boy called Walter Valise always took on the role of mentor with application, revealing a new crazy reference to me every time I came to eat or sleep at his place. First on the NES with Bubble Bobble, then on the Super NES, with Turtles in Time, Act Raiser or Alien³, among two hundred other crazy games, and finally on the PC, with Colonization, Master of Orion II or Mechwarrior 2, among three hundred thousand other crazy games. He also introduced me to the Nintendo 64, a Golden Eye gun magazine here and a Turok dinosaur scale there, but it didn't last long. When you've got the equivalent of a dozen supermarket shelves full of video games, it's easy to become an expert on the subject.
U.N. Sadistic
And even though I enjoyed every single one of these titles, especially on the Super Nes, which I didn't own, I was stuck on U.N. Squadron for a long, long time. Stuck in the good sense of the word, because the gameplay gave me so much pleasure. And stuck in the literal sense, because I never managed to finish it, given how much it lifted me up in the air, and smashed me to the ground with its brutality, ferocity, and... and just its hatred of gamers, really.
Bank banned at eight
So for months, I'd been bugging my cousin to play it whenever I went down to his basement, which had been converted into a games room. Well, playing... that mostly meant trying to get past the third level. I already found shoot'em ups difficult, but this one... And yet, you don't die from the slightest little flashing projectile that hits you in the corner of the cockpit. Only if you take a second one before your plane comes back to its senses, and only if you lose all your life bar too, nothing odd about that. Still, I couldn't get enough of taking a beating, because U.N. Squadron had something extra: by collecting money during the game (all you had to do was destroy as much stuff as possible, no problem), you then had access to a shop where you could buy lots of new weapons and gear.
It's impossible to get very far in the adventure without saving enough to buy a more powerful fighter than the old one available as standard. And the old mechanic remains incorruptible, despite our many attempts to fool him. By the way, have you noticed that all the mechanics belong to this category of old-timers? Ernest Borgnine in Super Copter, Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder, that guy with the cap in Alien, Kris Kristofferson in Blade? Well, that's just a detail, I think. Let's get back to the game, which fortunately offers a way to make a lot of money, by farming specific stages almost endlessly. Walter and I never understood this aspect of the gameplay; we'd have had to be able to string two words of English together to do that. Perhaps by abusing farming, the game can be played without too much trouble.
While I was just discovering the concept of character development in video games (I started slowly, with Warriors of the Eternal Sun on the Mega Drive, huhuhu), Capcom offered me the same thing straight away, but in an ultra-frenzied shooter version. Inevitably, it broke my brain a bit. The missions in the field became simple excuses to collect money and spend it in the dedicated hangar. Finally, to add a little more replayability, three different pilots provide their services, each with their own special characteristics. The classic boring but well-balanced guy, the whimsical madman, faster but more fragile, and the gruff veteran, slower but tougher. Great. On Arcade (the game is called Area 88, because, juste because), everyone keeps their own plane all the way to the end, but personally, I preferred to choose between the six models available on the Super NES version.
‘We're at war!’ Thanks to our national Manu Macron for making that phrase go viral, during the first Covid-19 lockdown. OK, so we're not pulling out the heavy artillery to burn viruses here. Here we are, propelled into a realistic shooter set in the near future. A near future as defined by the end of the twentieth century, that is. Because while you're bickering with lots of small, reasonably-sized planes, you're soon being shot at by completely improbable vehicles, such as tanks, submarines and bombers the size of fortresses, and fortresses bigger than the Seine et Marne department. And as soon as you test a couple of missiles bought from the old mechanic in the shop, you're in for a wild ride.
Cutting-edge, very edgy equipment
The guy really doesn't look like he'd sell you laser grenades that vaporise the entire screen, and yet... he's got it in him, the old chap. Unsurprisingly, the further you progress, the more oppressive the levels become, and the enemies become ever more innovative in the ways they attack the player. The conflict takes place on Earth? Ah, during the fifteenth Gulf War, then. That said, we had already seen a few things back then. Most people from Generation Y discovered video games with a plumber who eats giant mushrooms, plays football with turtles and pushes everyone he meets into lava! And what about the blue hedgehog who runs faster than any super-boosted U.N. Squadron plane?
Brass munitions
Manami Matsumae has done us the honour of composing this action-packed soundtrack (thanks also to her work on Megaman, the first Final Fight and the mythical Shovel Knight). The tracks fuel us with the energy we need to survive the prolonged onslaught we must wage to defeat our countless enemies (until we run out of life, in truth). It seems to me that a few compositions are lost in the Super NES conversion, notably those of certain bosses. You also lose some head-banging potential. It has to be said that Yoshihiro Sakaguchi used instrumentals that have aged very badly on this console, and no doubt no-one could have known that at the time. Come on, those twisted guitar riffs or that sick trumpet, can anyone really listen to them today without breaking anything? Strangely enough, yes. At least I can. I've heard a lot better on the Super NES since then (mainly in the RPG genre, Secret of Mana in particular) but, uncritical thinking aside, we loved it and that was that. The intro and theme of the first stage still stand the test of time. Obviously, it sounds better in the original arcade version. But even my cousin didn't have the Area-88 machine at home. Mind you, I almost wouldn't have been surprised if he'd had his own arcade room.
Arachnea 88
The evenings spent crashing at my cousin's house are among my fondest childhood memories, even if there were a few inconveniences. The first was having to put up with inappropriate remarks from my mother, who, for some reason, didn't like Walter at all. The second was that his bedroom was in the basement, next to a more or less renovated cellar, and not exactly isolated. We played with dozens of Playmobil knights, on the first console, on the other console, we watched a film, we took out an obscure but wonderfully cool board game, we turned on the second console again, and we agreed to go to sleep at the fifth warning given by their parents. Actually, no, we didn't sleep, because through the many holes in the wall that coincided with the cellar and the outside, three or four spiders a night crept in. I'm not talking about cute little ones like the jumping spiders we saw making the buzz on the internet in the 2010s, but big hairy tegenaria bigger than our heads, attracted by the smell of fresh child flesh.
I was terrorised by them, aided by Walter who screamed even more than I did, and who probably made me practically arachnophobic until I was twenty-eight. So, to reassure ourselves, we debriefed our bitter defeats on U.N. Squadron, hoping to do better the next day. ‘And if we saved up enough money to buy this plane that can carry this weapon, are we going to make it through this tunnel full ofAAAh A SPIDER ON MY BLANKET ! Except that I was seven or eight years old, and I was pretty much useless in this game, which required light-speed reflexes. So we kept getting stuck on the same obstacles, despite our repeated conversations and our many cold sweats. Years later, I tried again to tame U.N. Squadron on an emulator. I soon gave up, blinded by mental images of arachnids jumping out at me in my sleep.