Phalanx was actually one of my favorite SNES shooters. I still really like it, and the music is really catchy. Just my personal opinion; I know I'm in the minority here, but this is part of my personal nostalgia.
@@musclemark2710 Coming in super late, but yeah- UN Squadron is great, and saying the music is bad enough to turn the game off... Pshhhhhyeahh right. :D
Wow, I honestly didn't expect the negative view of U.N. Squadron. It's one of my favorite "shmups" out there, and although not Capcom's best, I loved the music. Oh well, life would be boring if everyone had the same opinion, right? :)
Maybe I have the nostalgia blinders on in full force, but I always loved U.N. Squadron and actually really enjoyed most of the music. I'm conflicted now because I love the show and value your opinions to the point where I like to at least partly agree with most of what you guys have to say, but not this time. Curse you, Gamesack! Curse yooouuu!!! But seriously though, I suddenly have a serious need to play some shooters!!!
John Benson un squadron is awesome, don't question your opinion. they clearly haven't put time into learning the intricate mechanics for that game, i know it ultimately comes down to subjectivity but i love the graphics, music and game play. i think its fantastic.
common rider Yeah, I think I forgot that having my own opinion was fine even if it was different from theirs lol. By my how we've all grown since then! Now I like to respond to comments fashionably late....2 years??! Shit!
I think the majority of the reason I enjoy _UN Squadron_/_Area 88_ (original name) is just because of how much I love the _Area 88_ anime. Great series!
wow this hurts, phalanx was and is one of my favlrite snes shooters, it really is a good game once you learn secrets, powerup systems and that last level is brutal
I can't believe you guys put down UN Squadron. One of the best schmups on the system!!! Anyone watching this watch Bullet Heaven's Review for in depth reasons on why it's one of the best!
Lol, the guy commentating is actually the Octopus. And said something along the lines of (6:25) "Papapapam~ Hello there all you bullseye girls and other people, thank you for your patience! It's just me, the octopus! Let's vigorously do this!!"
U.N. Squadron has horrible music? So bad it makes you stop playing? This is one of the strangest comments I've seen on the channel since most of the time I agree with your opinions.
I generally don't enjoy shooters but got hooked on R-Type III. I left the system powered on for weeks as I slowly passed checkpoints, failing umpteen times in the process, but beating it was really rewarding in the end.
Oh man, I actually LOVE U.N. Squadron's soundtrack, especially the first level theme, but I really grew up with Capcom's reverb-happy SNES soundtracks constantly in my ears so I guess I'm kinda conditioned to love them. And about Space Megaforce... It's actually part of a series called "Aleste" in Japan, and the Aleste games along with just about every other vertical shooter Compile ever made are all very similar to each other (though they're all quite good as well). You could've also easily compared it to Gun-Nac for the NES while you were at it, and even some of the weapons are extremely similar to perhaps Compile's most unique vertical shooter, the awesome Guardian Legend for NES.
Know what's funny? If you look the SPC file of the musics, there's no reverb. For a Capcom's SNES game this is rare. I can only remember the first Streer Fighter II (aka The World Warrior).
SpaceMegaforce is probably my favourite SNES shooter to date but I don't see people talking about it much on youtube. Glad to see you guys covered it, surprised at the negativity/talk of overratedness though in comparison to shooters on other consoles considering you are talking specifically about SNES shooters. I'm not sure what other vertical SNES shooters are comparable to this one. I guess I don't understand how it is overrated based on not knowing anyone in my area that has really even heard of it, let alone loves it. It was developed by the same company that made Gun Nac, it also took inspiration from that game from what I understand. It may be over priced, but to me it seems like 60% or more of SNES games are, and dollar for dollar, I find it more enjoyable than R Type III (at current market prices anyway). I know everyone (including myself here) has bias, I just thought it odd that both of you have an issue with it's current price, but when talking about MUSHA(saw that video today as well), only one person felt it was overpriced, and it's much more expensive than MegaForce. It looks like one of the best shooters, but I'm having difficulty seeing how it's worth the price and not overrated at 100ish more loose than MegaForce. I know you mentioned trying to be more 'extreme' in earlier videos and I obviously don't take offence to these opinions, just something that came to mind while watching. Really enjoying the video's, plan on bingeing a few more tonight lol.
The music on Gradius 3 is fricking awesome. I especially like the music of level 2 and 4. Level 2 is the bubble stage, and level 4 has the stone head's from Easter Island.
I'm a little bit disappointed that they didn't go over Firepower 2000's two-player mode, where player two flies a helicopter. The chopper controls quite a bit differently (it doesn't have to worry about the terrain, but can only fire forward) than the jeep and is a great way to support player one. It does slow the game down, but not to the point of it being unplayable or anything.
+Michael Adams (ARCWuLF) Yeah, the only issue I have with these guys is that they often overlook some of the cool play mechanics of games, especially if a 2 player simultaneous option offers something different to the games. I also like the fact that in FP 2000 you jump into jet fighters later in the game.
+Michael Adams (ARCWuLF) Yup, it's also a bit disappointing they don't mention that it's a spiritual sequel to Silkworm and was originally called SWIV (Silkworm IV) on the Amiga.
***** In fairness, I don't think that Joe and Dave have covered a lot of Amiga games. A lot of Genesis games are direct ports of Amiga titles though, so Joe might want to consider it (the games that are ports all have MUCH better music on the Amiga, anyway)
lightsouthaha Eh. I knew a few people who had Amiga computers back in the day (they were light years ahead of Macs and PCs in terms of graphics and sound for a good long time) here in the U.S. I understand that Joe and Dave cover what they cover, but eventually they're going to run out of their own nostalgic games, and the Amiga was a hidden gem of a gaming computer back in the day, mostly thanks to Psygnosis and Team 17.
@mistaphill Yes, the gameplay does feel very smooth. Leave it to Compile to know how to work around a system's strengths and weaknesses to provide a better overall experience.
Glad to learn about the Blazing Lazers family tree. The comments listed also taught me about the Firepower 2000/SWIV relationship. Always something to learn here at The Sack. "A ton? The ENTIRE GAME is slowdown." Thanks!
I think U.N. Squadron is the full package with some of the best music and strategic gameplay on the SNES. My only complaint about the game is that it's too short (only 1 board and should have been 2 or 3). I even prefer the SNES version over the arcade thanks to some great use of Mode 7 and better challenge with limited credits. Gradius 3 is pretty average and the slowdown is horrendous. Average music, average stages, average bosses. I prefer Gradius 2 or 5 any day. Very surprised you would think it's the best SHMUP on SNES.
I don't think I'll be able to explain it in a way to where you get where I'm coming from, but I'll try. I don't want lossy RU-vid audio. I don't want lossy MP3s. I don't want inaccurate emulated sounds. There's something special about hearing the music from the console itself. I hope that you can appreciate that this is something some people enjoy. If not, well, then surprise! Not everyone is the same.
10:25 - that's because it is! Earthbound is a hyped-up game. Super Aleste (Space Megaforce) is hands-down Top 3 shooters I've ever played. Groovy music, trippy backgrounds, cool graphics/scaling, lots of enemy variety, smooth controls, fair difficulty curve, awesome, unique powerups in generous quantities. Oh yeah, vertical scrolling! Everything a shooter game should be! Grab yourself a quality arcade stick and a fifth of Hennessy and blast off into the future!!!
+lightsouthaha I've heard about blazing lazers and a TG16 is in my future i think... the NES/Famicom has some good shooters, Gunnac being one of the best. If musha wasn't so expensive; I'd have that one too... Super Aleste still blows me away though
+lightsouthaha I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the level design for Super Aleste. i like the crop circle monkeys in the first level and the trippy backrounds on some of the later levels. it's definitely got a unique set of "rules" for a shmup and the power ups are a bit excessive. I certainly wouldn't pay the SNES price for that one. Gun-nac is awesome all around. Very impressive for an 8 bit game. Lots of sprites, color and speedy gameplay. The level design is unique and humorous most of the time (demonic space bunnies and cigarettes being some of the enemies in the first levels) I wouldn't pay the NES price for it but it was well worth the 40 for the famicom
Axelay proves that the SNES does have what it takes to produce a great shooter... I'd say that Axelay is one of the best shooters ever made... It's just a shame that the machine didn't get many quality shooters... The Japanese-only title 'Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie' ... is another example of what the snes can do in the right hands.
If you stand on your head, put two fingers not quite together and look through them, close one eye, and squint right around the 3:35 mark you can see that for approximately 2 nanoseconds you MAY notice that Gradius runs and normal speed. No charge for the advice everyone. ;)
@benjaminshinobi Virtua Racing is the only Genesis game that used a special chip. All other games run perfectly fine on the Everdrive which simply loads ROMs into a real Genesis.
Same here, I absolutely loved that game and still play it. I was excited when I saw the cartridge in his hand because I thought somebody was finally going to say something good about it.
@benjaminshinobi Actually there were several fully 3D games for the Genesis and it didn't need a special chip embedded into the cartridge to accomplish this. Had Sega gone the route NIntendo did by throwing a chip in the cart every time they wanted to do something special, we'd have seen even more impressive (and expensive) games.
You guys are awesome, I'm glad you guys are still coming out with more and more episodes, and on a really frequent basis too! I love schmups, I'll definitely have to check some of these out!
Duuude, UN Squadron has amazing music. So do the MMX games (and Megaman for that matter). UN Squadron is also in my opinion the best shooter on SNES. I'm mostly saying this so that viewers can get a better idea of how great this game it.
Just wanted to say: You guys are great. So much better than most of the special ed rejects you find on RU-vid. I like your sense of humor and you have some good info on the topics you discuss. Going back and watching all your vids. I also enjoy reading your humorous responses to the idiots leaving stupid comments and you don't take them serious. Keep up the good (and entertaining) work!
I was about to comment the same thing. Was watching the video and this popped up and I instantly recognised it as the jeep sections from SWIV. Also the intro music to the Amiga version of SWIV is amazing!
thank u guys for all of your videos. i am from the caribbean so allot of these games i haven't heard of and your reviews are always on point , keep it up
For O-shaberi Parodius, according to the Japanese Wikipedia page, he says stuff like "Its face is its weak point!", "Shoot in the middle", "Woah, pretty big uh?", "Watch out!", and "Wah! Can't follow anymore!" when you reach top speed. As for what he says in the clip you show, I can't for the life of me figure it all out. I looked on the internet but to no avail. He starts with "Pappababaaa! All you heavenly >?ladies... ?
Niiiice, "Utopia: Creation of a Nation"! I played this all the time on our Amiga 500 back in my childhood! To see the game mentioned always feels like that ultra rare occassion where somebody except me indeed knows the game! 😁 Never knew there was an SNES version too though, I might have to hunt that down now! :D
Obviously sega has better shooters. But the snes shooters have this certain charm to them. Also, typically the screen space is smaller so less things on screen and as such its much easier for plebs like me.
Firepower 2000 was the US name. Everybody else remembers it as SWIV. Sales Curve originally converted Tecmo's Silkworm to home computers and SWIV was a "Spiritual successor" to it. I remember SWIV being one of quite fantastic conversions for Atari ST and Amiga. I think it had the same kind of streaming technology, that Sales Curve used also in conversion of Ninja Warriors for ST and Amiga. I have to fire up my ST and check out how it has stand the test of time ;)
Well, just to correct it literally years later, but you can't compare CPUs clock by clock like that. While the colecovision clock speed is indeed higher, the Z80 CPU it packs needs a mininum of 4 cycles to execute a instruction, where the snes CPU can do it in two. Of course, its more like 6-10 cycles for most Z80 instructions and 3-6 to the snes ones, but snes is at least twice as fast as the coleco on its 3.58 Mhz mode.
Well, the funniest part is where the PC Engine does have pretty much the same same efficiency as the SNES and runs at 6 Mhz, pretty much mopping the floor with snes and genesis with its "8bit CPU"..
Do you know what makes PC Engine run shooters better than the genesis? the frigging CPU! They are pretty much the most CPU hogging games of that generation because required a LOT of sprite setup, and this was a painful time hogger. Also bits don't define how well the graphics look, actually they only talk about the numerical precision of the CPU, with 8bit CPUs handling numbers "natively" from 0 to 255/ -128 to 127, 16bit CPUs going from 0 to 65535/-32768 to 32767 and so forth. Just to show how the bits measure are worthless, Intellivision use a 16bit CPU, PC Engine use a 8bit CPU and while the Nintendo 64 use an 64bit CPU, it can't run Crysis like the 32bit PC can. Now on the deal itself with the PC Engine/genesis etc, is all about "instructions per clock cycle". First, a typical computer program is made out of this huge list of "instructions" that are executed by the CPU. Secondly, a CPU works typically by receiving this "pulse signal" called the clock, that makes the CPU "do something" on every pulse, and that Mhz number is actually how many of those pulses per second the CPU receives, in millions. So, the final "raw throughtput" is determined on how fast the CPU is getting those clock pulses, and how many clock pulses it need to perform a single instruction from the list i said above, and in this sense, the PC Engine 6502 is better than the genesis 68000, because the 6502 take a minimum of 2 cycles to execute an instruction while the 68000 takes a minimum of 4. This happens because the 68000 is actually a semi 32bit CPU constrained into a 16bit bus, designed to be cheap and use cheap memory but "future proof" by setting a 32bit standard that could be followed later by a 32bit CPU all around that would perform much better but be still compatible with the 68000 software library. But the plot does thicken because IF the game does actually require a lot of 16bit precision math, and i mean a really lot, the 68k can actually be faster than the 6502 because it needs to use at least 3 instructions to perfom the 16bit math, and that takes a lot of cycles, but most spritefests of the 90's didn't required it.
First, its not because the 68000 is newer than the 6502 that it is automatically better at everything than it. That mandatory 4 cycles minimum per instruction hurts its performance quite a lot for tasks that involve setting a lot of 8bit values in a short timespan, like setting up sprite positions. But the PPU of the genesis and snes etc is the part that truly shines and makes all the things cited here, like the parallax scrolling, higher resolution possible. On those old 2D systems, the CPU don't actually draw the graphics pixel by pixel, but rather feed the PPU a tile map (or multiple in case of snes/gen for their multiple layers), and the chip itself "assembles" the final picture onscreen, allowing all those consoles some marvelous things like having a very detailed scrolling screen that use almost no CPU time at constant 60 frames per second. But to give the 68k credit, when you DO require a lot of more complex operations, like rendering early 3D graphics, or running an OS etc, the 6502 simply can't into it as well, so i doubt you can for example do a raycaster game on the PC Engine as you can on the genesis. But when talking about huge number of sprites onscreen or making massive sized sprites out of several small 8x8 ones like it do on a regular basis, the 6502 at 7 Mhz wins hands down.
***** Ever seen an arcade card port of the neo geo games for the PC Engine? While the zoom look like shit, given the fact the PC Engine primitive PPU can't into zooming at all, the actual frame rate the game runs are on par with the arcades, with can't be said about the genesis/snes ports of the neo geo games, that are always full of lag. But you did indeed showed where it fails, with it not being very good at scaling up the clock rate, as the 68k does. A 12 Mhz 68000 obviously beats the crap out of a 6502 running at 6 Mhz, but the same can't be said about the 7.6 Mhz 68k on the sega genesis.
***** Well, i taking my info from the actual CPU opcode timmings etc, and having a good guess on what you need to do on the CPUs to perform the simple operations needed to run the games, also observing the real games running and taking account the video hardware differences. The most blatant example of how better the PCE is at sprite setuping is pretty much any time you have a large moving sprite onscreen that don't have a black background on the system. Sega genesis/snes can simply cheat this out by using one of the background layers with the boss, but PCE just can't do such things, yet it run bonks 3 and all those space shooters with a shitton of bullets and large bosses. And i'm not saying that 6502 is better than 68k, it is better than 68k at running 2D sprite based games, which were what genesis/snes/PCE were designed for due its high IPC. You most likely can't run Amiga Workbench on a 6502, or the genesis/snes toy story 3D levels for example.
A few shooters I've played on the SNES> (My favorites are towards the top) Axelay U.N. Squadron Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie Space Megaforce R-Type III: The Third Lightning Super R-Type Gradius III Pop n Twinbee Imperium Spriggan Powered Cybernator Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius Gokujou Parodius Super Nova / Darius Force Biometal Firepower 2000 Aero Fighters Choplifter III Marchen Adventure Cotton 100% Parodius Da! Phalanx Super Earth Defense Force Darius Twin Cosmo Gang: the Video Super Dropzone S.T.G. Strike Gunner Thunder Spirits D-Force Flying Hero Rendering Ranger R² (alernating levels) Pocky and Rocky Pocky and Rocky 2
I don't know why people complain about you guys scripting your commentary. Personally I really enjoy it. It reminds me of the ol' GamePro tv show (with J.D. Roth!)from back in the day. :-)
Are you guys musicians? I love when you guys comment on the music in video games, and you guys seem to have good taste in music. Much love from South Carolina :)
12 лет назад
Very respectfully: The review of Firepower 2000 was incorrect: is a Two players co-op shooter. One player can use the jeep and other can use an helicopter. We played a Lot in my country those days. I think it deserves a better review.
I think you missed a great opportunity to mention you can play two player on Firepower 2000. One player as a plane and the other as a jeep. That makes for a fantastic multiplayer experience!
I recently bought a cart only copy of Space Megaforce that was hiding in a random game store bin for $110. I must say it's quite impressive for the SNES and it's the best shooter I've played on there so far. I would like to try BioMetal and Aero Fighters though.
I agree with the comments on Space Mega Force. It's definitely a good game but the hype surrounding it is insane. Then again, perhaps this is the reason why I was so underwhelmed by it. Gotta check your expectations, I guess. It should go without saying (but I'm going to anyways): everybody has their favorite shooters for any number of reasons that go well beyond gameplay and aesthetic considerations. I mean, my favorite on the SNES is Gradius III and I acknowledge its obvious limitations/shortcomings. Still, having said that, I think that in terms of pacing, spacing, graphics, variety, and even the difficulty curve (which is hard to nail with shooters), Axelay did EVERYTHING right (and the bosses are memorable to boot!). I still think the Genesis is the better 16 bit system for the genre but to my mind, Axelay is the best shoot-em-up for its time. If you love retro shooters but haven't played Axelay, do it as soon as possible.
Despite its processing limitations and smaller selection I always preferred what the SNES had to offer in shoot em ups to the Mega Drive. Even with its crippling slow down Gradius 3 was great fun. I loved R Type 3 as well.
UN Squadron is originally known as Area 88 in Japan which is based on a Anime OVA series. Space Megaforce is also known as Super Aleste. Super Dropzone is another decent shooter on the SNES to check out guys if you've not done so already.
I think Space Megaforce is still my favorite on SNES. It's well rounded in every way, but doesn't suffer from any inherent weaknesses other than length.
it is a shoot em up, but the games were you have multidirectional shoot and move the screen instead automatic scroll are considered run'n gun subgenre. Chaos engine is a great game btw, totally hidden gem.
