Capcom's SNES conversion of their classic shooter Area 88 (or UN Squadron, as it was known in here) is an odd beast, and is best regarded as a re-imagining of the arcade original rather than a straight port.
First, the two-player element is gone (presumably excised, as poor Guy was in the SNES Final Fight, due to lack of cart space), and so are the characters' three selectable planes in the arcade original, you could choose from Shin Kazama in his Tigershark, Mickey Simon in his F14 and Greg Gates and his A-10 Thunderbolt. In the SNES version, you start with the same aircraft regardless of which character you select - the choice now appearing to have little tactical effect on the game - and better planes are only available to purchase later on once enough cash has been earned.
Things are markedly different in the game itself there's now a cunning twist to the energy bar system, with initial damage from an enemy bullet leaving you dangerously vulnerable to a second for a brief time; get hit twice in rapid succession and you're dead. And to make things even harder, you don't respawn from the same point as was the case with the coin-op you have to restart the whole level from the beginning. This makes the game a far more hardcore experience than its forebear, and can lead to some seriously tense boss battles.
Cosmetically, Area 88 still looks the part, with detailed sprites and some impressive layers of parallax scrolling. The music too, is pleasant enough, in a jaunty early-nineties-synth kind of way, though it's strange that even the soundtrack didn't survive the conversion intact, with many of the original's themes altered or replaced.
Area 88's achilles' heel is its distracting level of slowdown a frequent and irritating bugbear present in seemingly all SNES shoot-em-ups. Even so, it's a pity the programmers couldn't have found a way of limiting the amount of sprites that appear on screen to avoid this I found myself frantically trying to shoot down planes, not to score points, but to keep the game running at a sensible speed. Having said this, it's almost vital that you kill everything you see anyway, since the enemy's heatseeking missiles and kamikaze tactics make missing even one of them a dangerous proposition.
There's no denying that Area 88 is a seriously tough challenge - far tougher than the arcade - but this doesn't make it any less enjoyable, and while it's not a classic of the magnitude of Konami's stunning Axelay, it's not a million miles behind either.
The SNES Area 88 may not be an arcade perfect port - such a thing may have been too much to hope for back in the early nineties - but accepted on its own terms, it's still a lot of fun, and harder to beat as well.
