Submission #1736: georgexi's SNES U.N. Squadron in 18:33.27

U.N. Squadron is one of the first side-scrolling shooters to come out for the Super Nintendo and also one of my favorite games as a kid. This game is also known as "Area 88" in Japan. Brief overview of the story: some ruthless group of mercenaries known as "Project 4" are out to take over the world and you're the only one who can stop them. Made in Snes9X v1.43+, this is a long-term project I started over 2 years ago. I worked on it on and off but didn't get around to completing until recently. Since this is a side-scrolling shooter, my main goal was to be *entertaining* as opposed to "fast": 100% of enemies are killed, took no damage while flirting with death many many times, abused a special weapon reload exploit to kill bosses faster than humanly possible (explained later).

Being fast was a secondary goal I strived for, particularly with the boss fights. Prior to undertaking a stage, the number of special weapons required to kill the boss as quickly as possible is pre-planned and calculated. Then the remaining special weapons have to be exhausted during the stage to get all weapon counters to 0. This saves a bunch of frames at the end of the stage when it counts up your unused weapons. There are a total of 10 stages but only the necessary 8 are completed. It's possible if someone is a master manipulator of luck and lag, they may be able to beat the total time by a couple seconds.

Some basic game info before I explain as this is very important. All enemies in this game, including bosses, are invulnerable for 2 frames after taking damage. So essentially to kill them as quickly as possible, you need to hit them with high-damage weapons every 3 frames. Your main cannon once it hits level 3+ fires every 8 frames. Each special weapon has it's own reload time: bombs = 10 frames, falcons = 20 frames, phoenix = 40 frames, etc. The "one-hit" specials like bombs, falcons, phoenix do a lot of damage... the "multiple-hit" specials like napalm, cluster do pitiful damage so these aren't really used.

For stage 1,2 bosses, alternating timed cannon shots and bombs were used. Every shot/bomb registered a hit and none were wasted during the "invulnerable" frames.

For stage 3,4,7,8 bosses, the "reload exploit" was abused. When you use one special weapon, ordinarily you'd have to wait many frames before you can use it again. But the reload counter doesn't apply to the other specials, so you can switch to a different special and use that right away. Using frame advance, time the cannon shots with two different special weapons in between to achieve maximum damage in the shortest amount of time.

Special thanks to skamastaG for giving me ideas for making an entertaining final stage run.

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. Oh! I also replaced the ROM name.

Truncated: This has gotten a lot of positive votes in a short time, especially for an auto-scroller. Accepting.