Battle Squadron Longplay (Sega Genesis) [60 FPS]

Developed by Innerprise Software and published by Electronic Arts in 1990

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Battle Squadron was one of the first shoot 'em ups I ever played on my Commodore Amiga and I was surprised to learn that Innerprise was also responsible for creating a conversion for the Sega Mega Drive. Curious to see how it compared to the Amiga version, I decided to dust off my piloting skills and give the Barrax Empire another thrashing.

The game is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up where players must tackle near-endless waves of Barrax fighter craft as they fight their way to inner core of the planet in a bid to destroy it from the inside out. The player's ship can be outfitted with a multitude of weapons with which to deal with enemy foes, and a number of screen-obliterating smart bombs can be collected for when things get really tough.

As to the quality of the conversion, first impressions are very favourable. The game is solid conversion of the original game, but there are a number of tweaks and updates made for the console release.

The MD version features smoother scrolling than it's Amiga counterpart, as well as some additional layers of parallax scrolling; watch closely during the planet core sections and you'll see holes in the ground that reveal a separate layer that looks like molten lava flowing underneath, which looks pretty cool.

As for audio, I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard. I wasn't expecting it to be better than the Amiga (which it wasn't), but the game's soundtrack still sounded pretty good on the consoles' sound hardware. Although the digitised explosions from Amiga version are absent, there are still plenty of suitably exciting effects on hand to make sure the game never feels less than exciting.

Not everything is a bed of roses, however. I found that this version of the game to be considerably tougher than the Amiga original, thanks largely to the dramatically increased number of enemies that can appear on-screen at any given point; compare the versions side by side and the screen can be veritably swarming with foes! I'd never thought of Battle Squadron as a bullet hell shooter, but it came dangerously close at times.

The second (and perhaps even bigger) gripe I had with this version was the way your ship can fly behind parts of the foreground, effectively masking it from view. Whilst the programmers might have thought this looked like a really cool feature, it makes avoiding enemy fire next to impossible in the subterranean levels; given the increased enemy count, you'll need some serious luck and good reactions to make it through these levels alive.

I also encountered a strange bug with this version of the game where the game would get stuck whenever entering or leaving the planet core levels. The game displays some horizontally scrolling text that flies to the right of the screen, but it doesn't always leave the play-field, leaving you stuck. I was able to get around this problem by mashing buttons whilst the text scrolled as this could sometimes bypass this screen, but it was extremely annoying to encounter this kind of problem.

It's this final issue that makes the Mega Drive version of the game rather difficult to recommend. It's all very well being able to use save-states to try and work around the issue, but owners of the actual cartridge won't have that luxury. It's a shame I encountered this problem because, other issues aside, it's actually a really good shooter.
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