*Seven* Modes? In this Economy!?

August 24, 2021 9:30 AM

August 23rd marked the 30th anniversary of the Super Nintendo in North America. Considered by many to be the greatest console ever, even kids who grew up on the SEGA side have to give it respect.

A big technical upgrade from its 8-bit predecessor, the SNES boasted the ability to rotate background graphics with what Nintendo dubbed "Mode 7". It was a big selling point for the system.

The SNES also boasted a powerful audio system that produced some incredible soundtracks.

But what it really game down to were the games. So take a few minutes today to think back on your favorites and argue about where they should be ranked. There are no wrong answers!

Or, if you're really feeling ambitious, pull out your old hardware and give it an upgrade.

posted by Zargon X (27 comments total)

The recent Widescreen Super Mario World rom hack by Vitor Vilela is really cool. (demo video)

It runs on the bsnes-hd emulator, which can automatically extend mode-7 effects to higher resolutions. (comparison video)
posted by Phssthpok at 10:14 AM on August 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

I bet that today, after not having touched it for nearly 30 years, I could still complete the final Pilotwings combat mission. At the very least I could nail the 100 circle with the jetpack.
posted by hwyengr at 10:39 AM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

Just got back into playing Super Metroid on the Switch inspired by the recent Waypoint 101. It's such a great game.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:41 AM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

The US launch titles:

Super Mario World
F-Zero
Pilotwings
SimCity
Gradius III

I still play F-Zero when I'm in the mood to GO FAST and just want something simple to dip into.

So take a few minutes today to think back on your favorites and argue about where they should be ranked. There are no wrong answers!

I encourage folks to RTFA -- the ranking system they're using is actually a scoring system, based on pretty old data off of ROM sites. Discussing this particular list probably isn't really that interesting, but I'd love to see mefites' top N lists.
posted by curious nu at 11:22 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

based on pretty old data off of ROM sites.

So that's why Mario Paint is missing. I feel that's at least one thing missing from the list.
posted by FJT at 11:32 AM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

F-Zero was my favourite game on that console, although my friends and I did have a really fun weekend with a rented copy of Uniracers. Games since then have had better graphics and felt more accurate, but nothing feels faster than those did at the time.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:34 AM on August 24, 2021

> mefites' top N lists.

#1: Captain N
posted by genpfault at 11:35 AM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

This was my peak console. I never really mastered the 3d controllers that came after. I also loved the sheer variety of weird games the platform had. Koei had a number of historical simulation RPGs and I played all of them and got deeply into Uncharted Waters: New Horizons which was an age of sail RPG, something that is hard to imagine today.
posted by feloniousmonk at 11:44 AM on August 24, 2021

Uniracers was so fun! I never got into skateboard games but I was a trick master with a sentient unicycle.

The manual was really fun, too. The cycles were faster in the air than on the ground. The explanation? Jets are faster than cars, jets fly, QED.
posted by curious nu at 11:46 AM on August 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's amazing to look back and think that it took another two whole years before I got an SNES. It came out when I was entering third grade, and I did get it until I was going into fifth grade, practically an eternity in kid years.

Enough time to give away the copy of the SNES Players Guide I got with my Nintendo Power subscription because I didn't need it. I also gave away the Game Boy edition because I didn't have one of those either.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:49 AM on August 24, 2021

During my CEGEP years I played so much F-Zero that I could beat anyone in my friend group's best lap time using only one hand on the Nintendo controller.
posted by jordantwodelta at 11:50 AM on August 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

IMO that list has way to many car racing games, which were so terrible until the better processors and graphics came along and not enough NFL, hockey, or basketball games, which completely changed between the NES and SNES, with wide rosters and better graphics and wider playbooks.

IMO, soccer games weren't notable until the later systems either, and baseball was fine on the NES.

RPGs were so much better also, but I don't have a strong reaction of Earthbound vs Final Fantasy vs Secret of Mana vs Chrono Trigger vs Illusion of Gaia. They were all very similar and just which ever story you like the best is the best.

Link to the Past and SNES Mario were amazing.
I don't really like the Donkey Kongs that much - it's really funny how hard they pushed them. The marketing budgets must have been huge.

I personally remember buying way too many Nintendo-made sports games, which were generally terrible. In NHL Stanley cup the guys took like 20 game seconds to skate the length of the ice and the football and college basketball versions were equally lethargic.

A lot of the others felt like ports with just slightly better graphics. MegaMan, Castlevania, and Contra especially.

I didn't really buy that many SNES games since the NES library was so huge and they all got discounted when the SNES came out.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:02 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I came home proudly with my SNES, bought with my own money from a summer job, my Dad thought I had been scammed. It looked to him like the same plumber jumping on the same turtles and he concluded Nintendo had simply re-released the NES in an updated case with maybe marginal improvements.

Then I put in Pilotwings.

Case closed.
posted by steveminutillo at 12:29 PM on August 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't really like the Donkey Kongs that much - it's really funny how hard they pushed them.

It's hard to overstate how revolutionary Donkey Kong Country felt when it came out. It was beautiful, it had amazing music, it had fun character designs, it had responsive controls, and it wasn't bullshit with its hidden zones/items/levels (IIRC).

I didn't play DKC2 or 3 so I can't speak to them, but if you liked platformers, DKC was a monster of a release.
posted by explosion at 12:30 PM on August 24, 2021 [9 favorites]

Arguably one of the best SNES games - if not one of the best Mario universe and Nintendo games and perhaps even best platformer of all time - is Yoshi's Island.

The crayon/cartoon story book graphics treatment is just gorgeous, the sound track is amazing, the game play is top notch, the storyline is engaging and just fun and it just has so much going on for it. They really got into using sprite scaling and Mode 7 for some really neat new tricks for a platformer, stuff we take for granted today like having the terrain and background rotate around you while the physics stayed the same so walls sometimes became floors, that kind of thing.

I never played it on the actual console but fell into it years later on an emulator. If you're a fan of Mario universe and in-house Nintendo platformers and you haven't played Yoshi's Island, you should revisit this one. If anything it was kind of a prequel to Kirby's Dreamland.
posted by loquacious at 12:34 PM on August 24, 2021 [6 favorites]

Okay, so I just conducted an elaborate NCAA-style bracket in my head.

The Elite Eight includes Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart in the Nintendo Division (All-Stars was robbed, robbed), NBA Jam TE and Super Tecmo Bowl III in the Sports Division, Super Street Fighter II and Super Bomberman II in the Super Division, and EarthBound and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in the Genres I Don't Really Fool With Division.
posted by box at 12:39 PM on August 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Donkey Kong Country rewards mastering the courses in a very refined way for the time. Many of the stages are built such that you really don't need to slow down as long as you observe the proper timing of jumps and such. There's a great sense of progression to it that really only presents if given time.

Sonic games kinda work this way at well but the exploration of stages is much more painful with the acceleration curve of the character, vs the snappy roll+run of DKC.
posted by StarkRoads at 12:41 PM on August 24, 2021

In retrospect I think DKC and the Sonic games are very similar in the way that they both reward repeat playing, learning the logic of how the levels are laid out, and mastering the controls. They're also similar in that the people who grew up playing either will defend them vociferously in a way that folks unfamiliar with the games find mystifying.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:06 PM on August 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

For fans of Yoshi's island, you might be interested in Yoshi's Fabrication Station, a fanmade "don't call it Mario Maker" in your web browser. Finally you can take those well designed mechanics and make garbage troll levels with them! Have a look on YT for some level playthroughs.
posted by anthill at 1:18 PM on August 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

Wow. While I took no part in the “get new subscribers” push as a young paper carrier, each new subscription earning a raffle ticket for prizes at the once-a-year paper carrier bash, I did know an older dude who’d got 7 new subscribers and didn’t want to attend the event full of mostly 10-16 year olds, and he gave me his tickets. So I rolled up with my meager 7 tickets and won the brand new SNES right from under kids who’d spent all summer getting 70 or 80 new subscribers. I felt a little bad, and then stayed up all night braving Super Mario World.
posted by klausman at 1:28 PM on August 24, 2021 [13 favorites]

(Captain) Nth-ing the praise for the Donkey Kong Country games. When I discovered emulation around 1998ish, those were the games I kept coming back for. Even the mine cart levels somehow manage to not suck and I find they actually reward persistence.

And as a kid Final Fantasy II was my Star Wars from the awesome Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack to Tellah casting Meteo (NOOOOOOO!!!!!) to Kain's betrayal to that awesome moment when the giant robot awakens and the entire world unites to keep it distracted while your party slips inside to destroy it. Too bad I never had Final Fantasy III because that would have completely shattered my world.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:46 PM on August 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

A lot of the others felt like ports with just slightly better graphics. MegaMan, Castlevania, and Contra especially.

I mean, they are sequels to very good games that often utilized a lot of the NES featureset, with their own plots and new mechanics. They don't stray far from their predecessors but I wouldn't expect them to either. But I agree, Mode 7's half step to 3d graphics made racing games much more feasible and interesting.
posted by pwnguin at 3:44 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Funny enough, the DKC mine cart levels are the ones I can't complete on an emulator thanks to the display lag. They were good fun at the time, though. I loved that game when it was fresh. The soundtrack was just amazing.

I enjoyed games like Street Fighter Ii Turbo and Mortal Kombat, but my real loves on the system were the simulation games. SNES also had the only side scrolling shooter I've ever enjoyed: UN Squadron.

PilotWings was a great way spend Christmas 1991, though. It took a couple of days for the warts to become apparent.
posted by wierdo at 5:01 PM on August 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Starfox was the SNES game that blew my nine-year-old mind. Super Metroid is a million times more interesting than dull old Donkey Kong Country. Mario Paint is basically the reason I went to art school. The Yoshi's Island menu theme (wait for it) is still my favourite videogame music of all time.

Also, E.V.O. or GTFO
posted by oulipian at 6:40 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

Super Mario Kart will always be a top handful of all time for me. But those computer players — wow. Fuck them right into the fucking sun, as some one said recently.

My friend and I got really good when we were both working part time and living out of our moms' respective basements after college. I realize a good player can beat 150cc with their eyes closed but for us it was hard-earned and ultimately we got it every time.

But the way the computer cheated — oh my god! We actually set up a DV camera to record the screen and review races when we felt something was fishy. And there was something fishy nearly every race. The tapes, which I have lost most of sadly, are hours of play nearly constantly filled with "dude!" and "oh my god, what a cheater!" and "did you see that!" and "look at that shit!"

Depending on our chosen pair — usually shrunken Toad and Koopa, or Bowser and DK ("Wipey," as we called him for reasons I will leave to the imagination) — we would have a predictable counter-set of nemeses who would ride our tailpipes the entire GP.

Not only would these bastard CPU players pull the usual rubberbanding to catch up, but they would utilize unlimited numbers of their chosen weapon: mushrooms for Princess Peach, fireballs for Bowser, and for Mario or Luigi, near-constant star-powered invincibility. They also had incredible juking skills against shells, and would jump a green shell without fail unless it was fired point blank. A bug in the red shell code meant it would sometimes "vibrate" right on their tails as they bounced into the air over and over. They got up to all kinds of dirty tricks.

Still, we prevailed more often than not and took special pride in laying shells or bananas at points we knew the computer passed through and would almost always set them back half a lap (Mario Circuit 2 is the best for this). Truly great gaming memories.

And then there was Battle Mode! But that's a story for another time.

Happy 30th, SNES! I still have my original launch year unit and I have to say it looks its age... but works like a charm.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:43 PM on August 24, 2021 [7 favorites]

Yeah, Super Mario Kart was a really great, really terrible game. It always bothered me that no matter what, the computer players always finished the race in mostly the same predetermined order. You could sometimes manage to disrupt it by knocking someone out on the final lap, but then whatever order the players finished that race in would be the order they finished in all subsequent cup races.

Battle mode was great even if one of us would always use a feather to hop into and chill for a bit in one of those inaccessible pools on the Koopa Beach area.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:04 AM on August 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

DKC was a really great multiplayer game. My brother and I played through it a number of times. Swapping who's active is pretty fun, as is rescuing each other from the barrels.

re: talk about Final Fantasy games and SNES hardware: the opening snow-march in FFVI! Completely breathtaking at the time, and still incredibly impressive.
posted by curious nu at 11:43 AM on August 25, 2021 [2 favorites]