When I saw Star Fox the first time as a child, it completely blew my mind! It looked so incredible good back then, you just can’t reproduce that feeling
@@truepatriot6657no pc in the 90s had anything like starfox. Just slow flight simulators, running on a 486DX. I'm a snes fan so each to there own i guess.
The reason why Winter Gold almost looks like full motion video is that it actually is, in a way. Game backgrounds, intro and menu backgrounds were rotoscoped from video, so it's not 3D polygons but rather 2D vector graphics. Looks cool regardless.
Stunt Race FX was my game when it came out, I played it over and over to try and beat my best times. Once you get used to the controls its a very addicting racing game.
It's a great game. I bought it when it was new. Recently I bought a Super NT and was excited to play it again, and going back to it after two full decades of not playing it AT ALL, I was shocked by how well it holds up. The framerate isn't that bad, the controls aren't bad either, and I was instantly remembering every single track. Someone else in the comments mentioned a lack of replayability, but I found the same as you, once I started getting better I just wanted to beat my own times over and over and over. I had forgotten how much time I put into the cart until I saw my initials in every single slot of every track! The controls work remarkably well considering it didn't even take me an entire race to get used to them after such a long time. I can't say the same about a lot of older games (the original Tomb Raider on Sega Saturn is probably the worst example I can think of).
Me too, my sister and I played it almost as much as we did Super Mario Kart. It was amazing, and like you said, it played really well once you got used to it.
As I Recall, The GSU-2-SP1 (The Final Model Released Of The Super FX Chip) Had The Following Features: Efficient Floating Point Arithmetic Acceleration, 2 Extra Parallax Layers, Advanced Sprite And Background Warping, Rotation, And Scaling, Along With Extended Sprite Memory, Much Higher Maximum Colors On Screen, And Lastly, Unlike The GSU-1, It Has The Full 21.4 MHz Of Power.
@@bertinernie31 LOL.. The Genesis had midi sounds. I suspect you were being sarcastic but Genesis had a couple of great exclusive games. But if the title was also on SNES, SNES version was most of the time better.
@@bertinernie31 the megadrive has the svp and the 32x. The blast processing claim is just because the cpu in the megadrive was clocked higher than the snes
Atari Jaguar got it better. Even the PS1 renderd it with a frame. But who could afford an expensive thing like that. Toy for kids with the price of a solid adult income range.
I wasn't aware the SFX chip was used on SMW2. That was clearly the direction for such technology on a 16 bit device. If there hadn't been such a rush to keep impressing with more and more powerful machines I imagine the SNES could have kept creating some incredible games for at least another decade.
@@somerandofromoregon Hmm... but why would it? I get some games advertised the Super FX as a selling point but it's not like it's a peripheral the user could own and potentially use with the game. :P But yeah. I always wondered how some effects were done in that game. There's little the hardware can do to transform graphics natively - the infamous video mode 7, color-blending operations, clipping windows, and weird HDMA stuff done during v-blank, and... not much else, lol. It's like the rotating gears in Castlevania 3's clock tower - visual effects that we took for granted as kids but that were an impressive tour-de-force on the devs' part!
Stunt Race was my shit. I rented that a few times. Once you get a feel for the timing of the controls, it's a blast. If you weren't around or were too young at the time, then it's hard to really understand what a novelty these types of games were, especially for a 16-bit console.
My biggest beef with Stunt Race FX is lack of incentive for replay value and lack of content after beating the game. Once you beat the Master cup, there isn't a whole lot to do aside from the Stunt Trax courses and doing time trials.
I bought Stunt Race FX when it was new, I still have it. In fact, I fired it up recently on my new Super NT, and I was a little blown away by how well the game holds up. I was expecting to hate the controls and see a framerate that was unplayable, but that wasn't the case at all. The game is actually really playable, and it doesn't hurt that the sound is great. I'm so glad I managed to hold onto this cart, because it might be my favorite Super FX game. It's got a lot of charm to it, in addition to being a really novel early 3D racing game that doesn't exactly suck. People seem to like to hate on it, and I'm biased because I played it SO MUCH (I had forgotten how much time I spent with this game until I saw my initials taking up all of the slots on every track), but there's a lot to like about the game even today. It's one of those carts that I'll keep firing up on a regular basis now that I have a machine that plays actual carts over HDMI.
The stunt tracks were so hard, I never managed to finish any as a kid. In fact, I just beat my first one yesterday. Heh. I still enjoy racing the tracks themselves though, that's where I find my replay value.
Agreed. We were in such a rush to make better and better hardware, but I see the wisdom in Nintendo's approach of making better and better games on the same hardware. Now we've got the ridiculous situation of PS5 having nothing of real value to offer in terms of innovation.
@@daithiocinnsealach1982 last couple generations of consoles have been trending this way. Hurry and buy our expensive machine that right now doesn’t do more than the current but will one day when the price is reasonable! But buy now.
@@aelechko Publishers hold back good design that's new and innovative, because they know people will buy the same old shit, They will hold the medium back forever for as long as they're allowed to get away with it
I think people crap on the SNES port a little too much as one has to put it into perspective. The fact that Doom is as playable as it is gives it SOME leeway. Still though i would never seek this port out in 2019 even if I wanted my OG Doom fix. Still love the music though :)
@@schwarzerritter5724 younger people think that people played doom in a 1993 pentium at high definition settings... while the actual situation was that most people only can afford a crappy 386 with standard vga and pray for getting doom beyond 15 fps !
I rented stunt race fx a few times as a kid. I enjoyed it :) . I remember waking up a little earlier in the morning so I could play it before school. Those were the days .
The intro for Winter Gold is an effect from the Amiga demo called 9 Fingers by the Norwegian demo scene group Spaceballs. The game was developed by former members of said demo group... here is a link to the demo in question so you can compare it ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PPoYzwib7JQ.html
Starfox blew me away the first time I saw pics of it in a magazine. Then I got to play it and man was it amazing. I doubt I could go back and play it now, but back then in the good old 16-bit days, it was bloody impressive!
Years later, but if you look for "Stunt Race Overclocked" you'll seem some magic. That game running at a smooth frame rate is fantastic. A fast and goofy racing game like that was ahead of it's time.
Good video. I honestly love the first two Star Fox games so much. Yeah, the frame rate is not good (especially if you're playing the PAL version), but I really like the graphics. They may be untextured polygons, but there's something so charming about them at the same time. Like how the enemy weakpoints are flashing blue or orange areas. It's a shame that I only know two people around my age who can appreciate what Star Fox has to offer. I honestly think it's almost if not as good as the 64 bit sequel.
Had Stunt Race FX briefly. The chip showed that even the SNES could get down, but at 5fps it was reminiscent of playing Quake on "old" hardware when it was released. Good times.
came here to recall the name of Dirt Race! I rented it as. kid and had a great time just driving the truck around in 3D space, enthralled by the truck graphics and physics. I'm sure it's quite a shallow game but it definitely left an impression on me.
I think Stunt Race FX is a criminally underappreciated game. Now I have to preface this by stating that I'm extremely biased. I love racing games and early-to-mid 90's 3D graphics (think "Lawnmower Man" in terms of what I deem the pinnacle of that era of 3D visuals). I absolutely loved the Star Fox graphics when it first came out and I was super hyped to buy pretty much anything that did 3D on the SNES and/or contained that ass-kicking Super FX chip. So naturally I bought Stunt Race FX as soon as I could, and wow, I hadn't fired this game up in probably 2 decades, but I wanted to play it on my new Super NT, and holy crap did I forget how much time I put into this game! I took all of the top scores on every race, and my vehicle of choice was (eventually) the coupe, because the race car was just too damn hard for me to control, while the 4WD was too slow. Seeing those high scores instantly reminded me that I used to play this game ALL THE TIME. So I started playing it, and sure enough, I felt intimately familiar with every new track. A lot of times, when I go back to play a game I haven't played in forever, I recognize the first bunch of tracks and levels but not the later ones because I realize that I would stop playing the game at that point for whatever reason and I never spent any time exploring them. Not the case with this game, not at all. One of the things I love about Stunt Race FX is the little subtle animations that are thrown in, like the truck crossing after the first lap on the first level, or the eyeballs on the cars, or the animations you get when crashing into things. These little details help give the game a lot more character and to me, help make it stand out (along with the 3D graphics, of course) from the tons of other racing games on the SNES. Is it the best racing game on the SNES? Of course not. Is it without flaws? Obviously not. The framerate is low, yes, but to me, the game does actually convey a sense of speed in spite of it, just due to the nature of how the vehicles handle at speed. In my opinion it's quite remarkable by _how good_ it actually is at doing this. Again, this might be because I'm biased and I spent a ton of time playing this game, but when you're tearing around a track at full speed with nothing slowing you down, to me it feels like you're going pretty darn fast. Coming back to this game after so many years, I was prepped for supreme disappointment. I was expecting to hate the controls that were way more terrible than I remembered and bummed by the terrible framerate that I ignored in my youth not only because it was the best available at the time but also because I wanted to justify my purchase of the game. I was extremely surprised to find none of this was the case. The controls took a minute or two to get back into (again, I'm pretty sure it took me a bit to learn when I first got it, so I'm assuming that somehow even after all these years my intimate familiarity helped in this regard), but I was shocked by how good the framerate is. It's not bad at all! I mean, yeah, it's low, but it's eminently playable and doesn't impact my enjoyment of the game at all. IMO, it's at least as high as Star Fox, which I also think is much more playable than it gets credit for. I also forgot how absolutely awesome the sound is in this game. The effects don't even seem that complex or varied, but they do a great job. I love the sound of the 4WD engine, and all the little sound cues like the truck beeping as it crosses the track, the sounds of the birds flying over, and all of the other little visual nuggets which help make themselves known with the audio cues. The music, in my opinion, is catchy and well-done. I found myself enjoying the audio the most when playing it recently. Seriously, maybe I'm turning into an old fart who likes his crappy old games because nostalgia and all these young kids just don't understand these old games, but I heard people complaining about the framerate of Star Fox 2 on the SNES classic, as if the game was pure garbage. I get it that modern gamers may be used to silky smooth, high-res graphics and don't want to put time into games like this. Fine, that just means more for me (and you). I really think when people pass over games like these because of superficial qualities they're really missing out on something special. It makes me sad to know that so many people think that Stunt Race FX is a garbage game and worthy of sacrifice to create reproduction carts of other games. It's not as bad as most people make it out, and certainly worth giving a shot if you're a SNES owner, especially if you're interested in the Super FX games. As for other SNES racing games, while I haven't yet played them all, one game I played at least as much as Stunt Race FX, and the racing game which is probably my absolute favorite on the SNES, is Top Gear. What a fantastic game. Like Stunt Race FX, it's got great audio, but I must admit that it's even better. Top Gear would be a great game without its music, but it would be missing one of the defining traits of the game, the music is _absolutely_ infectious. This is another game I played extensively recently, and again I was feeling intimately familiar with every single track. Top Gear has perfect handling for a game of its type, great tracks, and awesome 2D graphics. I miss driving games like this. I get a chill down my spine when I hear that opening arpeggio as the game starts up and the Top Gear logo appears. Almost as good as Top Gear is Top Gear 2, which is structured a little differently but plays largely the same. I have a few gripes with it, like the lack of the headlight beams that the first game had on night tracks (yeah, I know it doesn't really add anything to the game but it looks cool) and how, for whatever reason, I can't seem to see as well into the distance at night. The part buying feels agonizingly slow at first, as well, since the car you start with is fairly anemic. It's also a bummer that all of the cars are now the same, and basically generic (versus the wanna-be real cars which were easily identifiable). But once again, the sound, especially the music, stands out and the game looks great while also handling very well. It's a sequel that largely doesn't break anything that really made the first game so good. SNESdrunk, if you've bothered to read this far or read this at all, could you do a video about best sound or best music in SNES games? Perhaps you've already done one, I'm still going through your SNES playlist (I wish RU-vid would allow you to play playlists backwards, in the order the videos were created). I only found your channel recently and I've been binging it ever since. Great content, thanks for the videos!
"I love racing games and early-to-mid 90's 3D graphics (think "Lawnmower Man" in terms of what I deem the pinnacle of that era of 3D visuals" Tell me, have you ever heard of a little show called "ReBoot"? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NkNXERhiXNw.html
@@EvilStevilTheKenevilPEN15 I remember seeing that aired once or twice, but apparently it got cancelled after the first year in the US thanks to Disney. I never really got into it, but I should go back and watch it. The visuals are definitely a nice trip back in time!
@@rars0n It went for 4 seasons, and aired in Canada from the mid 90's until 2001. If primitive CGI is your thing, ReBoot's got it in droves. Best part is, the story is actually pretty good!
Stunt Race FX is far the best looking FX game. Way superior that the rest of the games. In today standard it may look slow, but playing the in in the SNES era was the best experience hands down.
Yeah.. I rented when I was 8 or 9... And initially thought 'what a cool game, it looks like the arcade Virtua Racer', next thing I spent hours and hours playing for what it is and for the unike physics that it has. It was deeper racing game from the car control perspective than any other game I had played at the time.
I was told that the reason for "Star Fox 2" not being released was because of how expensive it was to produce multiple copies of the game despite it being already completed.
@the hevy Welllllllll on PC in DOS you had games like Test Drive 3 in 1990, a full three years before Star Fox. That had 3D polygonal open environments. The FX chip closed the gap to PC which lacked proper 3D acceleration. Playstation took a brief lead as the most complete 3D accelerated machine (aside from the obvious monstrous Sega arcade cabinets) and then the consumer GPU revolution happened. From Quake in 1995 onwards you had Arcade > PC > Consoles in 3D performance. Now it's all PC.
Doom for the SNES is the only version I have ever played. So without having seen the others, I don't find as bad as people say...I agree it can be slow and ugly at times, but I always felt that was part of the charm.
I rented the SNES version to play it on X-Band. It was fun. I played it a little bit on X-Band, but it didn't work out very well. I think I just wandered around the level until I got fragged, and that was it.
Awesome video. I wish they would have done more with the Super FX chip. It would have been super cool to see an action/adventure or RPG made with those chips. Imagine what Enix, Squaresoft, Konami, or Capcom could have done with it.
I'll never forgive them for not realeasing Starfox 2. At least we finally got some of its core features in other games (the command map and Walker arwing mode.. 10 and 20 years after this game would've been released, respectively?!) but it would've been a blast and quite impressive for the time, and dammit, Miyu and Fay looked way better than any of the other new characters introduced since then. What's more, it might've just nudged Nintendo into making actual further sequels for the game rather than resetting back to the first story over and over again :/ Also, I actually have some good nostalgia for Stunt Race FX. I had it from the time it was new and the impressive graphics for the time combined with the really goofy visuals and 'bouncy' gameplay made it pretty memorable, and there were some great 2-player memories here with friends, tiny view screen be damned. Knocking each other off the stage in Aqua Tunnel never got old.
Winter Gold is probably a whole big full motion video. Super Turrican had FMV and there was an entire racing game on the SNES that was just FMV, Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing. There are even GBC games that do both of these things.
It wasn’t fmv, it was rotoscoped video that the snes was displaying as 2d vectors. It was the exact same thing that spaceballs did on the Amiga with their “state of the art” and “9-fingers” demo (funnily enough winter gold was developed by some of the people who were a part of spaceballs)
Star Fox 2 can be played on the mini SNES. The soundtrack from DOOM was very good on the SNES. You tube got some videos were they compare them and it got lots of ports.
I have stunt race fx. Despite being a bit slow, It's a pretty charming game, plays well, and the music is awesome. Also lots of mario themes and stuff in there.
The SNES version of Comanche is one of the unreleased beta ROMs I most wish someone would find. Just for the sheer novelty of seeing a *voxel* engine running on a SNES. Particularly considering that at the time, Comanche was cutting edge even on PC.
I never played Star Fox as a kid, I don't even know if it was released in Spain. Also I knew there was a game called "Lylat Wars" for the N64 but I never played it because I left Nintendo after the Snes and went with the PSX instead. So when I got my first emulator (I was like 16 at the time) I was fucking blown away by the Star Fox game. Because I didn't knew the Snes was even capable of doing that. And yes it was slow as fuck and unpolished and it had every single problem you can think of but I think it was an amazing feat the fact that they managed to do that. And I feel that way about every single super FX game out there. They can be trash but it's amazing they managed to even pull out that trash. (and let's be completely honest here, it doesn't matter what console you're talking about, no early 3D game was perfect or has aged well. I'm currently playin OoT for the first time and even though I admit it's impressive what they were able to do at the time and it's one of the better examples of old school 3D games, it has A LOT of problems)
I had no idea the SNES Super FX chip was even a thing. I remember my friend showing me all the cool 3D polygon games he could play with it, and I clearly remember Starfox and Stunt Race FX, but I was so young at the time the details flew over my head, so in my memory I thought these were N64 games. I played Stunt Race FX for like one afternoon when it first came out, and now here I am looking for it on youtube so I can figure out how to emulate it to see what it was actually like.
Man, I definitely don't miss the days before I found out you can overclock the FX chip on the SNES emulator I use and actually run these games at a playable framerate. Also, Doom is indeed painful to play on SNES. Sadly though, that was my first exposure to Doom back when I was a kid so I have a weird soft spot for it and have to go back and play it every now and then. At least the overclock helps a little with it.
6:37-6:55 Exactly! I'll never understand why developers tried to create these clunky, laggy, slow rigid looking 3D polygonal games, when they could have used the extra horsepower to create beautiful, timeless, creative and graphically impressive 2D games instead. How many more "one of the best Snes games" could we have had, if developers took a enhanced 2D approach instead of a flawed, primitive 3D one, I just don't get it... I'm grateful for Yoshi's Island because it showed what the FX chip should have done in the first place, boost the 2D capability of the Super Nintendo to create timelessly enjoyable games. I'm sad that consumers and developers didn't take more inspiration from Yoshi's Island, going into the mid-90's 32-bit era creating beautiful artsy 2D, sprite based games that would have aged *much better* , rather than designing games with a mediocre, crude polygonal style like in Final Fantasy VII, I mean really? I looked terrible back then and even worst today. (I thought it was inexcusably bad even when I first saw it back in like 2000, kind of late but still...)
3D back then was a new and exciting thing dude. Everyone wanted to try and create the next big 3D title. Rather anyone likes it or not 3D was the future and not 2D at that time. More amazing looking 2D games are coming out now because people finally realized that it can still be spectacular. It's just the way it went and to sit there and complain about it is just plain silly.
That's the problem, just because something is "new", it doesn't mean that it's good or better than what we currently have (or had). Sometimes we become blinded by new things like 3D at the time. Virtually everyone agrees *today* that 32-bit 3d graphics were primitive, clunky and have aged horribly, and think the 16-bit 2D stuff have aged better. Therefore...32-bit 2D sprites should have remained the standard going into the mid-90's. Lastly, since when is retrospective speculating a bad thing? You don't ever think back to the past and imagine things in a different way?
Experimentation, kid. Would they not tried to push the boundaries with what they had, the technology regarding the use of polygonal animation wouldn't have took off like it did. EVERYTHING has to get through that awkward phase of experimenting before it can properly take off. Non video game 3D animation is not so different(look to early 3D shows or even pre-Toy Story attempts at 3D), or even traditional animation(a lot of old school cartoons look off at points, even Steamboat Willie, because they didn't get what makes movement look right yet. And if they would just kept rotoscoping like they did with Snow White, animation as a medium would be stagnant) Would it be better if they tried to do a Rondo of Blood or Yoshi's Island instead of the clunky Full Motion Video or early 3D games? Maybe, but then they would not be as good when they reached the PS2 era and beyond. Seriously, some people N E E D to understand the importance of experimenting with new techniques, even if it doesn't always pay off.
it's too bad efficiency isn't as prioritized in game development as it used to be......I mean we are talking FX adding its own 21mhz input + the consoles's own 3Mhz processor and 128kb of ram...it's absolutely insane what they squeezed out of it.
Honestly I think the Mode 7 in games like F-Zero and the prerendered sprites in games like Donkey Kong Country or Killer Instinct are much more impresive than anything done with the Super FX chip.
That sequel to Star Fox 2 getting released 20 years later is so surreal lol, I got to play it though. I don't like it because of it largely being on the ground. I just wanted another flying rail shooter lol
winter gold used super FX to actually process 2D in the same way Yoshi's Island did - everything in that game is 2d video www.superrune.com/gallery/wintergold.php
Glad I'm not the only one who thought Yoshi was getting high as fuck in that game. A shame we never got to really see some of these canceled Super FX games, especially that Transformers one. Hopefully one day some ROMs will be found...
It's somewhat surprising that made it past the ratings board - this was released during the panicked suburban mom D.A.R.E. era of the Drug War where "Very special" after school specials were broadcast without a hint of irony.
Doom on the 16 bit SNES was way better than the 32 bit Sega 32X, and 3DO ports of the game. It's actually pretty good if you actually sit down and play it for a while. You do occasionally get stuck on walls and some of the darker areas can tire and strain your eyes, but if you can get past that, it's a damn good port of the game. The soundtrack is awesome, the game play is great (people complain about the slow response of the controls which is an issue I've yet to experience), the graphics are the best that they could do at the time on a 16 bit system, and it's still Doom. My only other problems with the game is that it lacks a save feature and that you can't reach episodes 2 or 3 on the two easiest difficulty settings. Aside from these few minor issues, it's a perfectly good game that is definitely worth playing today.
When you switched from the low framerate 3D games to the silky smooth Yoshi's Island, it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust. Incidentally, once you've had a baby of your own, you'll probably find Baby Mario's crying to be much less annoying.
Stunt Race FX is terrific. It was designed around it's lower speed, so comparing it to F Zero is kind of dumb. There are games like Extreme G that are even faster than F Zero, to the point of being unplayable. Speed is not the be all end all of racing games, unless for some reason you ONLY play ones like F Zero and Wipeout.
Thanks for the video. It's good to see them all back to back and I agree with you about most games (except that I actually think Vortex is worth trying out despite the low framerate). The fact that the Super FX technology is in legal limbo which is the biggest reason why none of them will ever be re-released on VC still makes me salty about that legal IP bullshit.
Starfox looked wonderful, but also a tad eerie., What I enjoyed the most was the pretty explosions with the particles. Also many bosses made very good use of the 3D, the more I played it the more I learned to enjoy it.
It looks dated now, but “Starfox” blew me and everyone else away when it came out in like 1992-1993. “Donkey Kong Country” did the same when it came out like a year or two later. (I know “DKC” isn’t a Super-FX chip game, but just mentioning it.)
They did that Doom map thing with Hexen also, on the N64. My grandpa sucked at playing games, but I got him to play hide and seek with me, using that game and the map..I was like, 7.
Considering that Kawasaki Superbike Challenge came out in 1995, I'm baffled Lankhor didn't decide to use the Super FX for that game in order to compete with the Genesis version which was an impressive 3D racer that had no extra chips.
