Pilotwings on SNES is a great way to get whiplash

destructoid.com:

While the N64 was still drinking backstage, preparing itself to stagger out and trip over the drummer, I was drooling over screenshots in various magazines. The game I was most excited about in the lead-up to launch was Pilotwings 64. Listen, I know that’s not everybody’s favorite game, but this was the first time I saw big, explorable worlds in a video game. I thought every game was one day going to be like that, before someone decided that the only way for a world to be worthwhile is if it was peppered with animals to skin every five feet.

I didn’t even know there was a Pilotwings on SNES until much later. Granted, it can be hard to miss one of the SNES launch titles, but I was four at the time of the SNES release, so cut me some slack. I only found out about it years later while perusing an old password guide from the era.

So maybe Pilotwings isn’t the most obscure game to ever hit the market, but while there’s often a lot of buzz around Nintendo’s other franchises, I only just remembered Pilotwings Resort was a game on 3DS this morning. In my books, that’s obscure enough.

Pilotwings is the story of the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 sprite-scaling effect. It was an entire graphical layer that allowed sprites to be manipulated in all sorts of ways. It wasn’t as advanced as a lot of games showing up in arcades, but it was something that their competition couldn’t do as readily, so Nintendo put a lot of emphasis on it. Since 3D games were still a rarity in the market, clever use of Mode 7 sprite-scaling could create pseudo-3D environments that enabled styles of gameplay that were still novel. Of the SNES’ five launch titles in North America, both Pilotwings and F-Zero could reasonably have been titled “Mode 7: The Game.”

While