Pilotwings retrospective: A bold attempt to one-up the PC flight sim | Super NES Works
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- Опубліковано 26 гру 2016
- Nintendo's third creation for their 16-bit console took an atypical approach for the company at the time, presenting players with a highly technical flight sim that demanded consistent, precision mastery of its varied mechanics. There's not really all that much game here, as the developers strained to exceed the boundaries of their new console, but good luck seeing this brief flight school course through to the end!
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The soundtrack for this game always brings me back to the simple days of childhood
Man I love the music in this game.
Me too. Soyo Oka did the soundtracks for this, SimCity, and Super Mario Kart, and I love the music in all three.
No mention of the penguin high dive?! That's one of the best parts!
Also, it's basically how I dealt with the "skillset shifting" problem of the game, if you just retried a challenge over and over until you got the penguin, you'd have so much points that you could coast to an easy victory. Occasionally I'd even crash and burn on one of the other challenges and get zero points, but win anyway.
And 2 birdman stages... when I was young playing this game I tried anything with the plane to find the bonus stage...
I did not knew back then, the plane has no bonusstage LOL
this game holds up better than most heavy mode 7 games imo, i don't feel like regular flight sims are a fair comparison at all
Ai Ai Monkey I agree. It doesn't really try to be a sim, but as with everything from Nintendo, it's a very fun game. I love this series and always feel a little saddened that it doesn't get the recognition it deserves, either on the SNES or the N64. Of course it's a matter of personal taste, but those games are still very fun for those who are into the genre.
Right, that was basically the point. The Super NES architecture wasn't set up to create a PC-style flight sim, so Nintendo took Pilotwings in a different direction.
Even so, when you compare Pilotwings to other SNES flight sims like, say for example, Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone, it still seems rather simple in comparison.
I LOVE the original Pilotwings! Great video!
The original Pilotwings is a classic to me. I played it on the SNES about mid way through it's life hiring it my local store I didn't really know what to expect but I was really blown away once I learned the controls for each mission and at the time I had not played anything like it before. I wanted to play more games like this so I have always been interested in new releases in the series.
To me this showcases why I bought my SNES over the Megadrive and I'm really glad I played it at the time of the SNES's heyday because it really doesn't mean the same anymore because now we have full 3D polygonal graphics the impact is severely lost compared to me as a kid in secondary school who didn't have access to a PC at home and had not played anything else like it in terms of other flight sims.
No mention of the "secret" bird man or penguin levels? You need to be pretty skilled to achieve the perfect landings required to go to those stages.
Matt Sephton, then how would he know about them? Lol
sprdvx by playing the game or doing some research; you can play them if you land on the moving targets with sky diving, hang glider or rocket belt.
Matt Sephton, I know; it was a joke. The whole video was Jeremy complaining about how hard the game was it seemed.
sprdvx it is a tough game but nothing some practice can't solve. It's not a big game, as he says, so missing out the well documented bonus levels is even more puzzling.
Matt Sephton, I grew up with this game and can attest that it's extremely challenging, but hardly the most challenging game on the system. It very easy to start and get a hang of with a bit of practice, Those night helicopter stages are a different story, though. Those are just unfair and impossible to finish without memorizing.
Like someone else already said, there were three bonus stages in the game expanding on the already available playstyle. The trampoline hopping stage, penguin diving and bird an, for the rocket belt, skydiving and hangglider sessions, respectively. I don't think plane stages hold bonus stages, or at least if there are I never found em, and believe I've looked :P.
It's a game I still love to go back to. It's an unforgettable part of my childhood.
Minor technical note: Mode 7 cannot actually skew the background. It can zoom, rotate, translate, and distort, but the result is always a parallelogram. The illusion of skew is created by zooming the background in or out during H-blank between lines.
You won "the best Pilotwings review video in UA-cam"-award. Congratz.
So is there like a statuette or cash prize or...?
@@JeremyParish A link to this video in a "still in progress" snes tribute document. :D
So many great series from Jeremy: Good Nintentions, Game Boy World, and Mode Seven. This is a severely underrated channel, and deserves tens of thousands of subscribers. I always look forward to these uploads. Thanks Jeremy!
You didn't even mention the LEGENDARY music.
Cruising the 7 and bumpin the jazzy tunes is the point of this game FR FR
The first time I ever saw the Super NES in action was when my mom and I went into a Circuit City and they had Pilotwings running on a giant screen. eight-year-old me was mesmerized. I never had a Super NES while it was current, though, since we had just gotten an NES the year before its successor launched and my mom felt that one game system was all we needed. It wasn't all bad since having the NES during its latter years meant that we had the pick of the system's best games right from the start.
Really appreciate this channel. It's so damn informative and nostalgic. Exactly what I watch it for but I also am very impressed by the production quality. If I had expendable funds I would totally donate. Finding media worth my very limited time is very important to me so I'm just saying. This channel is worth my time and attention and I'd recommend it to anyone curious about Nintendo's origins. 👍
This game is very technical. There is a way to do everything perfectly. Once you memorize that way of doing it, it becomes second nature and actually fun to tear it up. You can master this game.
Could have mentioned the amazing music by Soyo Oka, the fact that in its original form of Dragonfly this was the very first snes game, at least that we knew of, and that it was the first snes game to include a coprocessor. I feel this and f-zero both hold up great and it's not a game I'd thought about comparing to a slow complicated 3D flight sim on a pc. Coming from systems like the Mega Drive and arcade machines I don't think I'd played anything that had a relaxing vibe like this did.
re: Technical Limitations
The SNES has enough VRAM for 1 (one) 1024x1024 pixel Mode 7 tilemap. It also has a setting that determines if the tilemap wraps around, or fills the area outside of it with a filler tile (like the grass in Mario Kart). With the wrap-around setting you can create maps much larger than the hardware's tilemap by modifying the portions that are out of view (like every other system with hardware scrolling).
Pilotwings zooms so far out that there very rarely "out of view" portions of the PPU's Mode 7 tilemap; hence, they decided to disable the wraparound and give us the small stages (the helicopter stages might be different, though). If they didn't do that, we'd either see stuff similar to the "garbage" at the screen edges in NES games (except much, much worse), or the game would have been much more zoomed-in.
These facts are also why the SNES can either give you Mario Kart's split-screen multiplayer or F-Zero's luxuriously large tracks (averaging ~6000x3500 pixels, apparently), but not both.
Thanks for the specifics! I'm glad my hunch was not off-base.
Yeah, that's pretty accurate. The developers even confirmed as much for the F-Zero vs Mario Kart arrangement.
Of course, personally given that I'm involved with homebrew development for several systems, I would say 'never say never'.
But splitscreen AND scrolling mode 7 would be difficult.
In theory you could split it into two regions of 64x128, but you'd have to be extremely careful with where you position the two views you're using.
As far as things you can do with mode 7, there are far more interesting and impressive things for homebrew developers to attempt, even though that particular one may interest people looking for a serious challenge.
UA-cam auto-chapters strike again. I've noticed this on lots of my older videos recently too. Makes for some pretty funny chapter names at times, like how most of this video is "Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0" currently ^-^
Love your work Jeremy. Thanks for your research and persistence through these libraries.
Remember first seeing you being pulled up on the ladder for the skydive, I was 11 years old and was blown away
One of the most relaxing games I have ever experienced
Great video! Pilotwings has always been one of my favorites.
Nice touch with the first skydiver landing in the water. Too relatable :)
I legit 100%ed that game the year it came out. I went back and tried to do it again a year ago... I don't even recognize the brain in my head that was capable of doing that.
Played the crap out of this game. A few years ago I had a friend come over and I was playing my SNES and Pilotwings. He quickly became a fan as he never even heard of it (how? it was a launch title). He like the different instructors, music, simple gameplay, and insane idea that you send a student to pull off rescue mission twice.
The early Super Famicom tech demo "DragonFly" from 1988 became Pilotwings.
love this game, can't believe that they didn't put this on the SNES classic. Had to add it myself...
Yeah cant work that out either
I remember the first time I saw Mario World running in my local computer shop. I vividly recall seeing F-Zero for the first time too, and being unable to wipe the smile from my face. But it was Pilotwings that absolutely knocked me out. It fails to be a true system classic in the sense that, say, Super Mario Kart or Assault Suit Valken or Super Aleste manage to be - and I don't think it was ever a pricy game to purchase - but it was the only SNES game that years later I just had to own a pristine OG Japanese copy of, the only title that I had to collect rather than have at hand to play
bumtree I agree with everything you said except the part where it’s fails to be a classic in the sense of a game like Mario kart, I consider it too be up there with it. Loved this game as a kid.
The hang glider is the only aspect that gave me any real problems. Didn't have much trouble with the chopper stages. Just have to have good reflexes and be able to recognize the trajectory and anticipate the patterns of the anti-aircraft fire.
I think you could probably technically stream Mode 7 tiles by "bank switching" on the cart, but the default amount of tiles was so large in relation to the expense of data permitted in a cart at that time that no dev ever saw the need really. The only game that would've benefitted would have been Pilotwings, and that was one of the first games for the system.
I remember this brilliant game great fun
The top buttons were used wonderfully in f-zero
I think that you may have been a bit unfair to this game. I loved this game as a kid and I think that my only gripe is how hard the helicopter stages are because of the enemy fire. The difficulty jumps way too high for the level of training you just prior.
You don’t give it the credit it deserves. This game is a masterpiece.
I really wish I could have experienced this as a kid. Oh well at least I got to play Pilot Wings 64.
It's already been stated several times, and of course this is a video that's several years old, but the SNES screen resolution is 256x224 (or typically 256x240 for PAL - the handful of 'high resolution' games bump that up to 512x224, or at most 512x480 for a PAL game using interlaced high res graphics... Which I don't think any game ever actually did.)
Backgrounds for modes 0-6 are 32 or 64 tiles (can be set independently for each layer, and in each axis, giving 4 sizes), and can use either 8x8 or 16x16 tiles.
This means regular background layers vary from 256x256 to 1024x1024, and wrap around when you go outside those boundaries.
Mode 7 works rather differently to any other, but in general it involves a background of 128x128 tiles, and those are 8x8 tiles.
That makes it 1024x1024
However, as demonstrated in most games, you can scroll through larger areas by dynamically re-writing the background layers. If you change what the background contains in an offscreen area, you can scroll much larger areas while hiding that you're dynamically reloading graphics.
The SNES even had special modes for accessing VRAM in orders that help you write vertical columns of tilemap data (as well as horizontal rows of tiles themselves, if your screen memory is laid out in the right way) - this speeds up this process quite a bit, since otherwise you'd have to reset the VRAM address every time you wrote a new value to write vertical columns.
Does this principle still work with mode 7? Absolutely.
But it does create a few complications here. First, given what the affine transformations of a mode 7 image can do to the data, if you want to scroll mode 7 without creating visible artifacting, you have to ensure that the current view of that image leaves space for performing this dynamic reloading somewhere that isn't visible onscreen. (it's not that you can't do it if it's visible, but it would glitch out a lot, which would likely be very distracting.)
The theoretical size of map you can create with this method is almost unlimited, but of course you do need to store enough data for these maps. ( a mode 7 map, ignoring the actual graphics tiles themselves consists of 16 kilobytes. So if you were to create an area 10 times this size in each direction, eg 10240 pixels, you'd need 100 times as much, or 1.6 megabytes... Just for the tilemap data! You can imagine why this isn't plausible given cartridges that in the SNES's lifetime ranged from 1 to 6 megabytes in size.)
A second problem you have with mode 7 is that the tilemap can be in any orientation relative to the screen.
With regular modes you know that the top edge of the tilemap is at the top of the screen, and the left edge at the left, and so on.
In mode 7 the edges you need to scroll could be anywhere in relation to what's visible onscreen, which makes it more complicated working out what part of the tilemap needs to be scrolled.
A flight sim has the problem that you're at high altitude, which makes the visible area larger and larger the higher you go.
The chances of not seeing all or most of the entire mode 7 map at once is limited, so that presents a problem in disguising the scrolling edges.
For splitscreen multiplayer you have the problem that a single tilemap has to show two views. To make this fully flexible 'infinite' scrolling you'd have to split the tilemap in two, and then be extremely careful how you draw things to ensure that you never see something intended for the other players.
For say, a racing game, one of the imposed limitations you'd run into, for one possible solution is that the 'road' could never go back on itself. No corner could be more than a 90 degree turn (and probably not even that), and you could never, EVER double back on yourself or even follow a set of curves that exceeds a total turn of 90 degrees.
The arrangement here would be something like splitting the tilemap down the middle, and keeping the 'camera' for each player pointing in the opposite direction to the other player. (you also have to ensure the 'camera' for each player never strays into the other player's half of the map)
If you can maintain this limitation you could, possibly (there may be other problems unfortunately) be able to have 2 players with scrolling beyond the limits of a regular 1024x1024 mode 7 map.
It would take extreme care though.
(one thing you could definitely do though is provide two simultaneous but linked views of something that scrolls. So for instance, a left and right view of an aircraft that is moving forward. The left and right view can even turn off axis somewhat, but both views have to be moving in the direction that the map is scrolling. - you could for instance make a game where one player controls a ship and others control turrets. As long as the range of motion of the turrets is sufficiently restricted, this won't be obvious.)
I loved this game as a kid, but the depth of field was often hard to judge and especially your relationship to the target or how fast your moving versus the runway guides or the rings or updraft. Sometimes, it was just sheer luck more than being able to gauge how to move.
As far as SNES flight sims go, i feel like you can't do any better than Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone. It plays a bit like Top Gun: The Second Mission on NES, only much, much better.
1:26 Hey, it's that song from Smash Bros! ;)
Particularly nice video Jeremy. Was anyone able to legitimately beat those helicopter levels? They were ridiculous.
Difficult? Sure, but far from ridiculously hard. I remember beating it back in the day without embedding a single controller in the nearest wall.
Funny the parachute noise is the same noise as Mario's cape
Jeremy, what would we do without you?
I completely forgot there was a Pilotwings 64
nicly done, man.
Pilotwings is an excellent game and I will play it. 😀👍🎮
This game is very interesting from a technical point of view. And also the statement it makes about the SNES, even though it doesn't make that statement out in the open.
As an actual game I don't much like it (though I adore Pilotwings 64).
So what's so significant about Pilotwings?
1. It's a launch title.
2. It contains a DSP-1 chip.
At first glance the significance of this might be easy to miss.
But when you think about it, this is a statement of intent.
A comment on how the SNES was meant to be used.
That is, expansion hardware in the cartridge was not a panicked after-thought, it was a considered, deliberate design move.
Speaking of which, the DSP-1 was, by some accounts rumoured to have originally been part of the console itself, but was moved to being in cartridges last minute.
What does the DSP-1 offer though? Extended hardware multiplication and Division are it's most basic features, but in fact it has about 20 functions almost all of which are purpose-built for 3d graphics and flight sims in particular.
Perspective calculations. Projecting the intersection of a line with the ground.
(there are others, but they are hard to remember from memory. I know it can do calculations for a matrix transformation and a bunch of other things. Think the underlying calculations required for a 3d graphics and physics engine and you get the right idea.)
Calculating positioning and scale of circular objects composed of points.
Does any of this sound familiar? It's like the whole thing was purpose-built for Pilotwings.
And yet, those same set of functions were used for Mario Kart.
On a side note, this means that the DSP-1 was available to devs (if they wanted it - cost extra of course), at launch.
That's right. There was an expansion co-processor available for SNES games from the very moment the system was available.
This tells you something pretty significant about the philosophy behind the system, and ultimately make the SA-1 and SuperFX seem less strange. (the development of the SuperFX seemed accidental, but the SA-1 almost looks intentional. Just look at what it consists of - the same CPU as the system itself, but at 3-4 times the speed, and with better supporting functionality. That's like someone thought ahead of time that the system might need a mid-generation power boost.)
I HATED Pilotwings as a kid; rented it once, decided it wasn't for me, and basically never played either it or the sequel again.
Goddamned if the Mode Seven overhead landscapes don't make me incredibly nostalgic, though. Secret of Mana, Actraiser, Final Fantasy VI, all had that same exact look to the maps. Something about it never fails to make me smile.
Also, Mental Gears? (In Snake's voice, of course.)
Gotta make it an interrobang for full authenticity: "Mental gears!?"
Feels kind of weird that you didn't mention anything about Pilotwings being the first SNES game to use expansion chip (DSP-1 to be precise).
Yeah the DSP-1 chip was basically created by Nintendo to do some of the math required for Pilotwings (so much so that the SNES development manual specifically says "Pilotwings used this particular DSP-1 command to do x" for some of the DSP commands)
That's not only worth mentioning, it also has some major implications about design philosophy of the SNES, given that we're talking about a launch title that had an expansion chip.
(or in other words, an expansion chip was available for the system from the moment the system came out.)
First thing everyone should do in this game.....don't open the parachute :)
Yup, Pilotwings resembled a DOS game more than a console game.
It surprises me to hear anybody describe this game as being difficult.
As far as slapdash-feeling launch titles for their respective consoles that use scaling effects and involve the experience of flight I have to say that for all its faults, Pilotwings is inordinately better than Super Thunder Blade.
And while obviously Pilotwings owes a debt of gratitude to games like MS Flight Sim, it's hard not to look at those chopper stages and think that another guiding motivation for this game's design was "what if we made a console port of Thunder Blade that didn't suck"
Oh, I never said it feels slapdash. A lot of thought went into this game. It just feels small, unbalanced, and dated in retrospect.
Jeremy Parish that's true, this game is well-made if a bit trapped under the technical constraints of the time. Super Thunder Blade, on the other hand... *shudders*
*wings*
I'm disappointed you didn't show off the skydiving & penguindiving bonus stages, but it's fine otherwise.
The music sounds like Sr. Pelo
My goodness, I think you need to relax a little my friend . While you seem appreciative of this game the amount of fault finding is excessive. The game was amazing when it first came out, for what it was. There was nothing really like it at that time for consoles. At the time I wasn't even thinking about wishing I could fly between buildings, nor was I busy noticing the blockiness of the pixels when I approached close to the ground. I was just happy to have the sense of flying in general.
Nah, I didn’t really enjoy it that much when I first got my Super NES back in 1992, either.
@@JeremyParish fair enough, but you seem overly critical in general, my friend. Sometimes it's good in life to simply sit back and enjoy, not search out all the flaws in other creations, ease up on nit picking... see the glass half full, you know, cliches like that.
@@lvx4408 But pointing out the flaws is one of the whole points of the series.
I agree, Jeremy. This game was just a bunch of tutorial stages really and not a full fledged game. Still fun though.
So are you going to review any SNES games that you actually like?
No, that sounds boring.
@@JeremyParish I knew it. You're just another AVGN wannabe. Just kidding ;) I love your channel.
loved this game until i got to stage 2 and the game just got harder. i was a casual gamer then in this genre and it was just too hard to enjoy. sucks. games like these should be accessible to every type of gamer, not just hardcore flight sim freaks. especially when it is on a commercial console rather than a fanboy computer of some sort
When a game is based on the precision but is unplayable, it gives this crap!
I remember thinking how ugly this game was back in the day, with it's flat, uber-pixelated landscapes that constantly seem to shimmer and distort, but looking at it now, I find it strikingly beautiful (albeit in a brutalist sort of way).
My conclusions on the game itself are much the same as yours though. Almost certainly better of-it's-time, but now it just doesn't quite seem worth the considerable effort it demands.