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Check out the history of the SNES's Mode 7

by: Sean Colleli -
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The Super Nintendo Entertainment System turned 25 yesterday, and to celebrate games journalist Jeremy Parish started a new series exploring the history of its games. titled Mode 7, the first episode appropriately looks at F-Zero, the game that used the SNES's Mode 7 texture scaling to create a surprisingly tense and frenetic scifi racing experience.

I've always found Mode 7 to be fascinating, because it looks so primitive even compared to contemporary games like Doom, but at the same time it's a clever graphical sleight of hand and at launch it had gamers picking their jaws up off the floor. It was really the only way for the SNES's underclocked CPU to match the speed of the Sega Genesis, but ultimately I think the quality of SNES games were a cut above most Sega offerings.