 Hey, thanks to Demix for my Patreon page for the request. Now let's take a look at every Super Nintendo game that utilizes the Super FX chip. I'm not much of a technical nuts and bolts kind of a guy, I guess I'm just not wired that way. Yeah, get it? I just want to look at the games that had the chip. Just to give a very brief history though, the Super FX chip was developed by Argonaut Games and given a code name Super Mario FX. No, there were no plans for a 3D Mario game on SNES, it was evidently just a name. Anyway, the chip acts as a coprocessor built into the cartridge that works together with the Super Nintendo hardware to provide advanced visual techniques, most notably the polygon rendering capabilities you'll see in some of the games in this video. Diving into the technical aspects of how the Super FX chip is able to do this, now that's beyond what my primitive brain can understand. There's a link in the description that goes deep into how it works, right down to the instruction set, detailed registry information, and a memory map both from the Super Nintendo CPU point of view and the Super FX chip's point of view. So if you're into that, that's there for ya. So obviously we want to start with the game that made this chip famous with Star Fox. Evidently Nintendo wanted to try and make their own version of Star Glider, but for the SNES, Star Glider being a fast paced first person rail shooter set in space. They even named the Star Fox prototype NES Glider. The thing is, the SNES hardware had no chance of making the game fast enough to be any good, so some extra help was needed, hence the Super FX chip. Some people have joked over the years that Star Fox for Super Nintendo is essentially a glorified Super FX chip demo, but I'd rather look at it in a more positive light. Yeah, the game looks super dated, it's rough around the edges to say the least, but I like to think that the Super FX rendered polygons here really length themselves to creating their own unique visual style. The frame rate here is the real problem, and that's what makes the game dated, but even dealing with that, Star Fox is such a satisfying pick up and play and blow stuff up kind of game, it's one of my all time personal favorites, and it represented some exciting new possibilities at the time. If you're aware of it or not, Star Fox had a sequel in development for the SNES with Argonaut again teaming with Nintendo, but this time deciding to take the gameplay in another direction, instead using an overhead map system similar to what ended up being used in Star Fox Command. You bounce around to different locations, fighting battles, intercepting missiles, and forming a strategy as to what to attack and when. Sure, the game looks similar, but it plays much faster thanks to an improved version of the Super FX chip. Star Fox 2, of course, was never released despite it being completely finished, the reason being that Nintendo, quote, didn't want to confuse their audience by misrepresenting what a 3D game should look like, meaning the N64 was on its way and they wanted to focus the audience's attention on that instead. Still, Star Fox 2 is still worth playing today. Its improved frame rate means it's aged better than its predecessor from a technical standpoint, and the gameplay definitely represents something different in the Super Nintendo library. Alright, so we got the Super FX flagship franchise, so to speak, out of the way, so now let's take a look at some of the other games that utilize some form of the Super FX chip, like Stunt Race FX. In a way, this is even more impressive than Star Fox because the whole freaking track has to be rendered, but I mean, look how small the viewing area is, and as a racing game, this doesn't have anywhere near the same sense of speed as something like F-Zero, a launch title that was made nearly four years previous. Stunt Race FX certainly isn't a bad game, there's three cars to pick from with a couple more that can be unlocked. There's a bunch of game modes like stunt courses that are pretty fun to drive through, especially with the second player, but again, the viewing area is so small when you got Player 2 on there. So yeah, as impressive as it is for the Super FX chip to get a game like this off the ground in the first place, you're much better off playing stuff like F-Zero and top gear. Stunt Race FX has its moments, and it's a decent two-player game, but it's a racing game that doesn't feel very fast, so it feels like it's missing something. Next there's Vortex, not to be confused with the planned SNES Transformer game called Transformers Generation 2, that was a completely different deal. Again, the developers at Argonaut were shooting for the stars here. You play as a mech robot that can transform into four different modes, a biped walker, a car called the Land Burner, the Sonic Jet, and something called the Hard Shell. This aspect alone is a really cool idea, but unfortunately the controls here aren't very intuitive, stuff like switching weapons is kind of a pain. Vortex is an up-and-down experience, on one hand it's pretty cool to make stuff go boom as the walker or the jet, but again, the frame right here is what made this game age poorly. Combine that with the weird controls, plus enemies materializing from nothing out of nowhere, and you've got a case of a game that sounds like a good idea, looks like a good idea, but sadly just doesn't follow through. Vortex is decent, but disappointing, and you can experience its good qualities in better games like Star Fox. Next game, Dirt Racer, a game only released in PAL regions and man, anyone watching that lives in PAL territory, I just want to say I'm sorry. North America got stuff like Chrono Trigger, but you guys got Dirt Racer. This is an awful mess. You got stuff popping up out of nowhere, you got a track that's really hard to follow, you have terrible controls that have you swerving all over the place. Seriously, I feel like this game punishes you for going fast. What kind of racing game is that? Yeah, if you want a Super FX racing game, go with Stunt Racer FX, the less said about Dirt Racer, the better. After Dirt Racer came Dirt Tracks FX, and thankfully this is much better. I think Motocross lent itself in a better way toward a Super FX racing game than cars did. It's just easier to get a feel for controlling two wheels than four, I guess. Dirt Tracks FX is nothing spectacular and there's not much beyond what you see from the footage here, but that's not a bad thing. This game is perfectly okay. There's the usual race circuits and eight racers to choose from. The only other interesting thing is a mode called Rad Tag, where you quite literally play tag with a second player in a confined area for three minutes. Dirt Tracks FX is fine for what it is. It's not worth going out of your way to play, but it does have a faster feel to it than the other Super FX racing games. Later on, there eventually came to be a Super FX chip sequel, so to speak, simply called the Super FX 2, which was first utilized in the Super Nintendo port of Doom. If you read the backstory about the technical details of this game, it's kind of amazing that they got it to run it all. They had to create a new game engine entirely. It was a valiant attempt, but sadly the SNES port of Doom just isn't very good, especially when Doom is readily available and imminently more playable on so many other platforms. The SNES port has a slow input response time and bleary and sometimes incomprehensible visuals. I do love how you can turn the map on and still move around. That's pretty awesome. But still, as impressive as the effort was to put this game together, you're better off avoiding Doom for Super Nintendo. The next game to utilize the Super FX 2 is, believe it or not, Super Mario World 2, Yoshi's Island, where they utilize the chip's powerful processing ability to make baby Mario scream as annoying in his ear piercing as possible. Okay, maybe not. But still, it just goes to show the Super FX chips weren't limited to just rendering polygons or creating 3D environments, so to speak. It could be used to help to create some unique backgrounds, some crazy effects like Yoshi getting stoned, and some truly memorable boss fights. Put them all together and you've got one of the 10 best Super Nintendo games ever made. If you want more about Yoshi's Island, I did a standalone review of it that you can find on my channel. The last game to get the Super FX 2 treatment was another Pal exclusive, this one called Winter Gold. This game is pretty good for what it is. There's six events you can choose from, slalom skiing, snowboard half pipe, freestyle aerials, bobsled, luge and ski jump. It takes a few tries to understand what you're doing on each event, but this game is definitely playable if you're into this kind of stuff. And yeah, this is a pretty good demonstration of what the Super FX 2 is capable of from a 3D standpoint. This looks like it might be mistaken for an early Sega Saturn game, albeit a bit slower. In fact, maybe the dudes from Virtua Fighter ski, snowboard and bobsled in their time off. Hmm, yeah, okay. Maybe I'm giving the visuals here a bit too much credit, but it's still pretty cool looking on a 16 bit console. Also, just look at the intro here. This almost looks like full motion video. Well, that wraps it up for finished releases that featured the Super FX and the Super FX 2 chip. There were a handful of projects that made it to the demo stage, stuff like Comanche, a first person helicopter sim that had a series on PC, FX Fighter, a one on one fighting game that eventually made its way to PC, the aforementioned Transformers game and of course, Star Fox 2. And that's all for now. Thank you for watching and have a good rest of your day.