Now You’re Playing With Power: Super Power! (Late 1991 Part 1)
A TV advertisement for the SNES and Super Mario World.[1]
“Mr. T-Spin: when it comes to classic tetris i MUCH prefer playing snes tetris, that way i dont get carpal tunnel from rolling all the time lol
JesterJohnny: Oh please, I know you’re envious of our better piece randomizer.
Mr. T-Spin: not as big of a deal when i can properly react to pieces falling at max speed thanks to the bumper technique
Soupigi33: Days without NES vs SNES Tetris debates: 0” - From the harddrop.com forums, circa 2013. The “Bumper Technique” exploits a bug in SNES Tetris where pressing right and the R bumper or left and the L bumper at the same time moves the falling piece twice as fast, which is incredibly useful once you reach max speed.
While limited quantities of the system had gone out to certain regions on August 23rd, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System truly launched on September 1st, 1991[2] in North America. Bundled with a copy of
Super Mario World and two controllers, the console retailed for $199. Compared to our timeline, the SNES launches to a bit more success, in part due to Nintendo and Philips hyping it up more prior to the system’s launch. However, the NES was still going very strong at the time, and Super Nintendo sales wouldn’t
really pick up until the holiday season. The two companies largely shrugged off the console’s lackluster initial launch once December 1991 rolled around.
The SNES launched with 7 games:
Super Mario World, F-Zero, Super Pinball, Pilotwings, SimCity, Gradius III, and
Tetris. As the first three were already covered in a previous update, we’ll skip over them. I also won’t mention
SimCity, as it’s practically identical to the OTL game.
All About Pilotwings
Platform: SNES
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: December 21st, 1990 (JP); August 23rd, 1991 (NA); April 11th, 1992 (EU)
Pilotwings is a flight simulator game for the SNES that makes extensive use of the system’s Mode 7 capabilities. Not much is different about the game compared to our timeline; however, there’s one additional mission late in the game that has you fly the attack helicopter through two rings and then land it on a frozen runway. The performance is smoothed out as well, but otherwise, it’s the same
Pilotwings that we all know and love.
All About Gradius III
Platform: SNES
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: December 21st, 1990 (JP); August 23rd, 1991 (NA); April 11th, 1992 (EU)
Gradius III is a port of the arcade shoot ‘em up to the SNES. Thanks to the Super Nintendo using a faster 10 MHz processor here,
Gradius III doesn’t suffer nearly as badly from the immense slowdown that it does in OTL.[3] Slowdown does still occur, but only on rare occasions. For that reason,
Gradius III reviews a lot better and is considered a more faithful port than it was in our timeline.
All About Tetris
Platform: SNES
Developer: Philips P.O.V. Entertainment Group
Publisher: Philips Interactive Media
Released: December 21st, 1990 (JP); August 23rd, 1991 (NA); April 11th, 1992 (EU)
Tetris is a port of the iconic block puzzler to the Super Nintendo. Unlike other versions of Tetris released on Nintendo consoles, which were developed by Bullet-Proof Software, SNES Tetris was made by Philips P.O.V. Entertainment Group. The single biggest improvement over OTL’s CD-i Tetris is that there are two rotation buttons instead of only one. The game’s theming is very Russian, similar to a lot of other ports at the time and different from CD-i Tetris using digitized photographs of landscapes and its more relaxed atmosphere. SNES Tetris features your standard endless A-type mode and B-type mode, where you have to clear a certain number of lines to move on to the next level. There’s also a 2-player competitive mode that you can play against a human or computer-controlled opponent, something that Nintendo’s NES Tetris notably lacked[4]. Four different music tracks can be selected to play, as well as the ability to turn the music off.
It’s Tetris, and a pretty solid version of it at that. Tetris is bound to sell well no matter what console it comes out on, and that’s certainly true for SNES Tetris. As time went on and a competitive classic Tetris community formed, a lot of debate about whether NES or SNES Tetris was the superior version. For a long time, SNES Tetris games would go on for much longer than NES Tetris games did as it was much harder to get pieces to the edge of the screen at max speed in NES Tetris. That was until the discovery of rolling in 2010, about 10 years earlier than in OTL and caused by the NES/SNES Tetris rivalry. Today, NES and SNES players have a much more friendly rivalry, and competitions are regularly held for both games.
Footnotes:
[1] Random bit of trivia regarding this commercial: you might notice that at 0:06, Mario walks on level paths that haven’t been opened up yet! This was done using a debug mode script that’s left unused in the final game, but was enabled by default in the localization prototype. You can use the Game Genie codes 0ABB-6D9D CEBB-6DBD B4BB-6D2D to re-enable this feature.
[2] The intended release date in OTL, before being pushed back to September 9th. However, Nintendo officially recognizes August 23rd as the console’s release date.
[3] While there is a ROM hack that fixes the slowdown in OTL, it makes use of the SA-1 enhancement chip to solve the problem. Coincidentally, the SA-1 is clocked at 10.74 MHz, so I think the game’s slowdown was caused less by bad programming and more by the SNES’s slow processor.
[4] The Tengen version, meanwhile, had both 2-player competitive and cooperative play.
END OF ACT I
And there we have it! The end of this timeline's first act! But don't go anywhere just yet, as we're only just getting started. I want to quickly say thank you to everyone who has been reading Dear Pesky Partners up to this point. I've been absolutely floored by all of the positive encouragement and comments from you guys. Since this is my first timeline, your kind words have encouraged me to go further ahead with this timeline. Of course, none of this would be possible without the contributions of Cherry, Shiny, @Nivek and @CourtlyHades296 so give a round of applause to them as well!
When we start Act II, we'll take a look at the Sega CD's Japanese launch. I'll see you then!
(Oh, and just one more thing... you see, I've got a very special bonus update planned for Christmas. It might come before Chapter 15, it might not... but definitely keep an eye out for it.)