Hardware effects are neat, but looking at what happened with the SFC, I think that the creativity shown in PCE games would have been stifled and we wouldn't have wound up with the unique library that we love.
I understand this statement, and there were certainly instances like this. Super ghouls n ghosts was not as good as ghouls n ghosts genesis, and effects made it even harder to play.
However, better hardware effects/chips also help with a game.
Yoshi's island is a great example. The super fx chip and other effects help to bring the warm, colorful world really to life.
Star fox has 3d that hasn't aged well, but there were many exciting level designs possible because of it. Entering the enemy tunnel and shooting the core in stage 3 is an epic moment with great buildup.
Heck, f-zero plays rather well still thanks to mode 7. Mode 7 was abused for title screens, but really made racing games more fun and fluid.
Not all snes games were stifled. Some cases, the effects embraced the creativity.
You can slap external processors onto a HuCard the same as games like Yoshi's Island, Star Fox, Super Mario Kart, Pilot Wings etc require for the SNES to run them. Star Fox doesn't use Mode 7 at all for its 3D, so it isn't an example of built-in hardware making games better (
and the Genesis has more polygonal games rendered purely by cpu power). I've also heard tech savvy people say that Yoshi's Island doesn't bother using SNES hardware for its scaling and rotation either.
Yoshi's Island, really is a great example of the point I am making. The SFX2 chip is 7 - 10 times faster than the SNES cpu and combined with the amazing SNES hardware effects, it was used as filler in place of animation. The bosses in Yoshi's Island almost all feature an unprecedented
ONE frame of animation, while a few of them feature as many as two or perhaps even
three frames!
But thanks to Mode F(iller), those static images swirl, rotate and pixelate to give the illusion of movement without any additional artwork. They also mostly consist of round outlines with a couple dots as the artwork for the single static frame.
The SNES/SFX2 chip effects aren't actually responsible for the warmth or color of that game world. That's the artwork side, which the reliance on special effects waters down in memory-starved SNES cart games.
I said in my previous post that F-Zero style gameplay is the one great thing that Mode 7 (+ misc effects) provided. It wasn't worthwhile enough for developers to continue using in the 32-bit generation, but it was a new and unique gameplay experience when it wasn't also used as filler in games like FFVI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc.
