My Thoughts on Xeno Crisis for SNES

Since the game has now started shipping to Kickstarter backers and is also available on the Bitmap Bureau online store too, I figured I’d share my thoughts.

Now, I don’t have an original SNES console anymore, which is currently the only way to play the game for this particular system (no digital version), so I can’t play it directly myself, but it certainly looks and sounds great from everything I’ve seen and heard with my own eyes and ears. And the controls in particular seem to be a real highlight in this version too according to all the previews/reviews thus far from people who actually own it, which makes sense, as the SNES’ controller is particularly well-suited to this type of dual 8-way moving and 8-way shooting gameplay.

What is Colour Blasting on SNES?

Yes, this image has been Colour Blasted

Colour Blasting is a term I coined on New Year’s Day 2024 that I like to use to describe all the awesome things you can do on SNES due in part to its amazing colour capabilities, especially for a console of its time. My original idea was to use it as a “cool” back-of-box marketing name for the feature otherwise known as direct colour (bit of a boring name for a feature that allows the SNES to display a massive 2040+1 visible colours on background 1 alone), which I didn’t think would really excite people and capture their imaginations if they saw “uses direct colour” on the back of a new SNES game box. Thus, Colour Blasting was born.

Using SNES offset change per column horizontally

Note how it says that each column can be controlled separately and can be scrolled horizontally in 8 pixel increments. . . .

Modern SNES Games and Demos

Note: Some of these examples may be a few years old, but they’re still new games for SNES that came out decades after it was no longer officially on the market. And some of them may be barely more than simple concept tests, or possibly just glorified ROM hacks, but I still think they’re worth covering here.

So, without further ado, let’s begin:

SNES Background Modes

Did you know that the SNES has a whopping eight different background modes to play around with, not just the infamous Mode 7 that everyone has heard a load about already?

Well, the video below by Retro Game Mechanics Explained covers the first seven of the SNES’ background modes in great detail and is well worth viewing (he has a whole separate video dedicated to Mode 7 too):

Despite being the best resource for how backgrounds work on SNES that I’ve found [that laymen can actually understand], there were a few things that still weren’t entirely clear to me when I first watched the video above, such as the actual amounts of colours per layer and overall for the backgrounds in Mode 0 for example, or that the amount of colours on screen can be increased well beyond the standard 256-ish total [for background and sprites combined] using things like Direct Colour in some background modes, HDMA on the backdrop colour, and colour math for transparency effects. So I’ll detail some of those things more below.

The 16-bit War

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