Prototypes, Betas, and Unfinished Games

King of Posters Galaxy Oddity
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Felt like we should have a proper general thread for these instead of just being sprinkled about?

Lost MC Hammer game has some new info out about it

https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2019/09/27/soulfire-the-mc-hammer-game-we-couldnt-touch/

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Some materials from the ill fated Mega Man Maker-esque Capcom game

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Dark Cloud was a lot different before they realized, “oh shit, we don’t know how to do the broadband shit, is it even going to be ready by release? fuuuck”.

Differences:

  • In TGS99 Dark Cloud, you’re building a town on a floating chunk of land (the protagonist’s hometown?) after it was destroyed (by an ancient evil, of course).
  • Apparently, people could come visit your town, and you could do the same, via the broadband adapter.
  • You had more control over object placement.
  • No more flying carpets (except as a mode of transportation into a back floor in a dungeon you can’t access in the U.S. version because of a bug)
  • You could jump.
  • Protagonist had more of a swarthy, Spanish flair to his design before they Linkified the fuck out of him.

My wall of text comment I left on Unseen64 that nobody there has paid any attention to:

The map is actually totally different. For example, the Arabesque palace on the right side of the map never appears in the final game. The port town of Queens doesn’t appear to be there either. The town on the left part of the map in the ocean appears to be Brownboo (which also appears in this video where the protagonist is falling in the water), however, for some reason, some of the villagers from Norune (the starting town in the final version) appear in the town, whereas in the final version only the rabbits are there. Specifically, Alnet (the female in the hat) and the Old Gaffer (the old man labeled as “Jisama” in the video). Norune doesn’t seem to be on this version of the map, either — presumably because his home town was destroyed and replaced by that castle you see in the giant hole in the middle of the map.

There are flying carpets in the final game, but you don’t control them and they only take you to a backroom in one of the dungeons (and due to a glitch, you can’t even access the backrooms in that dungeon so North American players will have never seen the flying carpet).

Some videos on GameSpot and IGN from TGS1999 have some videos where somebody is explaining some mechanics from the game. He mentions that the game would use the PS2’s modem to allow other people to visit your town (and vice versa). This never made it to the final game. The buildings used in the Georama mode are also different — the European-style house never appears in the final version of the game, however, Dark Cloud 2 does feature the European-style houses, but not the same as in the video.

One more thing, the Atlamillia and the Atla spheres seem to be something they came up with after this build of the game, as the protagonist doesn’t have the stone on his hand.

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I often think about the initial teaser for The Dark Sector and bemoan what came of it (The game of the same title, and the sort of spiritual successor/asset recycle Warframe)

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I like to check in occasionally on the GTA community’s never ending quest to uncover absolutely everything about the prototype versions of each game.

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Also, if you were browsing Pokemon websites c. 2000/2001?, you may have seen a fake that people were passing around of a Pikachu edited into a Dark Cloud (closer to final version) screenshot that people were claiming was from the “Pokemon game for Dolphin”.

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god. that dark cloud footage is cool

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yeah. i love the final game, but it’s kind of a mess. also, proto dark cloud’s world map is way cooler, the character design is way cooler, and the concept of building on a floating chunk of a land because some evil force killed everyone in your town and tore it out of the ground for its castle is way super cool.

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This is an extremely rad cutscene but release Dark Sector is a cool & good game

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I guess? Idk I stopped playing after an hour or two.

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Quality isn’t the best but you can still see how different some stuff looked in CV4 earlier on. I think I like those skeletons and medusa heads better than what we ended up getting.
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Jeeze I remember seeing some of these really off maps and the darker Simon sprite somewhere. Some magazine must have run a preview based on this back when. The Medusa heads and the bone towers look more like scaled up NES sprites.

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sounds like Bill Ratner

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Took me a while to find a working link since the old one I knew of died, but here’s an early trailer for the original Front Mission, featuring some instances of differing character designs, what’s likely placeholder art (Driscoll’s Raven appears to be a Zenith with different arms), and perhaps most interesting is the music which is much higher quality versions of the game soundtrack, which I’m not sure has ever appeared elsewhere.
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Jun Senoue’s demo versions of Sonci 3d Blast music

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Directed by the designer/coder of Umehara Kawase, real shame we didn’t get this one:

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even from the youtube still i know im going to love/be very sad about this

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hmmmmm
this github pull request seems to indicate a working version of this game has been dumped, which was definitely not the case when the above youtube video (the only known footage of viewpoint 2064 on the internet) was made
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There was a playthrough of the Sonic CD v0.02 prototype today and apparently more info on more Sonic Prototypes this month

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/500024770

https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Sonic_Month_Part_1_-_Sega_No._1

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Apparently Palmtree Panic was at one point called Salad Plain. Also this demo has the past music in super clear Redbook instead of PCM!

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Super Ultra Baseball 2 Localized Prototype