Last day I checked one of my favourite sites of the Internet, Old Computer Mags which, despite the name, covers console magazines too. They updated the oldest issues of one of my favourite italian mags, Consolemania. In the first issue I found new screens of Sonic 1 Beta! Go to our page to see them! I’m trying to find other beta-images of other games, if you want to help me, Old Computer Mags has plenty of scans of many other magazines!
Sonic Mars was being developed by Sega Technical Institute (STI), a U.S.-based developer that had worked on games such as Sonic 2, Sonic 3 , Sonic Spinball, The Ooze and Comix Zone. In its earliest conception, the game was set to be released on the Sega Genesis and later on the 32X, under the name Sonic Mars (based on the codename for the 32X, Sega Mars). Sonic Mars would also have featured Sally Acorn and the other Freedom Fighters from the Saturday morning animated series, Sonic the Hedgehog. Part of the project staff included Chris Senn, who designed demo animations in order to persuade executives, and Michael Kosaka, who was the staff leader and the game’s producer.
We already knew that Too Human had a lot of changes through his development, from the original Playstation 1 version to the X360 version (especially after reading this article with interviews about the original project), but i wonder: are there any differences from the first screens of the 360 version? From the Gamespot screenshots archive it seems that some areas of the game were changed a bit: if you have played the game, could you help me find more differences in there? Thanks a lot! :) If someone can find those beta-screens, we can open a new page for Too Human 360 in the U64 Archive! If you find something, you can send us an e-mail!
Martin Konrad has more contributions for U64 on the way: today he has shared two scans from two different german magazines, with screens of the GameGear version of Road Rash 2, which hasn’t been released. As he write in his email “Unfortunately the street isn’t as complex as in Road Rash 1 on GG/SMS. It’s very flat in these screens and with not much detail. But there is something interesting: there’s another motorcycle-game on the GG called “Kawasaki Superbike Challenge” and when you look into the rom-dump, there is a text that says “Road Rash 2 conversion by …”. I haven’t found this out myself, it’s from a post in the SMSpower Forum. I think it’s possible that Road Rash 2 was changed into Kawasaki Superbike Challenge. In Kawasaki SC, the streets does also not have much detail or hills like in these RR2 screenshots (advantage is that the game runs much smoother).”
Thanks a lot to Martin Konrad for these screens and info!
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Castlevania 64 underwent a no doubt rushed development phase and because of it, a lot of content was cut from the final game. The most obvious missing feature is that the final version only contains two playable characters as opposed to beta version’s promised four. Originally, we were promised Reinhardt Schneider, Carrie Fernandez , Cornell, and Coller. Reinhardt and Carrie made it into 64 and Cornell was lucky enough to pull into the “directors cut” version of the game, but poor old Coller never saw the light of day. He was, however, replaced by Henry. Castlevania 64 obviously had a lot more content than what we got, but fortunately, thanks to a bit of picture hunting and hacking magic, we can see a bit more of what the developers originally intended. Read the rest of this entry »