The Curse of Monkey Island [Beta – PC]

In the website of ATMachine we can read an interesting series of articles about the old Lucas Arts adventures and between them, we can even find a wonderful page with informations and screens for the beta version of The Curse of Monkey Island! A scan from al old magazine shows a prototype version of the game, with placeholder sprites and a page from the official strategy guide has the storyboard of a removed cutscene.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

Images:
 

Monster Hunter [PS2 – Beta]

Monster Hunter  is an action role-playing game for the PS2, developed and published by Capcom. The tent in the Hunter’s camp was different in the beta version: it looked more “futuristic” and it did not have the top part. It can even be seen in the original Monster Hunter trailer from E3 2003 (and maybe there are even more differences in there? Can you see more changes?)

Beta version:

Final version:

Video:

 

Unseen Interviews: Yakumo from Segagagadomain

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If you are used to the beta & cancelled games communities, you probably know already Yakumo and his Segagaga Domain website. SD is another great place to find informations about obscure games, especially japanese and SEGA ones: in there you can even see a collection of videos from unseen Saturn and Dreamcast games. In this new Unseen Interview we have questioned Yakumo, to know better the mind under Segagaga Domain, learn about the japanese gamer’s life and his toughts about the unseen gaming world.

U64: Thanks for your time Yakumo, would you like to introduce yourself and your site to our readers?

Yakumo: Sure, my real life name is Mark. I’m a British guy with a passion for gaming that has lived in Japan since 1998. My site, Segagaga Domain originally started out as a private online reference guide to what software I had at the time. A few friends had access to this reference guide and mentioned how great it would be to have some sort of online catalogue that actually gave decent size cover scans as well as comments on the games. I always thought there were plenty of sites on the net like this but as it turned out most of them just gave catalogue numbers etc without any really information on the game it’s self. So Segagaga Domain was born to fill in that massive void. I’m always looking to expand the site. Within the last year we saw the start of the Movie Vault. This will be the first place on the net (unless someone beats me to it) to feature video footage of ALL Japanese Sega Saturn games as well as unreleased game footage and Dreamcast games.

U64: Your Retrocore Show is a very nice initiative, especially the “What ever happened to…” sections, do you plan to talk about more “Unseen Games” in the next episodes? We do something like that with our U64 Italian Podcast, but well.. it’s in italian, so noone listen to it ;) 

Maintenance? What happened to U64?

As you have probably noticed, we had some problems with the U64 server in the last few days: what happened? Well, when Unseen 64 was created in 2001, we used a slow, limited but free web-server. Things have changed and we have grown bigger and bigger over all these years.

About a year ago we decided to upgrade the site and pay for a private web-server to be able to organize better all these unseen stuff.  But wow.. that thing costs a lot.. and as many more people started to visit U64, even the current server is not able to keep up with the bandwidth usage! It’s slower and slower.. so we need to change the server again.. to find a faster one.. and that means.. a more expensive one.

We are in the middle of the site transfer from the current server to the new one,  but while we were working on it, something went wrong and everything broke up.. so we had to close down U64 for a couple of days to fix it.  Now it seems that the site is working again, there are still some problems (the comments and the forums are currently disabled) but everything should be fine for the next week.

Now, the only problem that remains is.. we need to rise enough money to pay for the server for the next year.  Not much money is generated from those site ADS so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves. We know that not many people could be interested to donate money for a “stupid gaming site” like U64, so we though to.. open a cafepress shop. In there you can buy some U64 swag for yourself or for your friends.. and we can get some money from your shopping spree. You can even buy your favourite games through our Playasia banners if you want. But for the few, real unseen-geeks that would like to donate their pure love, we still accept contributions through PayPal. You can just donate how much or little you want. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the site.

And that’s all. Thank you for even reading this :)

With love, the U64 Staff.

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Contra 4: removed 4-Players coop?

Robert Seddon told us that in Retro Gamer magazine #51, p. 39, they talked about a removed 4 players coop mode that was meant to be in Contra 4 for the DS. Matt Bozon, director of the game, told to RG that “Our first playable incarnation was four-player Wi-Fi, but it was taking us in the direction of a wildly unbalanced game with fewer bells and whistles. We dabbled with Rumble Pak, but the team wanted each feature done right or not at all.” In the magazine we can ever read that some screens of the 4 players mode were released online, but i dont remember any.. do you know where to find these?

In a related note, on Wikipedia there are some infos on the leaked Contra 4 Beta ROM: “A Prototype version of the game was leaked to the internet in ROM image form. The NDS header indicates a US serial, but the game has been suggested to be a European prototype. The similarities between the prototype game and early game trailers confirm that they are the same. Among the many differences from the final product, each level starts the player with 99 lives, the player can choose any level, the Factory and Alien Hive stages are incomplete and sounds are missing and/or placed in different cues.”