Beta + Cancelled Unseen Features Video Games - Page 4 of 15

Unseen64 has recently been given the opportunity to interview the legendary audio designer Grant Kirkhope, most notable for his work with Rare (GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Piñata and more), he is currently Audio Director for Big Huge Games. As we can read on Wikipedia, before joining Rare in October 1995, he played for two bands called Syar and Maineeaxe where he played guitar, and already knew Robin Beanland, another Rare composer. Continue to read below to know more about his memories on the development of the Banjo series and other Rare tales!

U64: Thanks for your time Grant! Would you like to introduce yourself to our readers?

Grant: Hello, I’m the Audio Director at Big Huge Games in Baltimore, prior to this I worked at Rare in the UK and was lucky to work on many of Rare’s big titles over my 12 years there.

U64: In your time in the games industry what were some games you’ve worked on that were never released, or that changed drastically throughout there development?

Unseen Features, Unseen Interviews

Unseen Interview: Gregg Tavares

As we can read on MobyGames, Gregg Tavares has worked on many of our favourite games, as Wild 9 and Crash Team Racing for the PSX, Gex for 3DO, Locoroco for the PSP, Zombie Revenge for the Arcade, Afro Samurai for the PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360, along with some more obscure (and unseen) ones, as Disruptor for the M2, Terminator vs Robocop for the NES and Project Y for the PS2. We had the chance to have a short interview with him, to talk about his time in the gaming world and asking for some unseen tales on the projects that he worked on.

[Interview by EWJ]

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

Gregg: My name is Gregg Tavares, I’ve been making games for over 25 years starting on the Atari 800 all the way up to the 360 and PS3. I’m currently at Google working on adding technology to web browsers to make it easier to play games in them though both the WebGL and Pepper projects.

U64: You’ve been in the Games Industry for a while now, in all of your time working with games, out of all the games you’ve helped develop which games development stands out the very most to you?

Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: the removed Face Mapping

As many of you may already know, RARE planned to insert an interesting feature into Perfect Dark: thanks to the Gameboy Camera, you would have been able to photograph your face and your friend’s faces to use them as the face of PD characters in the single player campaign (as enemies) or in the multiplayer mode.

Unfortunately, due to the numerous acts of gun-shooting in American schools, RARE decided to remove this option from the game, to don’t create controversy. A game in which you could have been able to kill a character that had the face of your real friend, would probably have been too much for its time. Here are some screenshots of the removed Face-Mapping mode, perfectly working in the beta version.

Beta Face Mapping

Using the N64 Transfer Pack with the Gameboy Camera attached onto the back of the N64 controller, this message would have appeared on the screen.

Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: Beta Multiplayer

And now we can move on to the beta multiplayer of Perfect Dark.

Beta Multiplayer

One of the most interesting rumors for the Multiplayer mode of Perfect Dark N64 is the one about plans for the game to have an online mode too. During the initial planning there were some ideas to develope Perfect Dark for the 64DD and to use the built-in modem of the add-on for the Multiplayer mode. However, due to many problems the 64 DD was delayed for months and years, and eventually this peripheral was never released outside of Japan. It seems that Rare even though about a special cartridge with an internal modem (as used already by another game, released in japan. See the picture above), but as you can imagine the online structure would have been difficult to develope and soon the idea was scrapped.

Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: Beta Weapons

A journey in the evolution of the various weapons in Perfect Dark!

Beta Weapons

In this screenshot you can see that Joanna is holding a very raw / early version of the Falcon 2 / Magsec. The way the weapon is raised is very interesting as it’s not possible to see it like that in the final.