Unseen News

The U64 Staff is happy to welcome a couple of new team members, that will be of great help in the archiving work for the gaming archeology: say hi to Randy 355 (Unseen Researcher) and gmprunner (Jr Writer)! I’m not that good with this type of things, especially in English, so just pretend that it’s cool. Stasera pizza per tutti! 

Hello there, Unseen64 readers! As some of you know, I, Borman, run Past to Present Online. Not being content to just passively find images of betas and unreleased games, I hunt them down, and try to bring you new media. Monokoma has been kind enough to allow me to basically advertise my site here, in exchange for some good information for all of you! So today, I bring you a special preview copy of THQ’s WWE Wrestlemania 21. The disk, marked as a Test Build, is marked with 1/31/2005, burn time: 2:36PM. The same build was featured on IGN.com around the same time, as you can see similarities, such as the shadow errors. For now, I give you this image, and invite you all over to my place to check out some more! Past to Present, much like Unseen64, lives because of you, the reader, so keep on seeing the unseen!

About a month ago (but i have read it just today), VanishedOne has write an interesting article about hidden data in the Final Fantasy 7 disc. It starts like this: “There are various 2KB DAT files in the Final Fantasy VII (PSX) FIELD directory that have no obvious function (2.00KB being uniformly small) and don’t feature in the 7mimic map list. (I’m not even sure they use the expected headers or LZS compression.) It’s possible that they represent the remnants of maps that were never to be.

 Filenames permitting reasonable guesses based on similarities to known maps’ names:

– BLACKBGA, BLACKBGF, BLACKBGG | BLACKBG maps are used for other things besides debug rooms, so these could be for text-on-a-black-background that was later moved elsewhere.

– BLIN69_2 | Presumably an alternative version of Shinra Building floor 69; maybe Square were going to use bloodless/bloodied map files, then decided one file with a blood toggle would do. (Cf. COLOIN1, the normal Gold Saucer arena lobby, and COLOIN2, the version that appears following Dyne’s rampage-and those don’t even have bloodstains to differentiate them.)

[…]

There’s another 2KB DAT, FALLP.DAT, which does show up in 7mimic (right), with no dialogue; I assumed it had something to do with the FMV clip FALLPL.MOV, which is the destruction of the Sector 7 pillar, but in fact it’s a still from the parachuting clip… on Disc 2. This gets a raised eyebrow, not least because FALLP.DAT consists almost entirely of 00s; maybe FALLP.MIM was meant to be some kind of static backdrop without a walkmap, etc.”

I’m not sure to understand what this all means, but it sounds uber-beta-cool. Props to him! You can read it all in VanishiedOne‘s blog: Face Of The Moon – Hinted Land 

Super Mario 64 [Short beta video – Different HUD & more?]

Turok 64 [Short beta video — Different Weapon Selection &?]