Unseen News

RS Links: Sands of Destruction VS CERO ratings

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Sands of Destruction is a RPG for the DS that was developed by Imageepoch and published by Sega on September 2008 in Japan (planned to be released in America in January 2010). Robert Seddon has linked us to an interview that  Game Set Watch had with Image Epoch president Ryoei Mikage, and Sands of Destruction Sega producer Yoichi Shimosato, in which they talks about some changes that were made to the game, because of the CERO ratings:

This may be a difficult question, but the high concept of the game, where you are a character who is being compelled to end the world, is very interesting. But why take that and add some very, very traditional RPG fetch quests and anime characters and things like that?

RM: So this is probably the same in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., but the ratings boards — for Japan, it would be CERO — have been cracking down on the game industry. It’s been becoming more and more difficult to make games that are kind of out-there.

So, for this game in particular, Kato’s original scenario actually came back saying… In the final game, humanoids are ruled by the ferals, the beast men. The humans were food for the beast men in the original scenario, and there were scenes in there where the beast men would actually eat the humans.

Obviously, that would be rated Z in Japan. But for an RPG on the DS, the board felt that it would be more appropriate for the actual gameplay content to be something that even kids can pick up and play.

That’s unfortunate — if you had U.S. or Europe as the target market, you would not have had to change that. You would have gotten a Teen rating, maybe, but it certainly would not have been for mature audiences only.

YS: I agree. In my opinion, because this game was made specifically more for the Japanese market, it was appropriate the way we made it. But if it was more geared toward the Western audience, then, as you said, the original idea would have been more fun and compelling.

 

Werewolf: The Apocalypse (Saturn) now leaked!

About a month ago SEGA Saturno in cooperation with Hidden Palace, announced a fundrising campaign to be able to release a “new” prototype for the Saturn. A couple of days ago, finally they reached the amount needed and they released Werewolf: The Apocalypse, a playable demo of the cancelled action RPG that was in development by Capcom in 1995 / 1996!

You can download the file at Hidden Palace

Huge props to the Sega Saturno community for their efforts in preserving all these lost games for the sega consoles! You can find more info on this release at Sega Saturno (in Spanish).

 

RS Links: the unheard burps in Tapper

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As we can read on Wikipedia, Tapper is a 1983 arcade game released by Bally Midway. The goal of the game is to serve beer and collect empty mugs and tips. Robert Seddon has linked us to an article on Edge Online, in which they talk about some removed content from the game:

Sometimes good ideas turn bad when you actually hear them. Such was the case with the burps in Tapper. Wanting to take advantage of a brand-new digitising chip from Texas Instruments, Meyer and Morrison thought it would be a good idea to add a burp every time a character finished a drink.

So, to create the source audio, a group from the Tapper team went into a conference room with a bunch of soft drinks, beers and microphones, and just started burping.

Looking back on the misguided notion, Morrison says: “We put it in, and it was disgusting.” The game was so fast and the drinks were being finished so quickly that you heard constant belching. In the end, the duo didn’t bother installing the burps or the TI chip, although Morrison admits that passing by their office during that phase of development was a treat for all within earshot.

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Team Fortress 2 Alpha (Team GabeN’s) Leaked

Do you remember the post about the Team Fortress 2 Alpha “Invasion”? Well, a guy named 4emoman on BetaArchive seems to have leaked this build sometime ago, but his files went down later. Another user named Popbob has re-uploaded it on Rapidshare but on its release there are some unuseful files such as an MP3 in the TF2 folder that seems to have nothing to do with the release or Team GabeN’s tools for compiling maps.

LucaPM has uploaded a cleaner version of the Team Fortress 2 Alpha with batch files for opening the game with “advanced” options such as opening it with the control console. You can find this new leaked version at LucaPM’s blog or you can read more about this release at Team GabeN’s Wiki.

Below you can see a video of the alpha in action: