LiamRproductions has recorded a video-article in which he talks about the development of Kid Icarus Wii, a prototype that was in the work at Factor 5. It’s still unknown if the project will ever be finished or not, but it seems that after the closure of the american studios, F5 are still working on some Wii games in Germany . You can check the video article below, thanks to Liam for the video!
Is it too hot to work? Does the summer call you to the beach or to the mountains for a lengthy retreat? Well, the Unseen 64 Staff is going in vacation, too! From today (8th of August) this site will be in “Summer Break Mode 2009”, we are going to relax somewhere around the world and dream about beta games while we are swimming in the ocean or walking in the woods. Don’t worry! We’ll be back in September with all the updates and news from the unseen gaming world. In the meantime, there are still lots of things to do while we are away:
– Look and read: Check our archive of beta and cancelled games and read our articles.
– Contribute: Would you like to help the U64 Archive? Read how you can help us to preserve more beta screens, videos and info!
– Interact: Join the U64 Forum to discuss about unseen games with other geeks!
– Share: Do you have a website or a blog? Spread the unseen! Add www.unseen64.net to your blogroll or in your links page, write a post about lost games, talk about U64 with your friends, and share your beta-geekness. If more people know about this site, we could have more contributions and the archive can grow with more screens, videos, and info!
– Play: Are you going to buy some new games for this summer or in the next few months? If you buy them from Play.com, from Zavvi, from The Hut, from Sendit or from Playasia using our links and banners, they give us some spare money! For you it’s free, for us it helps paying for the U64 server. Thank you guys :)
Thanks to everyone that supports U64 with love. See you all very soon!
Robert Seddon has linked us to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that was published on Wired. In one of his answers, Miyamoto talks about the removed coop mode that was supposed to be included in Mario 64:
Wired.com: You said you had the idea to do a four-player Mario game for a long time. Had you ever actually done any prototypes of such a game on other hardware?
Miyamoto: With each (Mario) project, we do different experiments. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. We’ve done games in the past where we’ve had the idea and worked on it. But with side-scrolling games, the challenge was that the screen continues to scroll forward, and what happens when the other player falls off the screen? With Mario 64, we had an experiment that took advantage of the idea of the screen growing larger and smaller depending on how far apart the characters were. So we had Mario and Luigi running around in that 3-D world, but we ended up not using it. […]
Wired.com: Why did you decide not to use that Nintendo 64 game with Mario and Luigi?
Miyamoto: Ultimately, it’s the idea of processing speed and working within the constraints of the hardware. The DS Mario 64 had a mode with something similar to that, where you were playing with four characters.
I wonder if he really meant the original “Mario 64” when he was talking about Mario & Luigi in the prototype, as he could have got confused with “Mario 64 II”. Infact, his phrase is similar to an old comment about M64II (as we can read on Super Mario 128 Central):
Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We’ve been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system. – Shigeru Miyamoto on Mario 64 II, November 1998
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!
GlitterBerri has finished translating the Chrono Cross Ultimania interview in which we can read various information about some plans they had during development that they never used in the final game! You can read the full interview on BerriBlue or in the Chrono Compendium.
Around the time we began development we had plans to do a short game where we were thinking you’d be able to recruit lots of allies and enjoy the variations in the messages and events. To top it off, we’d planned to have it so that you could befriend anyone in town. Using both the battle and the talk button, you’d gradually increase your number of allies. But we limited it at the extent you’d expect, first at 64 characters and then in the end it was decreased to 45.
Actually, we’d gone as far as talking about giving each character an ending. Each ending would fork into 3, depending on the conditions, resulting in 120 in all! … When talk turned to who was going to make all of these, the idea soon died out.
There were several events that weren’t disarded, but just couldn’t be put in due to time constraints. We wanted to have events for all the allies. We had a variety of thoughts concerning Zoah, for example.
The developer responsible for the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube, Silicon Knights, has had the title of its next game leaked. Their latest project is named ‘Siren in the Maelstrom’. The leak came about when videogaming24/7 got their hands on a release from Canada Telefilm, an organization that lists projects approved for government grants.
No further information has been revealed so far but Silicon Knights has since issued the following statement regarding the matter – ‘Silicon Knights is busy working on several exciting projects. Unfortunately, it is too early to disclose any details.’
The “interesting” part for unseen-lovers is that many obscure projects from Silicon Knights that were announced in the past were later vanished, as a rumored game with Sega and the Eternal Darkness trilogy. Could this be their next unseen game? We’ll have to wait and see..