As we read in his Unseen Interview, Mr. Mark has recently acquired a copy (the last and only one?) of Kartoon Kombat, a cancelled fighting game that was in development for the Genesis. Sadly the ROM was damaged in such a way that it will most likely never be playable, but a friend of Mark (known as ZZap! on most forums) was able to extract some interesting text. This is what he was able to uncover:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: The offsets that are in this article work only with Pokémon Ruby v 1.0 (USA). If you want to know which version is your game, you can use the Rom Header Editor Advance (RHEA). You can find RHEA at any Pokémon hacking website. The text can be seen with Advance-Text (A-Text) but you have to convert the offsets from HEX to DEC (for doing this you can use Windows Calculator). For the unused rooms, you can use Advance Map (A-Map).
I have found some unused dialogs and rooms in Pokémon Ruby. None of them are used in the final version of the game but they are still hidden in the game code!
It seems like the game’s early project name was POKéMON AGB (AGB is the official product code for the GBA).
Unused Text n° 1 (offset 1A0712)
In May 2008, mrmark0673 found a working prototype of Hoppin Mad, an unreleased NES game developed by Elite. The game was previously unknown to the public and when it was found, the NES community was really happy to check all the infos and screens that were freely shared online by its new owner. We had a little interview with Mr. Mark, to talk about Hoppin Mad, the preservation of unseen games, the delicate relationship between collectors / developers / gaming community, the future release of the game and some of his personal tastes. >> Read the full interview
In the last couple of months we have added some stuff in these Unseen Archives: 100 Bullets, Red Faction BEAST, Project Katana (Red Steel), Bioshock, Skies of Arcadia, Orchid, The Unseen, Earthworm Jim [PSP], Starcraft Ghost, Buggy Boogie [N64], Gran Thef Auto 4, Left 4 Dead, Vectorman [PS2], Final Fantasy 7, Resident Evil 1, Dirty Harry, Four Horsemen Of the Apocalypse, Infinity [GBC], Hellgate, Spore, Battletoads [GBA], Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 7 and we cant forget a new, useless Unseen Uncomic + a new Link (Debug Unused Wikia) in our unseen web list!
Do you remember the unused japanese text that Robert Seddon found in the American version of SaGa Frontier (along with other interesting stuff)? Well, now thanks to another great translation from GlitterBerri, we are able to understand what it all means! Also, we are able to wonder where it could have been used originally. You can read the full text translation (by GlitterBerri) with comments (by Robert Seddon) in here:
Lost Text of SaGa Frontier @ The Face of the Moon
Lost Text of SaGa Frontier @ BerriBlue
Here are some of the most interesting parts:
[… ] The blood of mystics is different from your human blood.
It is not mere substance.
You are inheriting Orlouge’s spirit power.
He killed a woman, you see.
Knocked off a regular human girl.
He didn’t intend for that to happen.
He didn’t want that at all.
So he used his own power to prevent it.[…]One of the lost scenes from Asellus’s quest: not much new information (why would it bother Orlouge, not the most pleasant of souls, that he unintentionally killed a human?), but her being told to accept her fate like this would have added a little more depth to her predicament.
[…] Be safe, White Rose….
Please protect Lady Asellus.Thank you, Princess Kurenai.
Another scene cut from Asellus’s quest, showing why Kurenai was included in the game; in the final version she’s still present in Rootville, but after greeting Asellus she serves no function in the plot at all. This escape scene apparently follows the unused scene in Asellus’s bedroom (0x1A9 below) and leads to arrival in Mosperiburg (0x1F3 below).
[…] Furdo1 has come.
What do you think of my true collection?Perhaps ‘Furdo1’ is another placeholder for the developers.
So: Furdo would have had a larger role in the game, Nashiira and the Bio Research Lab would have had more of a purpose, and not only Zozma but also Ciato and Rastaban would have had more developed roles in Asellus’s quest.
Huge props to Robert and GlitterBerri for this!