Unseen News

In the Youtube Channel of Cshit87 we can see a couple of interesting videos about some beta characters that have been found still in the game code.

Darkel

Darkel is a character dropped during the development of Grand Theft Auto III. Little is known about the character, except that he was to be a revolutionary urchin who vowed to bring down the city’s economy. One mission involved stealing an ice cream van, using it to attract pedestrians, then blowing it up. This mission was given by El Burro in the final version of game, to kill a group of gang members. Darkel was also originally expected to give out Rampage-esque missions.

Darkel had his voice recorded for this part by Bill Fiore, but was never used in game. However, the character remains listed in GTA III’s manual’s credits, as well as having a character texture retained in the game’s data files. The official GTA III website suggests that Darkel was to reside in the Harbour Tunnel that runs underneath a portion of Portland. [Info from Wikipedia]

Novy

Who’s Novy? Novy was the original protagonist before Claude. But just like Darkel, novy was dropped out of the final version. He was discovered and put in-game by Ka-Boom.

Screenshots from beta version of the game

Esperanto

Old beta footages 

We are happy to welcome Scintitillating to the Unseen 64 Staff! You can already read his first article in the REZ page, that now has finally a description! There are many games in the Unseen Archive that dont have a proper description yet, but sooner or later, we’ll finish them all.. thanks to your help too! 

In this chapter of the Robert Seddon Links serie, we can find some interesting pages about restored content for Torment and Arcanum, a couple of computer RPG. The links of interest are:

Mods for Planetscape: Torment with previusly unused stuff.

• www.rpgwatch.com/show/newsbit?rwsiteid=1&newsbit=9246
• http://readme.spellholdstudios.net/PSTFixpack_Readme.html
• http://readme.spellholdstudios.net/PSTUB_Readme.html

Unofficial patch for Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura:

• www.rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=23720

That restores:

‘Added race icons for Dark Elves, Ogres and Orcs. Now you can distinguish them from their brotherly races. Note: icons were in the game, but somehow were left out.’

‘Restored HEF2 (Half Elf Female 2) and NPCJay (Jayna Stiles) portraits from the beta version as the ones in the final are clearly inferior to them.’

‘Fixed Nicholas the Bartender at Madam Lil’s. He was using a generic bartender dialogue, while he had a proper one. His dialogue is rather funny, he gives you free drinks when you pay for a girl, and when you get drunk enough you get an option to sexually harass him, his comments are priceless (and random!).’

‘6 missing endings are now obtainable. These are the Death’s Champion, the Righteous Hero, the Just God, the Dark God, the Quiet God and the Undecided God.’

‘Orcish thugs will never have Potassium Nitrate (which is an unfinished item) in their inventory.’

‘Balanced Boomerang now can be bought at quality blacksmiths. The developers somehow forgot to add it in.’

‘Quality Revolver now can be bought at gunsmiths. It was forgotten as well.’

‘These are leftovers of the development. There are also leftovers of old interface and many many other things, eg originally there was a combine skill. It got replaced by technology schematics system, but there’s still art for it.’

Thanks a lot to Robert Seddon for these links and huge props to all the people that have worked on these mods! 

Advanced Wars: Under Fire [GameCube Battalion Wars Beta]

Sonic Adventure – Removed Dragon Boss [By FullM3talGamer]

OoT Beta room in Ganon’s Castle? [By DeathBasket]

Conker Twelve Tales N64 Beta E3 97 [By adonfjv]

Super Mario Kart – Vanilla Lake 1 beta soundtrack [By marshallsuperplexi]

Zero7 is trying to find one of the 3 different demo-disks of Shadow Of The Colossus, that should have some levels from the E3 (2005?) beta where the secret garden was different. You can read the original topic in the U64 Forum in here.

The demos with SotC beta were:

– September 2005 issue of PSM
– October 2005 (#97) issue of Official US PlayStation Magazine
– The “Playstation 2 Holiday 2005 Demo Disc” that Sony sends out

Does someone know where to find one of these? Any ISO leaked?

On YouTube we can find a couple of videos that seems to show this beta-garden:

Even in this other video there should be some differences (can you find them?):