My Super Mario World: beta Hack Project is going well, here is some new stuff I had just put together. Based off of old screenshots, I have made a Ghost Castle level to show you what it may have looked like in the actual beta game. The ground was made by a person named Someguy. By the way, the SMB3 breakable bricks are not beta, they are inserted into the game with hacking, though they were seen in screenshots of the beta. It is only assumable a spin junp could break them. Here’s a screen comparison (at the top the beta hack, below the original beta screen):
Mr.Do for the GameBoy? A released “beta”
In the infinite web of the internet, sometimes we can find interesting memorial about lost gaming stuff, like this page from the developer of the GB version of Mr.Do, where we can read some fun facts about the game: “Mr.Do! was given a very limited release in Europe – in its unfinished form! [..] The game was meant to have a link-up cable option, where two players had to battle it out on a much bigger map. This was never completed due to problems with the development kit I was using (this ‘menu option’ has been removed). Also the baddie intelligence was never finished – they don’t ‘search’ the playfield correctly or ‘stumble’ beneath falling apples as they should. There was also supposed to be two modes of display – an authentic ‘full-screen’ version (with tiny graphics – see the pause mode below) and the scrolling, high detailed one that appears in the ‘end product.”
Team Fortress 2: second prototype
At the Team GabeN wiki website we can read some interesting informations about the development of Team Fortress 2: “Valve’s second concept for TF2 featured a Sci-Fi theme with none of the characters or even places being related to the Half-Life story. Following the Half-Life 2 leak, CS and HL1 ports were released by Anon. The Counter-Strike port included two out-of-place player models under the names “temp_player.mdl” and “alien_commando.mdl”. Those are a Human and the Alien Commando and they’re the only known/available TF2 models we have from Valve. Any other asset made for that game simply doesn’t exist or is not available to the general public.”
You can read more about this @ Team Fortress 2 (GabeN) or you can see more TF2 beta stuff in our archive page for the game
Unseen Interviews: Lost Levels
As you probably already know, the Unseen 64 Staff is not the only group of beta geeks that loves to talk about the cuts and changes in the gaming development: online we can find some other great sites dedicated to the beta-researches. Often these groups of gaming archeologist are hidden under the fame of the traditional gaming websites. It’s not always easy to find places with informations about the lost games, but if we can linking togheter all these resourches, we can have a better look at the beta world. The cooperation between the different websites related to the unseen games can help us to better archive, retain, filter and protect those gaming informations and documents that could be forgotten. With this series of interviews we would like to try to introduce the various beta-websites that exist out there, to know a bit more the staff behind them and their thoughs about the gaming unseen. In this first interview we have interviewed Frank Cifaldi, also know as RedEye, the editor in chief of Lost Levels Online. Read the rest of this entry »
Prince Of Persia: Prodigy [Beta – Xbox 360 PS3]
Prince of Persia Prodigy (also know as Prince of Persia Zero in its early beta days) is an action-adventure and platforming game developed by Ubisoft Montreal. It was released on December 2, 2008 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Proof of conception for this new title was found in September 2006, when a file that was leaked to the internet was found to contain concept art for the game, although Ubisoft didn’t announce the game until May 2008. [Infos from Wikipedia]
In january 2008, Surfer Girl released some screenshots from an early prototype of this new Prince Of Persia, in which the main character was followed by a mysterious flying girl. As you know, the final game has not flying-girls that follow the prince. As we can read over at GameSetWatch, thanks to “David Pettitt” we learn that this version was “a target render that the team pitched the game with”. It seems that Ubisoft showed the full Target Render at a Vancouver SIGGRAPH event. Below you can see the full video!
Some other rumors even say that originally Assassin’s Creed was meant to be part of the Prince of Persia series. Probably Ubisoft created a lot of different ideas for the project, before choosing the final one.
Even the released game has some differences from the official beta screens that we can find online. As noticed by FullMetalMC:
- Different colors for the Hunter
- Elika’s clothing is a bit different
- A removed enemy
- Prince’s sword has a alternate design
- Different Tree
- Elikas magic has less detail
In an interview with Prince of Persia Producer Ben Mattes, we can read more about Elika’s development:
To further answer your initial question of how her design evolved, at the beginning of the game, one of the things we were thinking about was — should she have more of an autonomous personality? Should she have a little bit more autonomy as a gameplay mechanic?
So we developed ideas of her sometimes taking the lead, or her sometimes wandering off and looking at key game points, or her basically just taking initiative. Some of them only got as far as concepts and brainstorms, some of them actually got as far as prototypes, but what we quickly realised was there was a lot of design that had to be done in terms of simplifying Elika’s involvement to make sure we delivered on that promise that she never gets in the way and she’s never a negative.
We had instances where we had interest points in the world — little objects that would attract her attention, and if you idled for a few minutes she would wander over to one of those objects to look at it, but then the player would, y’know, haul ass to the left and Elika’s wandering over there looking at that thing and then he has to stop and wait and go and get her and bring her back, and it was these things that detracted from that overall core message, which is more important than anything else.
[…] initially we kicked around the ideas of Elika being a young girl, but that brought up the whole babysitting thing, and then we toyed very briefly with the idea of Elika being a partner like a brother or a father figure or something, but it didn’t have the kind of sexual tension that’s fun to play with. And then within a couple of months we had the design of Elika almost fully fleshed out as it exists now.
Thanks to Surfer Girl & Grahamx227 for the contribution!
Images (Prototype):
Images (Beta):
Video: