Unseen News

Unseen News

Warcraft 2: development weirdness

U64 Staff & Contributors
28-05-2008
No Comments

warcraft2lo.jpg

“After the first Warcraft and when we were talking about Warcraft II, there was an idea for about a week where we’d open another portal open and have the Orcs invade the modern-day world. We had this whole cut-scene we were talking about where it was going to be dragons and F-16s and firefights and stuff. And we were like, “Man, that’s going to be weird. That’s going to suck. That’s not going to be Warcraft.” – Bill Roper, Games for Windows, Jan, 2007.

Imagine how that would have been. It sounds a bit like Warhammer 40,000, doesn’t it? 

Unseen News

The development of Grand Theft Auto 3D

monokoma
28-05-2008
No Comments

Some time ago, IGN made an interesting article about the history of Grand Theft Auto and in one of the chapters, there are some informations about the development of the first 3D version of the game: “Bringing GTA into the present tense hit its first roadblock when the DMA crew pulled Body Harvest’s 3D code off the shelf and found it’d aged badly. Building a whole new engine from scratch didn’t fit the schedule. Renting one did.”

gta3kd.jpg

“Instead of licensing a proprietary game engine, they became one of the first developers to use generic third-party middleware. Renderware scaled fast. A basic Liberty City was up by summer 2000, and a nameless anti-hero – only referred to as “Claude” in a few obscure lines of code – could boost cars and drive around in it. New elements popped in every month. Weather changed. Day and night marked the time. Some jacked drivers fought back. Stealing the right car opened up bonus missions. Multiplayer got a carry-over from London 1961 and was dropped before the design strayed.”

[…]

“Aircraft-based missions, a GTA first, were curtailed. School kids and elderly pedestrians pushing walkers vanished off the sidewalks. Missions doled out by homeless anarchist Darkel got the chop; only his ice cream truck-bomb job survived, transferred to El Burro with the targets switched from cops to rival gangsters.”

You can read the full story in here. For more screens from the beta version of GTA3, check our archive: GTA 3 Beta / Tech Demo

Thanks to Alber Gallegos for this link! 

Arcade, Leaked, Nintendo, Others, SNES + Super Famicom

Killer Instinct [Beta – SNES Arcade]

U64 Staff & Contributors
26-05-2008
7 Comments

Killer Instinct is a fighting game developed by RareWare and published by Midway and Nintendo. Initially released in arcades in 1994 it was later ported to the Super Nintendo. In the gallery below you can notice some early character designs for B.Orchid and Glacius. As they wrote at the Killer Instinct Arena, the earliest version of Black Orchid was a blonde amazon, but a later version of her featured a black outfit. In the final game Orchid wears a green and yellow dress.

Also, thanks to Lucazz we found out that a beta Killer Instinct ROM was somehow leaked online, and it contains many differences from the final version:

  • the orchid stage and the cinder stage have the same beta floor
  • glacius and jago have an unused song
  • the gangsta theme is in glacius’ stage
  • the fulgore theme is in cinder’s stage
  • the menu screen is in a different position
  • the orchid stage doesn’t have the rare and nintendo logos in the screens and the stage side is moved to the right
  • the raptor sprites are corrupted
  • the eyedol bridge stage is in the cinder’s stage, similar of the arcade
  • in the continue screen the song is the same as the menu screen

Thanks to Robert Seddon and Lucazz for the contributions!

In a promotional video of Killer Instinct, embedded below, we can see an early version of the coin-op with some differences:

  • Beta character selection screen
  • Cinder’s name was Meltdown and Sabrewolf’s Werewolf.
  • Some of the combo types were removed or changed, like Mondo combo and Elite combo
  • The voice that announces the stage name is different
  • Some stages were slightly different, like the Tower arena and the Sabrewulf livel

Images:

Videos:
 

Unseen News

Donkey Kong Country 2 for the Virtual Boy?

U64 Staff & Contributors
25-05-2008
1 Comment

With the success of Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo gave Rare the thumbs up for a sequel on the Virtual Boy. This happened just after the launch of the VB and was only at the drawing boards and in developement for a matter of weeks but it was cancelled due to the obvious failure of the Virtual boy itself. At the end of 1995, a sequel of the original game was released as “Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest” on the SNES.

game_10.jpg