Status

Unseen 64 Community Forum Test!

As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are trying to find the best way to have a new U64 Forum without the main problems that the old forum had, especially to have it on the same server as the main website and the risk to lose all the discussions (as it happened when we had to delete the old forums) . We collected all your feedback and even if there are some concerns about using Facebook Groups as a community forum, there are some nice features that are super useful for us and we’d like to do a test to see how it will goes.

So we created the Unseen 64 Community Forum with FB Group group, to work together to search for beta and cancelled videogames, to discuss about them and to get in contact with other unseen games fans. You are free to join and post new discussions, ask for help to other unseen games fans to find and share more info, screens and videos.. what we’ll be able to achieve? If this test will be successful, this group could be the new official U64 Forum! We are waiting for you :)

unseen 64 forum 2014

 

The new U64 Forum?

U64 Forum

Do you miss the U64 Forum? We are trying to find the best way to create a new forum, but we need your feedback!

As the old U64 forums were on the same server as the main site, they used a lot of resources and to moderate them was time-consuming.. also, as the U64 forums had to be removed from the U64 server, they are not accessible anymore.

So we are thinking about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum: that will not take any resource from the main U64 server and even if U64 will go down again, at least Facebook will stay online and the “forum” will be accessible (almost) forever.. what do you think?

We will collect all your feedbacks and decide what to do! Leave your comment below and tell us what you think about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum :) 

U64 back online, state of the site and suggestions!

As you can see, after months of problems and downtime, Unseen 64 is finally back online, with a new (lighter / faster / responsive) template and a lot of changes, even if some of these are not visible to most of you. The old database was too big and heavy, we had to clear it, to remove the forum (that almost no-one used anyway), to remove hundreds and hundreds of users accounts (if you wrote an article with your old account and now your name vanished, let us know so we can add you back as the authro!), uninstall many heavy (and not-so-useful) plugins, to add a new security system (so don’t try to log in the current site with your old U64 account, as you could get banned if the username does not exist anymore) and many (?) more.

What is still missing and what we would like to do:

  • Find a new form to add user-created articles (the old “wiki-alike” system was too complex and heavy for the server, almost no-one used it but spammers, so it was a long work for us to clean spam and bad, really bad-written articles)

  • Find a decent Advertising network to add a few banners to be able to pay the server cost for 2015 (for this year we are ok, but for the next year our current and optimized provider asks about 280$ a year, this site needs a lot of resources). If you have any suggestions, please leave a message below! We had Google Adsense in the past, but they banned us because we often talk about leaked prototypes and rom-hacks

  • Try to archive at least 1 new game (beta or cancelled) every month

  • Clean and improve current articles (as far as i can, i’m italian so probably my engrish will never be much better than this)

  • There are still HUNDREDS of emails and messages that we need to reply to, i don’t know when i’ll have the time to reply, but i’ll try to do it :P

Unseen 64 will still be limited to beta and cancelled games up to the seventh generation of video game consoles (AKA Xbox 360, Wii and PS3) for the complex reasons that you can read in this post. I already have some GBs of screens / videos / info about beta / unreleased games (from before the current gen of consoles) that are still not in the U64 archive (or elsewhere?), so there will be a lot of work to do and many years of potential updates.

Any suggestion, comment, compliment or insult are always welcome ;P At the moment comments are moderated, you need 1 approved comment before the next comments will be published automatically (again, even with spam-filters we had too many spam-comments on the site). 

Croc was born as a prototype for a new 3D Mario game with Yoshi as the protagonist

Croc was born as a prototype for a new 3D Mario game with Yoshi as the protagonist:

“The end came when we pitched to do a 3D platform game, the likes of which had never been done before. We mocked up a prototype using Yoshi. It was essentially the world’s first 3D platform game and was obviously a big risk – Nintendo had never let an outside company use their characters before, and weren’t about to, either. This is the moment the deal fell apart. We later made that game into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC, which became our biggest ever game in terms of sales and also in royalties, since we owned the IP.”

Taken from Eurogamer’s article about Argonaut Software