New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

People at Kotaku have made an interesting comparison betwen new and old MGS4 trailers, finding some changes in the style of the cutscenes and a couple of different 3D models. This is already a good start for future MGS4 unseen.. i wonder how much of the old trailers will be cut or changed in the final version of the game. So, who will be the first to finish MGS4 and then compare it with all the old media to find some good betas?

“Late last week, Kojima Productions released a (mostly) new MGS4 trailer. This is, it wasn’t new new, but rather, “new.” Kojima Productions went through and made various changes, alterations to assets that appeared in earlier trailers. But what kind of changes? Are they changes for the better? Or not? Above, is a comparison. On the left is footage from an older, yellowish MGS4 trailer, while on the right there’s brand new footage.”

Link: Metal Gear Solid 4, You’ve Changed, Man

The U64 Staff is happy to welcome a couple of new team members, that will be of great help in the archiving work for the gaming archeology: say hi to Randy 355 (Unseen Researcher) and gmprunner (Jr Writer)! I’m not that good with this type of things, especially in English, so just pretend that it’s cool. Stasera pizza per tutti!

Hello there, Unseen64 readers! As some of you know, I, Borman, run Past to Present Online. Not being content to just passively find images of betas and unreleased games, I hunt them down, and try to bring you new media. Monokoma has been kind enough to allow me to basically advertise my site here, in exchange for some good information for all of you! So today, I bring you a special preview copy of THQ’s WWE Wrestlemania 21. The disk, marked as a Test Build, is marked with 1/31/2005, burn time: 2:36PM. The same build was featured on IGN.com around the same time, as you can see similarities, such as the shadow errors. For now, I give you this image, and invite you all over to my place to check out some more! Past to Present, much like Unseen64, lives because of you, the reader, so keep on seeing the unseen!

About a month ago (but i have read it just today), VanishedOne has write an interesting article about hidden data in the Final Fantasy 7 disc. It starts like this: “There are various 2KB DAT files in the Final Fantasy VII (PSX) FIELD directory that have no obvious function (2.00KB being uniformly small) and don’t feature in the 7mimic map list. (I’m not even sure they use the expected headers or LZS compression.) It’s possible that they represent the remnants of maps that were never to be.

 Filenames permitting reasonable guesses based on similarities to known maps’ names:

– BLACKBGA, BLACKBGF, BLACKBGG | BLACKBG maps are used for other things besides debug rooms, so these could be for text-on-a-black-background that was later moved elsewhere.

– BLIN69_2 | Presumably an alternative version of Shinra Building floor 69; maybe Square were going to use bloodless/bloodied map files, then decided one file with a blood toggle would do. (Cf. COLOIN1, the normal Gold Saucer arena lobby, and COLOIN2, the version that appears following Dyne’s rampage-and those don’t even have bloodstains to differentiate them.)

[…]

There’s another 2KB DAT, FALLP.DAT, which does show up in 7mimic (right), with no dialogue; I assumed it had something to do with the FMV clip FALLPL.MOV, which is the destruction of the Sector 7 pillar, but in fact it’s a still from the parachuting clip… on Disc 2. This gets a raised eyebrow, not least because FALLP.DAT consists almost entirely of 00s; maybe FALLP.MIM was meant to be some kind of static backdrop without a walkmap, etc.”

I’m not sure to understand what this all means, but it sounds uber-beta-cool. Props to him! You can read it all in VanishiedOne‘s blog: Face Of The Moon – Hinted Land