Everyone making quality videos on YouTube needs to have a splash page about them. They need to address viewers' questions like, who are you? What do you have to offer? Why should I care about the trivia you're spouting to me? Well, that last part is your prerogative but let me explain for a bit. If you've read what's on my blog here, you'll get a taste of what I'm gonna post on YT. In fact, if you've really been paying attention you'll notice the two actually go hand-in-hand. Hey, I gotta do something on the side besides my full-time job you know. But that doesn't mean I'm just gonna throw something together, throw my hands up and say F*** everybody, I'm giving you guys quality videos of annotated game playthroughs (because I hate any LP commentary that isn't Game Grumps) in 1080p60, archived digitized VHS/LD videos (also in 1080p60, I've got a big back catalogue of such media that I'm looking back into to represent them in the best possible quality for archival), prototype coverages (OK, just playthroughs of certain game prototypes, oftentimes me doing YT-poop style ones. You'll see my highlights on the splash video), information videos about certain subjects in certain games (usually my favorites like Mega Man Legends and Resident Evil, to name a few), some glitch videos, and of course I aspire to do more from those subjects. So without further ado, here's my brand new, mint-chocolate chip backgrounded splash video.
Here's to a good start in 2016, too. I'm gonna make it my new years resolution to be more dedicated to this blog in the following year than I have been all this year. Can my infinitesimal audience help me drive myself to that resolution?
Because either I kept forgetting or I just stopped caring, but tonight I'll just shut up and provide you with a 30-minute loop sales video for Resident Evil 2, recorded in 60 frames per second and upscaled to 1080p HD.
Dated November 16, 1997 (so it says on the front label), the footage seen here presumably comes from the fan-called "BETA 2" build that was burned around the time this sales video was sent out to retailers. The familiar, iconic Resident Evil 1.5 trailer theme plays throughout the loop, and it contains some differences from the final version (one thing comes in mind is the unused bear taxidermy in Chief Irons' creepy torture dungeon). As I had mentioned earlier this year on my Capcom 2000 VHS video article, this is the second of three tapes I purchased last year in an eBay auction. The remaining tape I have would be Fighter's Edge.
I'll say nothing else till a question gets asked. Enjoy.
Update: Holy crap, today is my blog's one year anniversary too. Happy Birthday to The Game Informant! You can already tell by previous posts, but I'm a big fan of Resident Evil. Classic Resident Evil if you may and Resident Evil 2 is among one of my favorite Capcom games and probably one of the very few in the franchise that actually leaves a good, thrilling impression on me as a player today. Its infamous first draft and highly publicized revisions have also earned itself the reputation of being one of the most high-profile games in the subject of prototype and unreleased video game content today. So for the night before this year's Halloween, we'll briefly go over a video I published nearly four years ago that details two unique similar music pieces hidden in the sound code for Resident Evil 2 that can't be heard normally in the game. The music pieces sound as though they are actually variations (which I decided to call them) of one another, which you can listen to below on the embedded link.
As we hear in the video, the first variation sounds as though it's a rough mix, as it contains the least instrumentation. The second variation sounds much more refined, containing at least one more instrument playing in the track. Presumably, this would have been the final draft before it would be disused in the game's sound code. Sometimes, music pieces are composed for specific moments before scenes in a movie, TV show, or game is completed. When a scene is sent to the cutting room floor, usually everything is cut along with the scene. In this case, these particular music tracks were left behind as the scenes had been ditched in favor of the form we got in the final form. How these would have fit in the game remains unknown. Seeking for answers, I spoke to lead Resident Evil 2 music composer Masami Ueda on Twitter in which he gave the following response:
Ueda-san vaguely recalls composing these two tracks for the game, but was able to recall their purpose. They were meant to be a theme for Sherry Birkin, the young girl who accompanies lead female Claire Redfield in their escape from Raccoon City.
The pieces were originally discovered in a PSF zipped folder at Zophar.com, a game emulator and hacking resource website. A PSF. (PlayStation Sound Format) is a sound file that often holds the synthesized sound data in various PlayStation games. Cracking the format required computer hacking and disassembly skills. The individual who originally ripped the tracks from the game's sound directory and uploaded them on to Zopher in the first place is currently unknown. I'd like to thank that individual for finding these bits. Wanna know what my Halloween treat this year is for you guys? If you're a Resident Evil fan like me, I think you'll like it a lot. Stay tuned.
Three months!? Gosh, I've been out for a while. I've been in the mood for prototype/unreleased games again lately. This time, I've taken a listening to a track I've ripped and uploaded on YouTube a year ago, from a prototype version of Mega Man X5 dated May 1, 2000.
The biggest difference to note about this track is in the middle. The first fifty seconds are consistent to the final version, but after that the main verse (or bridge, whatever's the right term for it) becomes different. If you ask me, this version emits the vastness of space much more than the final one (though the stage actually takes place in a planetarium, surprise suprise). Out of all the tracks in the proto, this one is my favorite. The prototype itself contains a large number of rudimentary elements indicative of its progression into it's final form, all of which you can find them documented at the Cutting Room Floor. The US preview trailer, unveiled at E3 2000 convention in Los Angeles, CA that year, appears to be from this build of the game.
If you want to see the whole VHS rip in it's entirety, you can find it here and reminisce about the old days when Mega Man (and Capcom) was a bigger brand than it is today.
Ever watch a show or a movie and notice a song in the background you thought sounded remarkably familiar to another song you've heard elsewhere before? I have. Which is why I made the unoriginally-titled Song Similarities. I'm sorry.
Inspired by the Sonic Retro forum's "This Song Sounds Like X" thread, I've began making a short clip, of hopefully several to come, that highlights interesting similarities between a pair of songs that strike me as strong coincidences that particularly resonate with me.
Now, one thing Id like to note. I'm not trying to persuading my audience that "OMG (insert artist) must have done music for (insert IP), this is like MJ/Sonic 3 all over again!" I am just simply creating these videos of what I find are trivially interesting that I nonetheless feel would be worthy of bringing up
In this specific comparison, a BGM from one scene in episode 22 of the hit anime Slam Dunk features a melody structure that sounds quite similar to the present version of the level Tidal Tempest Zone from the popular game Sonic CD. Yes, it may seem like a generic beat today but one of the Sonic CD came out in Japan on September 23, 1993, while the Slam Dunk episode aired on TV Asahi in Japan on April 16, 1994. Any possible referencing, if at all, would have to have occurred after the game's Japanese release.
In a time when Street Fighter and Mega Man where the biggest names in Capcom's arsenal of video games in the early 1990s, 3D polygonal games had just begun to be a thing and polygons consisted mostly of origami figures that resembled moving pyramids and stationary chunks of sausage blocks, figuratively speaking. BIO HAZARD, or as commoners call it Resident Evil, would become the company's first bold experiment working with 3D polygons that would pay off in a major way.
Let's set the clock back to late summer of 1995. The PlayStation was already less than a year old in Japan, while BIO HAZARD had been in development for some time already. At this point in time, the game had just moved on from its "co-op" experimentation period (which not much is known about, and if I can even say it was co-op, actually) and into the period where survival was mandatory and isolation horror would shape up the final form it would assume.
On stage, director Shinji Mikami and supervisor Masahiko Kurokawa would present this direction to the silent audience of hundreds at the V-Jump Festival '95 in Japan.
This footage has been around for a long time now and in fact some of you might even recall seeing it on Inflames' website or other familiar locale. For the purpose of preservation (and because I can't stand the quality of the original rip anyways), I've once again taken upon myself to purchase the original VHS source to bring to you remastered footage of the segment in 1080p60. So the narrative is set in the near-future (for the time of the game's release) of 1998 at the northwest side of the United States where S.T.A.R.S, a police force stationed at Raccoon City, is called in to investigate a series of bizarre murders committed in the outskirts of their city. Upon receiving no word from Bravo team, the team that was initially dispatched the previous evening to find any clues to intercept the supposed killers at the Arklay Mountains, Alpha team arrives swiftly to locate their missing members.
I have an A.A degree in Journalism and I can tell you that that's a really terrible newspaper headline for a news story. Not that mine for this blog post is much better.
To their horror, they discover the grisly remains of their compatriots. The vicious dogs responsible for the deaths appear abnormal, and set their eyes and noses on the remaining Alpha members, killing one of them by the neck, and chasing the rest to a nearby abandoned mansion full of zombies and other horrific monstrosities. Now taking desperate refuge inside the establishment are three (six?) remaining S.T.A.R.S members: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker. They don't know where Barry Burton is or that Rebecca Chambers, who had one hell of an horror fest with an escaped convict the previous night, is somewhere inside. Thanks for leaving them behind, go to hell Brad Vickers.
OK, whatever. Cool story.
*Until REmake came and destroyed every single RE game that
came before it (Electronic Gaming Monthly #80, March 1996).
Upon the unveiling, comparisons were already being made between Resident Evil and the preceding Alone In The Dark, released four years prior. The two share similar horror and gameplay philosophies, but the key difference being that Resident Evil's graphics kicked ass* according to Mikami. He wouldn't be wrong though, it did prove itself as an immersive horror game with an intricate level of graphical detail into the polygon character models and CGI backgrounds even during the advent of the pre-rendered computer graphics craze in video games at the time.
The V-Jump prototype is dated
August 4, 1995.
So onto the prototypical context of the footage itself. First off, only a handful of areas of the first floor mansion are actually playable and the camera positions in some of these areas are drastically different. For example, in one angle, the camera appropriated to the first floor door leading to the first zombie is positioned behind the banister from the second floor (which I find the angle itself interesting, actually).
Jill Valentine is stands at the front stairs on the first floor of the mansion. She doesn't say much other than "I'll stand watch here." Nothing else. Interestingly, despite her presence in this prototype, Jill isn't actually seen in the embedded footage above. My guess is that in between the aforementioned previous prototype version and the leaked August 4th prototype, her model had just been redone from her previous, implementeddesign. But that would mean that there had to have been a build of that that existed at some point.
One of the elements I find more interesting is the lack of a finalized set of voice samples for Chris, possibly in Japanese. Presumably, this build was created at a time when the game was still planned to feature Japanese language performances. There's even a set for Jill as well. Take a sample (for more, check out the prototype's page that I sometimes update at The Cutting Room Floor):
Chris: | Jill:
Aside of that, and a snake that shows up from almost out of nowhere at the exit to the garden, there's not much else in the build that provides more of the game than the later protos exhibit. Beyond this prototype, there are at least two more other prototypes (three if you include the Trial Edition) that proceed the progress of the game's development. For now however, the focus is just for this build only. Sometime in the future, I'd like to explore those other builds. If there is a prototype of this game that you'd like for me to explore and document in detail, I'd be happy to.
I'm more motivated to start and complete projects based on the level of demand for their release, and in fact I've invited YouTube users to like this comment I've made about remaking a video about the Japanese dialogue that never materialized in the final game. You can too. Otherwise, hit me up at Google+ or Twitter if you want me to talk about it more.
Or I don't know, I'm just trying to be clever. Anyways, one of the best ways of preserving and observing video game prototypical media is collecting footage of them in action on game catalog tapes. Sega Video Magazine is a good place to start. They're a series of game catalog VHS tapes distributed in Japan by Sega Enterprises that promoted and centered exclusively around Sega's own games and games from other publishers during the Mega Drive and Sega Saturn eras. A lot of these tapes have footage of games that haven't taken their final forms yet, which oftentimes can exhibit strong, interesting differences in the content from the final releases. The spectrum of this can range from minor to extreme. NiGHTS into Dreams... doesn't really fall on either side, but lies more in the left-side of the middle. The clip below covers the world unveiling of the game that took place inside the Tokyo Prince Hotel on March 27, 1996 in Japan. Following that segment is an on-screen interview with some of the then-most respected developers at Sonic Team within Sega, who were also responsible for Sonic's greatest games ever. Producer and main programmer Yuji Naka, director Naoto Oshima, and co-game designer Takashi Iizuka take screen time to tell us their stories as to how the beginning of development came about. Unsubbed.
Scattered throughout the interview is footage of the game in it's early stages of development, including the first level Spring Valley that has a different level and object layout. Many of the sound effects differentiate from the final and even the music sounds unrefined, particularly The Dragon Made a Loud Scream. Turn on the video annotations and it'll elaborate the specifics to you.
I've said this many times already but Nico Nico Douga is quite the treasure trove of Japanese gaming history, featuring various promotional videos of various games spanning several decades starting from the 80s. I remember that Super Mario Bros. 3 video that was a big hit with proto enthusiasts in 2011 after it was found on NND. Hopefully, someone will be kind and interested to provide a translation of the interview above.
(Originally published at the now-defunct DASH Republic and Tumblr in 2013. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because goddamn it I can, that's what.) At a time when the third dimension was taking over the gaming landscape in the mid-1990s with 3D polygonal-based consoles, 2D-native characters of previous generations were making the leap to 3D, often to mixed results. Franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy made the jump to 3D and closely followed their 2D gameplay concepts.Mega Man's transition wasn't familiar. In what could be called one of the boldest transitions to 3D gaming ever, Capcom completely re-imagined the very core of Mega Man for his first major entry in the world of triangular-shaped polygons and textures. No longer did you select your level on a menu. No longer did you jump and shoot across side-scrolling stages and fight eight robot masters and anthropomorphic robot animals, or fighting evil scientists and rogue reploids. It wasn't gonna be the same Mega Man we knew. Not anymore.
Ah, hell nah. This was Mega Man Legends. You explored inside abandoned ancient dungeons. You shot at creepy bloodthirsty robots that live in said dungeons. You talked to goddamn talking monkeys and legomen. You live in an airship that crash lands on an island that becomes invaded by pirates who gave you psuedo-Team Rocket vibes. You fought a vaguely effeminate, psychopathic cyborg that wants to invoke a skynet-like apocalypse on humans that aren't even humans but "Carbons." You can kick cans over to a bakery and get free money. You could kick animals if you wanted to. In 3D.
So you have these awesome concepts that don't fit into the traditional Mega Man formula and yet it identifies itself as such. How do you market this game to your core fanbase, and the mainstream at large? Well, you create a demo and you include it in the same demo disc of a highly-anticipated sequel to your biggest-selling PlayStation game, with the director's cut release of that game in Japan. Enter Rockman Neo.
Capcom included this demo in the second disc of first edition copies of the Japanese version of Resident Evil: Director's Cut in 1997. The video above demonstrates the several major differences in gameplay, audio and visual content in this pre-release that the annotations in the video will elaborate over. Mega Man Legends went through many name changes in its development. First, Rockman Neo in Japan, whereas the English name would officially be known as Mega Man Neo when it was showcased at E3 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia; followed by the final Japanese name Rockman DASH. Mega Man Nova (really?) was a likely candidate before someone at Capcom USA or Japan recalled a boring lecture from their astronomy classes in school and figured how lame the name sounded, and finally settled upon... you should know by now.
Yes I know its 35 minutes long (!) but it's full of information, tons of beta facts, and fun stuff that supplements background to this demo. Plus, there's references to TauVertex'sMega Man Legends Abridged series. So take a seat and enjoy all the juicy details this demo has!
If you're even more interested in Rockman Neo, you should check out the Rockman Neo page give at The Cutting Room Floor! Lots of fascinating material found inside the games you thought gave you everything it offered!
...an English debug prototype of Mega Man Legends 2, dated July 12, 2000. This was by far, surprisingly, the most interesting of the three Mega Man prototypes that Protodude shared to me behind closed doors. I held onto this for a while before it was leaked onto the net, mostly due to video production reasons and to start writing a page for this at the The Cutting Room Floor.
So wait, wait, wait. What exactly does "debug" mean? What is it for and why should we care about this, aside of serving as a view of the game's development? So (to my understanding) debugging basically means to look for bugs, meaning any defects, in the whole game's programing and fixing them all of them as much as possible. This particular debugging prototype was used to assess the programming of the game during Rockman DASH 2's localization process into Mega Man Legends 2.
Oh dang, one month? Yikes. I hate working retailer with randomized schedules.
The face of a rabid rapist.
If there's one reason I love playing Capcom's fighting games. They're a blast to play with the bizarre variety of characters and the insanity these characters enable with their super-hyper-variable-attack whatever moves. To over it briefly, Norimaro is this Japanese sketch character created by comedian Noritake Kinashi who, in the game, represents neither Marvel or Capcom but of the Japanese Nippon TV channel in Japan. He appears as a regular playable character exclusively in the Japanese arcade and console versions of the game, but was removed in all the overseas releases despite most of his taunt text being translated into English. A few years ago, I stumbled upon this video on Nico Nico Douga of Capcom staff introducing Norimaro to Japanese TV viewers in the Japanese version of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter. In this segment, Norimaro performs a... questionable attack on a hapless Spider-Man. Just see with your own eyes.
What he's doing is a kancho, a Japanese prank that involves putting your index fingers together and sticking them up someone's ass, usually on friends. So now that you that fairly useless detail, please do not perform this in public. You'll probably be thrown in your local area's sex offender registry at the very least.
What should be noted however, is that this particular move was actually removed from the final version of the game. Word of hearsay goes that a Marvel representative had seen this build and furiously demanded its immediate omission. I'm not really finding any concrete sources that validate this report, but you can bet in the event that I do I'll immediately update this post with the full scoop. Needless to say, he's probably the only reason I'd play ever play Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter.
I've never played a TwinBee game before nor do I even know how any of the games play. In fact, I've only actually just watched the footage below after rendering this clip, as it was a recent request and I had only just decided upon rendering and uploading it yesterday. And with that out of the way, here it is:
Unseen64 has an brief article this particular entry of the series that was planned for PlayStation but was unfortunately canceled in early 1996. Not a whole lot is known about it, let alone why it was canceled, but judging from the V-Jump 1995 footage, TwinBee Miracle was to be an quirky 2D RPG by Konami based on its top-scrolling shooter roots with colorful characters to meet and some cartoony worlds to explore. It does look like an RPG I would have played. Its always too bad to see games that seem to have great potential get canceled. Not to be too off-topic but the greatest gaming tragedy I can think of off the top of my head is Star Fox 2, the sequel to the SNES Super FX megahit of the same name. Thankfully, there are prototypes of that game out in the wild internet for everyone to play and see for themselves the marvel that game is. I'm glad to have made somevideos out of it too. Hopefully, we'll see a build of Miracle in the future.
(Originally published on 1UP.com and Tumblr. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because I don't give a damn anymore.)
The front disc envelope of Next Generation (Sept. 1997) featuring Cupid probably praying for a giant meteorite to drop on to Mother Earth anytime now.
Remember those times when you bought a shrink-wrapped magazine from a supermarket or a bookstore, and you got a free disc of cool stuff inside them? Back then, the internet was this underdeveloped, yet still awesome tool to find the latest news on anything in general at the time, especially gaming news. Yet, anything through a crappy dial-up connection (remember that too?) would take forever for things — like videos — to finish downloading onto our PCs, so for a lot of us we resorted to these discs that came with image and video previews of upcoming games.
A few years years ago, I discovered an ISO on my hard drive called the Next Generation - September 1997, an example of disc containing such cool content. These were discs that were distributed in copies of Next Generation Magazine when you bought the magazine at the time. Included in this particular disc were lots of low-quality 320x240 MOV videos of PlayStation, Sega Saturn, & Nintendo 64 games that were featured at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) at Atlantic, Georgia in mid-June of 1997.
I've found many clips of many different games in their prototype forms, including Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Mega Man Neo (Mega Man Legends), and Sonic R, all in their pre-release glory. The following videos have been edited to correct the contrast issues the videos had when it was first produced. They looked terrible (view this comparison: twitpic.com/9d1v6q).
This old early prototype footage of Crash Bandicoot 2 features several differences that indicate how early into production this game was when it was first announced at this convention. The video above features brief annotations that go over said differences, including the original HUD font used from Crash 1, different object placements, etc. There's more footage where that came from too (give it a watch too).
This footage of Sonic R features what appears to be a slightly (don't quote me on that, watch and decide for yourself) stage layout at the end of the stage. Different HUD (this was a common beta trait from those days, wasn't it?), and character icons, camera angles, etc. There might be a better quality version on YouTube somewhere, but I didn't find it until after this video was uploaded then.
Next up, sp,e old prototype footage of one of my closest-to-heart games ever, Mega Man Legends, which was known at the time asMega Man Neo. Just like the first two, this video includes annotations that accentuates the various rudimentary differences that indicate just how early into production this 3D Mega Man title was when it was first quietly announced at the time. It's amazing seeing how muchcontent and concepts were experimented on this game, it doesn't even strongly resemble the final game know today.
Last but not least, another valuable video I found was an video interview of former CEO of Nintendo of America, Howard Lincoln. Topics discussed in this interview include the Nintendo 64's early performance in the west of that year and their strong relationship with Rareware, the developers of Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and GoldenEye 007. You know, really great games.
Backside.
As the internet grew to become the multimedia world it is today, the necessity of CDs packed with videos shrank as sites like YouTube and Google Video took over to allow users, fan communities, and media and game companies to upload videos without worrying about their own bandwidth and file sizes. I remember Nintendo Power coming packed with DVDs of trailers and such, but that was like in 2006 just as YT got around. YouTube and the internet has really made our lives easier.
Before I forget, I can't remember where I found the ISO in the internet originally, but in case the download source is no longer available, here's an ISO of the disc that's now readily available at the Internet Archive. I hope you guys get something neat out of this.
Capcom E3 Sales Presentation (Long Version) No, I don't have the short version.
So I got a seasonal job last month. It ate up most of my time but it was worth it for the moolah. Now I'm back, and I'm starting the new year off with a nice and hella lateChristmasgift to my tiny readership. Last July, I purchased three VHS cassettes from eBay containing promotional videos of various Capcom games from the late 1990s. One of them simply says Fighter's Edge, but the other two held greater interest to me. For this post, I'm only going to post only one of the tapes as it may be of value to a broader range of Capcom fans, especially to those who loved their games in the early-2000s. The other I'll be unveiling on the 29th of this month. The fan-base might just like it. ;) Actually no, that didn't came until Halloween of this year. Yikes, long delay. The E3 Sales Presentation (Long Version) tape includes several trailers for games that were announced in 2000 including Mega Man Legends 2, Mega Man X5,Onimusha, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Power Stone 2, etc. Not only does it contain a trailer for RE: Gun Survivor, but a trailer for Resident Evil Zero on the Nintendo 64. Quite the heavy hitters there.
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