Mega Man 64 Transition Prototype

Software porting has always been a thing in digital entertainment. Seeing a game originally released in one, single system would oftentimes be on another in a year's time. That was especially true in the 32-bit era and before it. These days, nobody wants to deal with old stuff from a year before and publishers, who hold the keys to the game's IP, are particularly privy to that and so you see console ports of the same game across different platforms on the same day. 

Mega Man Legends was absolutely no exception to the former, but I'm guessing it was more Capcom wanting to recuperate some of the costs of the original game, since it wasn't the huge commercial success that they wanted. The effort put forth onto this port wasn't stellar either. Last month, me and a couple friends of mine released an early prototype of Mega Man 64 online to some fanfare for Legends enthusiasts like myself.

What you see above is actually an abridged version of the three and a half hour surprise livestream that I did before we released the ROM online. Not having satisfied with how it turned out, I went trimmed it to about 25 20 minutes, making it more entertaining and watchable. Also included are some gags you might want to check out. There are also annotations captions that deliver context behind certain prototypical happenings in the video (turn on [CC]).


Okay so, Mega Man 64. It was sloppily ported. It's a messy, compressed recreation of the original experience. Certain visual effects are nerfed, frame-rate suffers in places that should never/didn't happen on PS1, vaselined textures that undermine the sharp, visual charm of the game, and my personal favorite flub (see 4:50). Having grown up with the original PlayStation version, I see how this port undermines all that was great about Legends. You could also see why I wasn't initially thrilled about this prototype.

A few months ago, me and friend Pixelbuttz and Protodude were tipped off of a prototype build of Mega Man 64 that was in the hands of a collector. The gentleman acquired it from a friend of his and decided to share the knowledge of its existence to AssemblerGames, a now-defunct video game enthusiast forum.

In addition to the reasons I've explained earlier, I wasn't that particularly interested in this build because this would have represented the point in time Legends was being ported to the N64. Having realized that exact sentence I've just said, I figured this might be interesting after all. It wasn't until this collector had posted a video of the prototype in action on YouTube that it finally piqued my interest.

"KANTAN" is suppose to mean easy in Japanese.

The prototype included a menu on the title screen to access a scenario flag switch, a stage select of sorts and the ability to enable or disable certain scenarios in the game. Following this revelation, Pixelbuttz scrambled to gather as much funds as we can to beat out any competition interested in the prototype.

When I say "scramble," what I really mean to say that PB had just frantically made a GoFundMe page not realizing what hurdles it would take to overcome the complications that came about and what a royal pain-in-the-ass lesson it would be to learn not to repeat again (never resort to GoFundMe, stick with PayPal only). PB contacted 100,000 Strong to spread the word of this effort to bring more people to contribute. We just wanted the ROM of this thing, because we knew logistics would complicate things with the physical goods (and, boy, will we get into that in a minute).

Within a day or so, we acquired $400+ until the dude offered us to pay him that amount and he would compensate for the rest of the cost. Cool guy.

We thought we were over that mountain -- until the package arrived at customs. Some asshole basically told the bloke that he not only had to pay a certain expensive fee to get it delivered to his residence, but that they were essentially taking the package hostage until that amount was paid for. He actually had to drive to there and explain what the hell it was. Thankfully, it was all resolved and soon after that he dumped the ROM. Now it's all preserved for eternity.

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to the recovery of this prototype. We now have another piece of Mega Man Legends history preserved and we can also see what a complete mess the port already was in its transition from PlayStation to N64. If you'd like to see what is being found so far, go hit up the prototype's page at The Cutting Room Floor.

Rockman Neo [Mega Man Legends demo] Analysis Video (With Annotations)

(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.

Pictures by GodDamnProtoman.

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's Mega 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!

Prototype Time! | Mega Man Legends 2 (English Debug Prototype)

Last March, Protodude approached me with a few Mega Man prototypes he had on his possession. The first was a proto of Mega Man X5, the third being a "late"-English localization build of The Misadventures of Tron Bonne circa months before it's North American release, and the second in-between...

...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.

Buried Game Treasure: Next Generation Magazine CDs

(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 as Mega 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 much content 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.

So I was a guest in GetMeOffTheMoon's Mega Man Legends 2 Debug Live Stream

Sorry for not updating this past couple of weeks folks, I've had a terrible sinus infection after traveling upstate the last two weekends. I do have something cool and quick to post about though.

The kind folks at GetMeOffTheMoon, the famous Facebook page campaigning for the return of the tragically-cancelled Mega Man Legends 3 (long story), as well as being the number one active place for all cool things Legends and some other Mega Man media, occasionally, had invited me and another friend of mine (PixelButts) to participate in a live stream discussion about a English debug build of Mega Man Legends 2 that was leaked earlier this year at Protodude's Rockman Corner.

I'll elaborate the exact details at a later blog post but earlier this year Protodude had informed me of the prototype he had in his possession and he commissioned me to test it out and document any and all differentiations between the debug build and the final English release. The result was this thirteen-minute video showing off just how much fun I had producing the video, and the start of the English Debug Prototype page at The Cutting Room Floor. Lots a different things detailed in the entry that I'm sure will be of some interest to fans of the game.

Despite my inexperience in recording verbal live streams (and how painful it was watching the footage afterwards) its was quite a lot of fun, and I hope I'm invited to another stream with the gang in the future.

Here's the link, for some reason Blogger won't play nice with Hitbox.tv embed so you'll have to click that for the steam. Have fun.

Re-ripped and remastered Mega Man Legends 2 trailer from E3 2000 (@60FPS)

Man, whatever happened to Mega Man in 3D gaming? Scratch that, whatever happened to Mega Man period?



I remember back in the day when I saw some shots of Mega Man Legends 2 on an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly and getting super stoked about it. Aside going online at Capcom's USA website and staring at weird screenshots, I got onto GameSpot and watched that particular E3 2000 trailer you see above on a shitty-ass Real Player or something similar. This was when Mega Man was still relevant in gaming. Now he's stuck to merchandise, and he hasn't had a game since 2010. Bummer.

Oh well, so what existed before as a low-ASSolution mess of pixels is now remastered -- from the same promotional VHS source as the Resident Evil Zero trailer I posted having in my possession several days ago -- as an 1080p60 HD quality trailer. 

That's right, 60FPS. We have YouTube to thank for enabling 60FPS video playback for everyone to experience. Be sure to watch it on Google Chrome, for now. Stay tuned for more videos of this source from me. =)