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.

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.

Get hyped. Old E3 2000 Trailer for Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo 64) now at 1080p80!

Resident Evil games always had some of the most interesting development stories told in video games. Compared to other entries in the franchise though, Resident Evil Zero had a much less chaotic development cycle.

I've already briefed this a bit in the last post, but this game was about to come out late in the Nintendo 64's life cycle and memory wasn't helping. So Capcom moved the game over to GameCube so it could become the gorgeous, bad-ass looking game that it became.

Now, about the footage. If you were a major Resident Evil fan back in the day, you may have seen this particular trailer from E3 2000 before in the past as a really low-res video on YouTube or even back in the day when, even then, it looked like a pixelated mess of squares. Now, thanks to a VHS source I purchased online where this trailer originated from, and for YouTube for finally enabling 60FPS video playback, I can finally now share this 1080p60 HD rip of the trailer that was originally of low-quality for the rest of the world to watch.

I'll get into the meaning behind Capcom E3 2000 Sales Presentation [VHS / 2000] at a later point of time. There's more where this trailer came from too! Stay tuned!

Scans: Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo 64) | Famitsu PS (Japanese) NO. 81 | 5/12.26/2000

Oops. This article was meant for yesterday, and I was working on it then, but time management is a skill I have a lot to improve upon. But here it is, a scan about Resident Evil Zero as it was meant for on Nintendo 64.

Ignore the Japanese text below Rebecca, that's just part of a copyright notice
in another part of the page that is little to do with the game.

Anyways, page 148 of Famitsu PS (Japanese) NO. 81, 5/12.26/2000 gives a small column of their Capcom page about the Item Box function in the game -- or rather, lack of. The ability for your character to drop items in any room, was evident in this version, and the column specifically refers this to Sweet Home's inventory system. Having never played this game personally, I have no clue as to how much both game's have in common (besides the series' roots to the Famicom game).

For those that need a little context, Zero was a prequel to the hit survival-horror franchise that was meant to be the game that carried the same level of ambition and quality its CD-based predecessors had onto a small-capacity Nintendo 64 cartridge. The N64 port of Resident Evil 2 cemented that probability in late 1999. But that's not to say things would go smooth for this title.

Basically, while the game had a much less chaotic development cycle compared to previous entries, the only major roadblocks for Zero were basically both the memory capacity limitations and the timing of its projected release date. The game was simply becoming too big to fit into a cartridge and the hardware transition from the Nintendo 64 to GameCube was fast approaching. The only logical solution was to adapt to then-upcoming sixth generation, and release the game as a GameCube-exclusive in 2002.

As with many of the Japanese I will be posting on The Game Informant, let's hope someone plucky will be willing to translate this article and enlighten us the details of this column. The front cover and entire page can be found below.

Coming up next, I'll post up more scans other some other Resident Evil games from this era of gaming. Stay tuned!

Front Cover of Famitsu PS
NO. 81 | 5/12.26/2000

Page 148