Nintendo

Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Faxanadu [NES – Unused Sprites]

monokoma
14-01-2009
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Faxanadu is a platform adventure game for the NES, that was developed and released in Japan by Hudson Soft in 1987. In 1989, Nintendo of America released the game as a first-party title in the US and in the European market in 1990. Faxanadu can be considered a side-story of Xanadu, which is the second installment of Falcom’s long-running RPG series, Dragon Slayer. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Thanks to Robert Seddon we found out this page on TheInterweb.com, where we can see some interesting sprites that were never used in the game: “‘The IDs of these enemies are 18, 29, 36, 39, 43, 70 (all decimal). Two defined NPCs also never actually appear in the game. The first one is the lovely blue lady with ID 53, the
other one is the child with ID 54.’

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Phantasy Star Zero [DS – Beta / Concept]

monokoma
08-01-2009
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pso-zero-beta

PS0 is the new chapter in the Phantasy Star Online series of games, that was released for the Nintendo DS the 25 december 2008 (Japanese version). When SEGA started to work on the game, various prototypes and different character designs were tried before to choose the final one. In the earliest stage of development, they recreated the Forest area from the original PSO Dreamcast on the DS, with Boomas and the famous Dragon. It seems that initially items / mesetas were dropped on the field when an enemy was killed, instead of coming out from the final-box that appears only after all the enemies are died, as it is in the final version of the game. Probably SEGA decided to remove the single-enemy drops because of the limited graphic capabilities of the portable console (with too many 3D objects on the screen, the game could have slow down too much). In other concept arts and screens, we can see a “more stylish” design for the characters, that looked more like the one from the original PSO.  In one of the  artworks there are even some “flamed-head” enemies with guns, but there are no enemies like that in the final game. All these images were show at the Phantasy Star Zero Christmas Party that Sega organized to promote the game on the 25 December 2008.

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Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Mother 2 / Earthbound [SNES – Beta / Concept / Unused Stuff]

U64 Staff & Contributors
22-12-2008
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Development on EarthBound took place as a joint effort between Ape, Inc. and HAL Laboratory, Inc. and was designed by Shigesato Itoi. The total development time for the project was five years, much longer than was initially expected. The first design concepts for the HP boxes were to make them like pachinko balls and have them fall off the screen whenever a character was damaged. However, this was later changed to the “rolling counter” HP boxes because the pachinko balls did not work so well when characters had large amounts of HP. [Infos from Wikipedia]

In the video, subtitled by the lovely Starmen crew, we can see a collection of beta scense, in which Ness has no backpack, and we can read some interesting facts about the development of the game. In the image gallery there are some unused sprites, like Everdred’s ghost, a climbing King, a Starmen Capsule, an unknow flag and a red beating heart. You can read more about these unused sprites in here. From the various concept arts that were in the MOTHER 1+2 Art Book, we can notice some nice differences from the same scenes in the final game, like a fortress on top of Dungeon Man’s head, a giant elephant that keeps up the Dalaam city, early design of Dr. Andonuts’s lab and missing snow in some areas. You can read more about these concept arts in here.

Also, some unused animations from the opening were found in the rom.

Thanks to Gabriele for the contribution! (scans from Japanese magazine ‘Game Peer – vol. 4’)

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Arcade, Dreamcast, Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD, Others, Playstation, Sega, Sony

Mortal Kombat 4 [ARC DC N64 PSX – Beta]

U64 Staff & Contributors
17-12-2008
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dc_mkg

Mortal Kombat 4 is considered the 4th intallment of the Mortal Kombat series, 6th if you count MK3U and MKT. Released in 1997, it was the first MK game to use 3D graphics. It was first released in the arcade version and it would be the last arcade MK made. It was released on the N64, Playstation and PC in 1998, ported by Eurocom. An updated version was released on Dreamcast in 1999 called Mortal Kombat Gold, which was identical with the exception of better graphics, added players and a few more stages.

A new character named Belokk was intended to appear in Mortal Kombat Gold, but was cut from the released game. The developer of the game, Eurocom, sent information about the game with Belokk to Game Informer, and as a result, six screenshots of him were published. According to Ed Boon, Belokk was cut due to time constraints during development. Despite the mention of Belokk’s scrap, he was still rumored to appear as a secret character. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Actual secret characters can be accessed via rotating a specific box for a normal character, however when a player do this to Tanya’s box a question mark that was rumored to unlock Belokk appears, but it unlock nothing.

Since it was the first Midway 3D fighting game, the staff had many difficulties while in development, partly due to the fact the staff had doubled in size. Which means many changes were made and many interesting aspects were taken out.

Differences from the arcade version to the N64 version would include: Lower pixel rate and additions such as Goro being a playable character, extra costumes, and another arena called Ice Pit.

Pre-release trailers show Reptile and Fujin with God-O-Mite as their name in the lifebars. More then likely this was before they got to the name detail.

Kitana, Noob Saibot and Kano were orignally going to be in MK4. Kitana was then changed to Tanya. Noob saibot was taken in and out many times and replaced with Reiko. Jarek replaced Kano and for some reason was left with Kano’s moves, which caused many fans to complain because Jarek was hardly original. Noob Saibot can be accessed in the N64 version by a cheat, but was never in the Arcade. These characters were taken out mainly because Midway wanted more new characters in the game.

The hidden character Meat was originaly intended for testing.

Thanks to Pachuka and Sir_Brando for the contributions!

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