The great people at Retromags have found and shared the first issue of EGM, dated May 1989! Are you unseen-geek enough to find some beta screens in it?
“This issue was incredibly hard to come by on Ebay, I believe in the past 3 years of running Retromags, I have maybe only ever seen it listed 3-4 times. I hope you guys enjoy this release! A big thanks goes out to Meppi for sacrificing his Mario Kart play time to clean up the scans of this issue. I would also like to thank everyone who donates to this site, those donations help us acquire these rare gems for preservation. As this issue is now scanned, I have re listed it on Ebay for selling. We will be taking the money won from selling this issue to acquire more missing EGM issues.”
I was browsing Assemblergames.com Forum and I saw this topic about a 64DD version of Super Mario 64. It looks like a Mexican gaming magazine had the chance to try a demo a Super Mario 64 with faster loading time on the 64DD. Not really important though, it was just a demo that Nintendo made for demostrating 64DD’s loading time. (the Edge scan below, was just an April Fool joke)
I have just found out that GamesMasterLive have got permission to upload all the magazines scans of the old Game Master Magazine, starting with the first number, dated January 1993. You know what this mean? Lots of pages too search through for beta screenshots! I did not find any interesting beta image in it, but maybe you are luckier (or just know those games better than me). You can download the scans from here: www.gamesmasterlive.co.uk Only the first number for now, but we’ll wait for the next ones!
“Issue 1 launched with a bang weighing in at a hefty 148 pages, considerably more than many of its rivals on the market at the time, also GamesMaster Magazine was packed to the brim of that oh so magical 90s gaming with reviews of Sonic 2, Desert Strike, Lemmings and many more top titles, the whole magazine was flawless and captured the heart of the TV show to a treat, the layouts were impressive to especially the reviews section it had the TV shows review booth written all over it and as each new series of GamesMaster would air the theme of the magazine used to change to what ever the show was boosting out at the time.”
In 2002 Team ICO began to work on Shadow of the Colossus, initially with the WIP name of “NICO“. The NICO concept can be seen as an early design of the final game, were some of it’s core gameplay ideas were already exposed. You can read more about the NICO Concept in here. After Shadow of the Colossus was officially announced, various trailers and screens were shown during the development of the game, and in these media we can still notice many differences from the final version.
In the gallery below you can see some of these screens and videos with early versions of the colossi that you can fight in the final game. Also, you can notice some colossi that were never used in the game, probably because Team ICO did not had enough time to finish them all.
Thanks to Team Ico Gamer Blog we found out the “official reasons” why some of these colossi were removed:
Unused “Bird” Colossus: it was too similar to Colossus #5 and Colossus #13, also the team encountered difficulties with collision detection.
Unused “Phoenix / Ostrich” Colossus: it turned to be way overpowered and it had to be fight in an huge arena, because of its attacks.
Unused “Spider” Colossus: Team ICO was not able to implement a good way to let the player to hit the legs of the Colossus with the sword while guide the horse between them.
The “Bird Colossus” was seen in the desert, maybe it was an early version of the one that we can fight in the lake in the final game. Another unused colossus had a “worm-alike-mouth” that maybe we had to enter into to find the sigil. In a screen we can see a beta version of the flying colossus (the 13th), with red stripes on his wings, that are not in the final design. There was also a removed “spider-alike” colossus, somehow similar to the aliens from “War of the Worlds” or some enemies in Half Life 2. Other colossi that were never used in the final game looked like a “dragon”, a “boar”, a “bull” and an “ostrich”. We can feel that Team ICO spent a lot of time to design the colossi and created many versions of them before to chose the final ones.
The video of the “Secret Garden” was taken from a beta demo: you can notice that the garden design is different from the one in the released game. Also, Pikol was able to pass across the broken bridges and closed passages in the same PSU demo, to find more interesting differences! Check the 5th video to see all his finds! Also, umjammerlammy and wwwarea modded Wander in this version to see if the temple was solid and had a nice trip at the top of the beta “Secret Garden” (check the 6th video).
Even Wander / Wanda, the protagonist of the game was changed through the development: in the original NICO concept, it looked more like the character from ICO, but while the game evolved in SotC, Wander became more and more like the final design. Some beta designs of Wander show him with horns, yellow pants and a blue shirt. This beta model was still a WIP, probably used just to test the gameplay before the final design was chosen.
In February 2009, Pikol from the Team ICO Gamers Blog was able to find an unused area in the Eastern section of the world that is still hidden in the final game. This area remains hidden by clouds on the game map and usually it’s not possible to reach the place without any GameShark codes. This zone was probably meant to be used as the “arena” for one of the removed colossi.
Also, originally there was meant to be a “secret alternate ending” in the game, that would play if an Ico save was on the memory card. This alternate ending was scrapped because Team ICO felt it would be unfair on those who never played ICO to never be able to see this different epilogue. You can read what happened in the removed ending at Team Ico Gamers Blog!
Thanks a lot to Robert Seddon and CoalarDrake for the contributions and props to TIGB for all their researches on the game! HUGE props to Unclejun for sharing various demos of the game, that were an awesome way to explore its early versions and learn more about their differences!
Unseen does not stand only for the differences between the beta and the final release of a videogame, but even for changes from different region versions too (usually from Jp to Usa, or viceversa) . It is not unusual, in fact, for a game converted for another market to be different from the original title. Here you will find small articles with comparison shots for these differences.
HELP! Do you like these articles? We are searching for a new U-Changes Editor to search comparison screenshots with the differences between the Japanese and American / European versions of released games. Are you an expert about imported games? This is your dream role! Send us an email and we’ll be happy to hire you in the U64 staff :)
Comparison list:
Pikmin VS Pikmin: Pikmin is an Real-time Strategy game created by Nintendo. Pikmin was one of the first Gamecube games, as well, using some concepts from Mario 128 (one of the first Gamecube Tech Demos). The Japanese version of Pikmin has some differences with the American one. Also some options are only available in the Japanese version.
Wario Land: Shake It Vs. Wario Land: Shake Dimension: Wario Land Shake It is the 5th installment of a Wario Land game, released in the console called Nintendo Wii in the year of 2008. Many miscellaneous stuff in the European version is different from the Latin America version, and also sometimes is different from Japanese version.
Wonder Boy in Monster World VS Monica’s Gang in Monster Land: This article lists the differences between one of the 3 games, and it’s original counterpart, which are Turma da Mônica na Terra dos Monstros (Monica’s Gang in Monster Land) and Wonder Boy in Monster World. Aside from a graphical change, the games are nearly identical.
Super Mario Bros. 2 VS Doki Doki Panic: Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as Doki Doki Panic in Japan) is little more than a port of a game that had no relation to the famous plumber at all. In the original version of the game, it actualy had an opening scene.
Zettai Zetsumei Toshi VS Disaster Report: Disaster Report (known as SOS: The Final Escape in Europe, Zettai Zetsumei Toshi in Japan) was released in Japan for the PlayStation 2 in 2002 and in 2003 was released in North America and Europe. When they ported the game for the US and PAL market, they decided to change the hair color for the main protagonists.
Street Combat VS Ranma: Street Combat is the american version of a japanese beat’em up dedicated to the famous anime Ranma 1/2. Because the manga series was not yet released in the USA, they completely changed the characters, the title screen and the introduction, but the animations and the special moves were left basically the same.
Team Fortress 2: is a team-based FPS multiplayer video game, developed by the Valve Corporation. In Germany the game was censored, but in a funny / interesting way: the blood and gore are replaced with random objects and plastic-alike characters.
Street Of Rage 3 VS Bare Knuckle 3: While translating this game from Japanese to American and European audiences, Sega of America altered it significantly. The most notable changes were that the miniboss character Ash was removed because he was a stereotyped homosexual
Soldier Of Fortune 2 in Germany: To avoid being banned in Germany, the German version of the game had all in-game violence and gore removed and placed the story in a parallel universe which was populated by cyborgs. These changes were not accepted at all by the players’ community, and the game was unsuccessful.
Contra vs Probotector: Even though the arcade version of Contra was distributed in Europe under the title of Gryzor with its graphical content unchanged, Konami were forced to changed the in-game graphics for the NES version, replacing the human characters with robotic counterparts, when it was released in the PAL region
Power Blade VS Power Blaze: Power Blade was a NES video game that was released in America in 1991, by Taito. The game was released a year before in Japan (1990), with the name “Power Blazer”: the style was really different from the USA version… [Article by monokoma]
Fatal Frame VS Project Zero: In the japanese edition of Fatal Frame (Project Zero), the protagonist, Miku, was a schoogirl. In the American version, she is more mature and with casual clothes, as a way of making her seem more ‘appropriate’ for the American Audiences. [Article by yota]
Perfect Dark Usa VS Japan: When Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64 was released in Japan, they changed Joanna’s face, to match a more oriental one. If you have more images from the Japanese version, please send us an e-mail or join our forum, it would be really appreciated! [Article by monokoma]
Wario Ware Twisted VS Mawaru Made In Wario: “Unseen” does not simply mean that which was never released as a complete game, but it often also refers to graphical and textual changes in during the process of translating titles for the western market from Japan. These things are never seen in the west! This artticle, dedicated to Wario Ware Twisted begins a new section of Unseen 64, which is meant to observe what changed have been made in the localizing of a game, be they cultural or simply accidental. [Article by Ultraman82]
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