Unseen News

The new U64 Forum?

U64 Forum

Do you miss the U64 Forum? We are trying to find the best way to create a new forum, but we need your feedback!

As the old U64 forums were on the same server as the main site, they used a lot of resources and to moderate them was time-consuming.. also, as the U64 forums had to be removed from the U64 server, they are not accessible anymore.

So we are thinking about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum: that will not take any resource from the main U64 server and even if U64 will go down again, at least Facebook will stay online and the “forum” will be accessible (almost) forever.. what do you think?

We will collect all your feedbacks and decide what to do! Leave your comment below and tell us what you think about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum :) 

U64 back online, state of the site and suggestions!

As you can see, after months of problems and downtime, Unseen 64 is finally back online, with a new (lighter / faster / responsive) template and a lot of changes, even if some of these are not visible to most of you. The old database was too big and heavy, we had to clear it, to remove the forum (that almost no-one used anyway), to remove hundreds and hundreds of users accounts (if you wrote an article with your old account and now your name vanished, let us know so we can add you back as the authro!), uninstall many heavy (and not-so-useful) plugins, to add a new security system (so don’t try to log in the current site with your old U64 account, as you could get banned if the username does not exist anymore) and many (?) more.

What is still missing and what we would like to do:

  • Find a new form to add user-created articles (the old “wiki-alike” system was too complex and heavy for the server, almost no-one used it but spammers, so it was a long work for us to clean spam and bad, really bad-written articles)

  • Find a decent Advertising network to add a few banners to be able to pay the server cost for 2015 (for this year we are ok, but for the next year our current and optimized provider asks about 280$ a year, this site needs a lot of resources). If you have any suggestions, please leave a message below! We had Google Adsense in the past, but they banned us because we often talk about leaked prototypes and rom-hacks

  • Try to archive at least 1 new game (beta or cancelled) every month

  • Clean and improve current articles (as far as i can, i’m italian so probably my engrish will never be much better than this)

  • There are still HUNDREDS of emails and messages that we need to reply to, i don’t know when i’ll have the time to reply, but i’ll try to do it :P

Unseen 64 will still be limited to beta and cancelled games up to the seventh generation of video game consoles (AKA Xbox 360, Wii and PS3) for the complex reasons that you can read in this post. I already have some GBs of screens / videos / info about beta / unreleased games (from before the current gen of consoles) that are still not in the U64 archive (or elsewhere?), so there will be a lot of work to do and many years of potential updates.

Any suggestion, comment, compliment or insult are always welcome ;P At the moment comments are moderated, you need 1 approved comment before the next comments will be published automatically (again, even with spam-filters we had too many spam-comments on the site). 

The unseen games of next-gen? Not on U64

Unseen 64 was born in 2001, from the passion of some italian friends that after some years looking at Nintendo 64 games that never came out or that were released with many differences from the beta version, decided to make an archive about them. We were young and with a lot of free time, it was just for fun that we kept working on U64 until it became the huge archive that you see today.Sadly we are not young anymore: we have families, full-time jobs, bills to pay and other real-life commitments that keep us busy 24/7. We don’t have so much free time anymore to write about unseen games. If we find some free time for our lovely videogames, we prefer to play them, than to write about the ones that we’ll never be able to play! From a couple of years we have already slowed-down the updates for Unseen 64 and there are still hundreds, HUNDREDS of emails, comments, contributions that we were not able to read yet. Also, to keep online our archive there are lots of other technical-related works to do, bugs to fix, servers to keep safe, plugins to update.

The current situation of videogames is much more complex than what we tried to follow in the early 2000: there are games for consoles, there are games for handhelds, there are games for PCs, there are games for smarthphones and there are hundreds of new indie-games announced every day. It’s basically impossible to keep up with so many interesting videogames that could be cancelled or that could be released with many changes from their beta versions.

This is why we decided that Unseen 64 will not cover new games for next-gen consoles (PS4, XBONE, Wii U) and not even “current gen” handleds as the 3DS or PSVita. We would not be able to do a good work when we are already in trouble to cover all the most interesting beta and cancelled games for the “retro” consoles. So Unseen 64 will slowly became a “more static” archive of Retro-Unseen-Games.

Today is much more easy to create a “website” using something like wikis, wordpress, tumblr, blogger and similar free tools so we hope that there will be some young gamers with more free time than us, that will decide to create their “Unseen Next-Gen Games Archive” for all the future beta and cancelled games.

U64 will not be closed. We’ll still keep Unseen 64 updated as much as we can and we’ll try to ready all the contributions that you will send to us, but we don’t know when we’ll be able to reply and to add them. For quick news about beta and cancelled games, we’ll probably share them on Twitter or Facebook, so follow us!

Let us know what you think about this and thanks a lot for you support in all these years! :D

 

Croc was born as a prototype for a new 3D Mario game with Yoshi as the protagonist

Croc was born as a prototype for a new 3D Mario game with Yoshi as the protagonist:

“The end came when we pitched to do a 3D platform game, the likes of which had never been done before. We mocked up a prototype using Yoshi. It was essentially the world’s first 3D platform game and was obviously a big risk – Nintendo had never let an outside company use their characters before, and weren’t about to, either. This is the moment the deal fell apart. We later made that game into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC, which became our biggest ever game in terms of sales and also in royalties, since we owned the IP.”

Taken from Eurogamer’s article about Argonaut Software 

Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Finally! Finally, finally finally finally! XD Finally after a year or 4 (I think?) I found the time and will to upgrade the site LOL! There is still a lot that has to happen but I have everything ready so it can be used! :D Most of the things I still need to do are especially background stuffs though so yeah you won’t be seeing much of those :3

As you can see the layout is updated to fit today’s techs :D The new and fresh layout is also ‘responsive’ meaning you can view the site on any device! The site will adapt itself to the device you are viewing it on. Ranging from phones, 3ds, vitas, tablets, tv’s and what not! You should try it yourself, it’s a llot of fun! :D

We also have a new Forum now! Finally we can discus our favorite unseen and released/upcoming games again! :D Also the “Off [Beta] Topic and Spam” section is back for some fun :) The forum works as it should completely but me and mono still have to add some stickies to it. Expect them to come soon! There are just two things you need to know, and that is that there is no possibility to PM stuff and you cannot preview posts but you can still edit them though. This due to some technical limitations.

Your profile is also different now. Instead of having to go to a special login page you can now directly login on the main site! Next to the traditional way of registering for U64 you can now also login with your favorite social network! Just click one of the icons under the login form to login with one of those and BAM! you can comment and participate in the forum! :D If you are logged in you can click on your name in the YOUR ACCOUNT block to edit your profile and upload your custom avatar and edit your signature and all. You also only need one account from now on for everything! No more different accounts for the site and forums and etc.

A last thing is that we also want to interact more on social networks! As you can see there are buttons to share posts and articles you like instantly on you Facebook, Twitter or G+. If you follow us on either Facebook or Twitter we will also auto-post an announcement with a link of every new article from now on so you will always be updated!

That’s it for now. If you have something to say about the new Unseen64, please leave your message in the comment box below (which also supports threaded comments from now on LOL)! I hope you will enjoy the new Unseen64 V4! :D