Unseen News

[Project] The Advent Rising restoration

As we read in the Advent Rising beta article, there were a lot of stuff planned for the game that never made it into the final, especially in the PC version. Advent Revising is a fan-made patch  that aims to restore the cinematics of Advent Rising to their intended quality. This English patch adds back thirteen movie files cut from the PC version of the game, corrects cases of desync and playback errors present in cutscenes, corrects and retimes all of the game’s subtitles, enables full 4:3 display with Vsync and trilinear filtering, and adds additional functionality to the player such as teleportation and level skip.

 

Sunman [NES – Cancelled]

Sunman is an cancelled NES action game made by Sunsoft which was supposed to be released in 1992. The most interesting aspect about this game is that originally Sunman was going to be a Superman game, and playing it is not hard to spot the resemblances: both heroes have a similar costume and the same powers. We don’t know why in the end Sunsoft didn’t get the official license from DC comics but probably the software house thought that it was a bad idea to spend a remarkable amount of money for a game planned for a rapidly aging console.

Other than that, Sunman was just an anonymous side-scroller game with below-average controls and only five stages, not exactly an appealing new entry for the NES market of the time. Nothing too strange, then, that Sunsoft decided to shelf it for good.

Update:

However, Sunsoft’s Superman survives as a Genesis game, as reported on Wikipedia. The game was published in the same year of Sunman’s prototype, 1992. While the graphic is better so that it can fit a 16bit console like Genesis , the game concept is still quite the same as the NES version. In fact, Superman/Sunman’s moves are the same (except that in the Genesis version he can also fire beams from his eyes) and some maps’ design is very close to the NES version. We can actually say that Genesis’ Superman is what we could’ve seen on NES.

John Doom is trying to make a complete Superman NES game using Sunman, creating and replacing Sunman’s sprites with Superman. You can try the game on John Doom’s space. It runs on vnes, an applet nes emulator (You need Java in order to play the game).

Images:

Videos:

  

2 e 3 Ottobre 2010: Video Games History a Monza (Italy)

This article is only in Italian, sorry!

Questo weekend, sabato 2 e domenica 3 ottobre 201o si terrà il Video Games History a Monza, esposizione videoludica (con ingresso gratuito!) organizzata dai ragazzi di Games Collection. Fra retrogames, tornei multiplayer per le ultime console, video storici e pubblicità d’epoca (ocio però!), incontri fra nerd e discussioni filosofiche, un’area-museo dedicata a tutti gli amanti di unseen games: alcuni prototipi e beta provenienti dalle raccolte private dei maggiori collezionisti italiani.

Anche quest’anno parte dello staff di Unseen 64 sarà presente all’evento, per infastidire i collezionisti cercando di recuperare video dei loro prototipi, perdersi per ore a parlare della beta di Zelda 64, esplodere a ripetizione nel torneo di Bomberman Live e tentare di presentare un breve documentario sui migliori videogames cancellati dal NES all’Xbox 360. Ce la faranno i nostri eroi?

Per accordi sul meeting dello staff e dei lettori di U64, potete lasciare un messaggio di commento a questo post oppure mandarci una email a [email protected]

Per maggiori informazioni sull’evento date un’occhiata alla pagina dedicata al VGH 2010 su Games Collection.

Il VGH 2010 si svolgerà presso l’URBAN CENTER di MONZA, Via Filippo Turati 8 (a due passi dalla stazione dei treni) nei giorni di sabato 2 ottobre dalle ore 10.00 alle 19.00 e domenica 3 ottobre della ore 9.30 alle 18.00. Ecco il luogo dell’evento su Google Maps.

Sabato 2 ottobre:

  • ore 10.00 apertura evento e Negozi videogames, Action Figures e fumetti.
  • ore 11.00 e seguenti inizio tornei Fifa 11 1 vs 1 e Multiplayer. In più tornei vari con i ragazzi di Arcade Extreme e Jagfest
  • ore 12.00 visite guidate al Museo
  • ore 15.00 conferenza sul tema: “Gli albori dell’ideazione e produzione di videogiochi in Italia”
  • ore 18.00 premiazione tornei
  • ore 19.30 AFTER-PARTY con bitmusic, chiptune e VJ Visualoop

Domenica 3 ottobre:

  • ore 9.30 apertura evento e Negozi videogames, Action Figures e fumetti.
  • ore 11.00 e seguenti inizio tornei Street Fighter IV e tornei vari (in fase di decisione)*
  • ore 12.00 inizio Primo Campionato Italiano di Pong
  • ore 14.45 conferenza sul tema: “La preservazione del passato videoludico e i suoi protagonisti”
  • ore 15.30 presentazione dei pezzi più rari e particolari esposti
  • ore 17.30 premiazioni tornei
  • ore 18.00 chiusura e ringraziamenti

INGRESSO GRATUITO!

Ecco alcuni video fatti durante il Video Games History degli scorsi anni:

 

[New Staffer] Franklint joins the U64 Staff!

newstaffers.jpg

The U64 army is still growing and more beta-lovers would like to share their time and will to improve this little archive of games that we’ll never be able to play.  You know, with more people in the U64 Staff, it’s possible to preserve more unseen games.. or at least trying to. Today we are happy to welcome Franklint in the U64 Staff! He already helped us a lot with his articles for beta Banjo Tooie, Spyral Saga, Spinny and Spike, Savage Heroes and many more..  now he’s officially one of us :) Good luck Franklint! 

Roadsters 98 [GBC – Proto / Cancelled]

Roadsters 98 is a prototype racing game by Genetic Fantasia, with a gameplay similar to Micro Machines, that seems to have been cancelled in early development. A playable demo exists, thanks to a scene leaked ROM from the old GameBoy Color days. While there is a game called Roadsters released in Europe and USA in 2000, it is completely different from Roadster 98. The release group got access to some beta software which is normal but in this case they probably thought they’d do a nice pre-store but the final game never appeared – unless this is an insanely rare special release no one knows about.

We can speculate that Genetic Fantasia worked on Roadsters GameBoy Color for Titus, but something went wrong and the publisher decided to release a different game.

Thanks a lot to BigFred for the contribution!

Images:

Videos: