The U64 family is still growing somehow and more beta-lovers want to help our little archive of games that we’ll never be able to play. Today we are happy to welcome a new young staffer, that will try to give us an hand to finish all those missing descriptions for the unseen games: say hi to Max/GamerX428!
Wild 9 (known as Wildroid 9 in Japan) is a video game developed by Shiny Entertainment for the Sony PlayStation, with a Sega Saturn version also planned but never released. Its gameplay is that of a 2D platformer, with occasional breaks in 3D dimension. [Info From Wikipedia]
Misterite has an interesting Wild 9 video on his Youtube Channel that shows an early build of the game, with unfinished levels and probabbly some other differences that i could not find.. but thanks to the help of Silverduran we have more informations: there’s a ton of things that had been changed from the final version, like Wex’s character model is much bigger and looks different, the Jet Cycle ended up being red, the guy ((Nitro)) that Wex picks up ended up being MUCH bigger, and 98% of the level designs shown in this video were never used.. but the animations were tho.
In the gallery below you can see many screenshots from a beta version 50% complete, if you can notice more differences in these images please let us know!
Thanks a lot to Silverduran for the contribution!
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Video:
Soulstar was a Mega-CD game created by Core Design, and after its release, two seperate conversions were planned. One was a port to the Jaguar CD, under the same name, whereas the other was an updated version for the 32X, under the name Soulstar X. In the end, neither of them were released.
In the YouTube channel of Sammature there’s a video from Twilight Princess that shows the beta bombs, an early version of the item that is still in the code of the game and can be seen thanks to a GameShark code. These bombs are similar to the ones that Link uses in the previous games, while the final ones in Twilight Princess have a more “realistic” design.
Although it seems to start out as something completely different, this is a promotional video for Earthworm Jim, mostly focusing on the Mega Drive version. As well as some insight into the design process of the game, it shows a lot of footage from an earlier version of the game. Unfortunately, the way the video has been edited together means that picking apart all the differences between the early version shown and the final game is very difficult, but some parts are clearer than others.
Some of the highlights include:
Video:
From some beta screenshots that were published in Nintendo Power, we can notice various differences. On the new junk city images the background art design looks different and there’s also a moose head in everyone of them, but those are normally only used to swing from. The wheel monster has a completely different design in the final game. On the screenshots for What The Heck the design looks different and the backgrounds are different in at least one of the screenshots. On the screenshot of For Petes Sake everything about that level is different in the final game: the asteroids, the background, and the ground. Jim’s models also seems to be different maybe even better looking than in the final game. Also, in the last screenshot we can notice a weird looking enemy to the left of Jim which isn’t in the final game.
Also, thanks to Rocketworm.com we can see many concept arts from the development of the game, showing an early design for Intestinal Distress (the falling columns of fat aren’t in the final game, and the idea for the villi was later used in Earthworm Jim 2), early concept art for Buttville and New Junk City (with some gameplay ideas that would’ve probaly been impossible to pull of on a 16 bit console), a concept of a level based off of Bob the Goldfishes world which didn’t make it into the final game and various character designs.
Thanks to Earthwormjim, Lemm and retroguy205 for the contribution!
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More beta Videos: