Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad

...on Blog Squirrel.

Can't get this on Nintendo!.. or Sega... officially. Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad, once set to hit your Sega Mega Drives in early 1994, before being cancelled by the man, plunging the world into fifteen years of misery and turmoil.

Thankfully we have been liberated from the darkness and oppression, as we now have both prototype source code and working ROMs of this game to play with. No doubt a good day for the world.

Battletoads

RareWare Central strikes again by releasing another unfinished Game Boy Advance game to the general public.

It's Battletoads, once set to be a remake of the 1991 classic. It's an extremely early and almost unplayable prototype, with much of its content being inaccessible during normal play. The project was scrapped before the team had a concrete idea of what they were actually making so as you'd expect, there's very little to see here. But it'll surely interest somebody, and it's a great way to make yourself deaf.

In other news, I'm a very busy man at the moment, forced to produce broken programs in my free time. You might have to wait a while between blog posts (i.e. more than a week). Don't blame me, blame a wacky higher education system!

Diddy Kong Pilot

RareWare Central have taken a break from whatever it is they do these days to bring us Diddy Kong Pilot, a cancelled Game Boy Advance game featuring primates in planes. It's what the world needs at this time of economic uncertainty.

Bio Force Ape

I'm not one to monkey around with Nintendo products (yes I did just post that sentence), but check it out, it's BIO FORCE APE for that entertaining Nintendo system, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Shown to the world in 1991, hidden from the world by 1992, it's come back to the world in 2011. And this time you can actually play it. But do we want to?

Space Fantasy Zone

Because everyone likes the TurboGrafx-CD... right?

Here's a strange period of Sega's history. So strange in fact that it doesn't even feature Sega, it features NEC Avenue and two of Sega's franchises. During 1990/1991 NEC thought it would be fun to combine the gameplay of the arcade hit Space Harrier with the other arcade hit Fantasy Zone, creating the TurboGrafx-CD hit... Space Fantasy Zone. How clever.

But as fine as the idea was, it never made it onto the market. A prototype did make it onto the internet though, so let us indulge in this hybrid and see if we can save the planet.

It's dangerous to go alone

I don't have a string of women to entertain me (partly because I don't come with a standard namespace declaration attached to my head), but I do have the next best thing - a Nintendo prototype. If you're not affiliated with the crazy world of half finished games, you won't know that Nintendo prototypes are stupidly rare. This one apparently cost about £3000.

Brought to us by a bloke called "cen" and a god called "drx", The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask prototype #1 is now part of the interwebs. It's debug heavy and slightly broken but could be of interest to mad Zelda fans. Majora's Mask was the second Zelda title for the Nintendo 64 and supposedly one of the best the series has produced. I don't really share that view, but that's because I don't really like back-tracking and time limits in a Zelda game.

Revenge of Shinobi prototype found

Sega are known for releasing half-assed Mega Drive emulators to the public. You may think it's a fairly new thing, but it actually dates back to the late 90s, just a few years after the emulation scene began. During this time Sega released several "compilation packs" (mostly in America), throwing in a few ROMs and an emulator in the hopes of achieving a few bucks. Sega PC Smash Pack was one of their PC attempts, relying on Steve Snake's first Mega Drive emulator from 1997, KGen.

Do note though, a "good emulator for 1999" tends to suggest that it's a terrible choice today. KGen was considered good because it was the first emulator to have a decent amount of compatible games and Yamaha YM2612 sound emulation, both of which are a standard in all modern emulators, even the ones adopted by Sega.

One of the bundled games in Sega PC Smash Pack was Revenge of Shinobi, a 1989 classic. RoS has been ported to numerous platforms over the years (not to mention it was re-released on the Mega Drive half a dozen times too), but this was its first PC outing. And a strange outing it certainly was.

Turns out for whatever reason instead of using the final US version, whoever created the pack opted for a Japanese prototype, hence the title "The Super Shinobi". Surprisingly, nobody noticed, and in fact the box art actually calls it "Super Shinobi" despite the fact it was NEVER called that in the US.

There was clearly a distinct lack of testing within the walls of Sega of America at the time, because this prototype is surprisingly early. It's missing a lot of music, a couple of bosses and various copyright screens. A level select is enabled by default, and there's a "No death" mode selectable, so not only was it poorly emulated the game wasn't even complete.

Recently the ROM has been extracted and can be run on most emulators. There's probably a load of differences I haven't mentioned, but I'm not a massive fan of the game outside of the music and crazy bosses. Hilarious stuff that something so broken could be released to the public though. Too bad they didn't learn from their mistakes when the Game Boy Advance's Sonic Genesis got put on the shelves.

X-Men 32X

The MegaDrive emulator Kega Fusion has been updated to version 3.63. Though Kega has been out-performing the competition since Christmas 2008, it's now doing so with significantly less memory consumption, and as there's been a lot of work in the 32X department...

X-Men 32X will run! Sega Saturno released this one a month or two ago after some donations, however no emulator could run it so we were reduced to a few off-screen YouTube videos, which wasn't really sufficient for an unreleased and potentially groundbreaking game.

New Prototypes

Drx, legend at the Sonic hacking scene has released a good couple hundred Sega prototypes for your pleasure, including Sonic 2 Beta 4 pictured above. It's a collection of pretty much every game revision on Sega's database between 1994 and 1995, which means there's a lot, ranging from the Sega Master System to 32X, and a few Saturn/Dreamcast/Gamecube protos being released as well. Also bear in mind this is probably the biggest batch of prototype releases... ever.

I'm sure drx could use the funds now so why not donate?