Virtua Hamster and X-Men: Mind Games, Unreleased Sega 32X Protos, Dumped, Released #

[A Black Falcon]

Why not post it here too...

Yes, really! Pretty cool stuff... As the title says both of these games were canceled back in 1995 or so and were never released, and before now they had not been available to anyone besides the tiny number of people with the prototype boards.

Virtua Hamster - http://www.hidden-palace.org/?releases/1093

X-Men: Mind Games - http://www.hidden-palace.org/?releases/1094

Videos

Virtua Hamster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD3j3h627wk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j4ADzIlUDk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzAkXe-X7YI

X-Men
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv2SXc06Wrk

Virtua Hamster works on real hardware or some emulators (it works in Kega for instance). There are no races or anything, but you can run around in the connecting tubes (Habitrails? :)) that you would be racing in, and look at the option mode options, none of which have been implemented yet. Good stuff... this would have been an awesome game if finished, I think! :( Oh, and the polygonal 3d tunnels and characters look great. All this really needed (needs?) is opponents, a goal (block off tunnels not in the current race or something, and have an end point?), the splitscreen mode, and the full controls implemented and it'd be a pretty good game, I think. I mean, it's basically a futuristic racing game with hamsters on hoverboards in Habitrail tunnels. Just from the concept you know it's awesome. :) There are videos of this on Youtube now, of course, so go watch some footage. :) (There's only one song ingame that's a short loop and there are no sound effects, but oh well... given that it's unfinished, it's just great that there was a playable build at all! :))

X-Men: Mind Games only works fully on actual hardware; the music and menu works in Kega, but you can't see the in-game graphics or play. It does have great music that sounds a lot like the style of the Genesis Batman & Robin stuff, really. Someday emulators will probably play the game... there is a video of it up on Youtube now though, so you can look at how it plays there. Again, very nice graphics... not sure if the gameplay looks fun though, going by the video. It looks decent, but not great. It wasn't finished of course, though, so it had time to improve... and the graphics and design look extremely good for the system! 3d graphics with 2d sprite objects? Very impressive work. Right now though, only people with flashcarts can actually play it. At least there is that video.

... A lot of other protos have come out recently, thanks to someone who owns a lot of them and is willing to release dumps of them if paid enough, but I don't think that any others are unreleased games.

Overall of course overall the 32X should never have been released at all, but given that it was, Sega needed to put a bit more effort into it. These two games wouldn't have saved the system of course, but with a library as small as the 32X's (40-something games), it needed all the help it could get...

(Why do I always want to spell hamster with a p... you know, hampster...

Is it because of this? http://web.archive.org/web/1999112300194...dance.html ) [with working audio, but corrected name, here: http://www.webhamster.com/ ]

[A Black Falcon]

Kega Fusion 3.63 or newer will play the X-Men 32X beta version! If you want to go beyond the short videos and actually explore the game yourself, go download it now:

http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=Kega

As the videos show, there are six levels playable, though none are anywhere complete (Arcade's level is not selectable, but the other six are). There are only five music tracks; the main menu, a track that plays in levels 1, 2, and 3, and separate tracks each in the Bishop, Iceman, and Rogue levels.

You can only play as Bishop.

Controls:
A - Block
B - Punch (hold down to repeatedly attack in the direction you're facing)
C - Jump
X - shoot some kind of magic thing from fist
Y - shoot from other fist, his metal arm (though in the same direction and the shot looks the same)
Z - looks like it's for pushing blocks or something? He crouches and "runs" forward without going anywhere.
Mode - Crouch, it seems. You cannot move while doing this (in this beta at least).
Start - Pauses the game and brings a crosshair thing onto the screen. left/right on the dpad move it left and right on the screen. Up/down move it into and out of the screen. A and X move it up and down the screen. Y resets it to where it started, if you've moved it somewhere far off the screen or something.
- While paused, holding down Z will allow you to move the camera around the level.

Very impressive stuff, wandering around the levels myself makes me more interested in the game than it was based on just videos.

Some things I noticed:
-The earlier levels are much more complete than the later ones. Play Level 1 and then Iceman's level and you see a huge difference in completion -- level 1 has a lot of enemies, switches that open doors, none of those missing walls where you can fall off the stage as far as I could tell, etc. Iceman's level has no enemies, no switches, fall-off-the-stage-or-into-other-rooms areas, etc. This is to be expected with an incomplete game.
-In a few places you can walk off of the edges of walls. If you walk back right away you'll go back up; if you keep going into the dark you can get stuck in the black area you are now in. It 's cool that you can get back. In at least one place instead of ending up in the dark you go to another room in the level, though the "warp" does not work two ways.
-The camera does a good job of tracking the character, making vital walls invisible, etc. Good camera! Sometimes you can hide behind a pillar, but walls themselves are never an issue. Of course it does this by being in a set, "front of the screen" location and never moving, but still, for 1995 or so they do a good job with it.
-You easily get stuck on walls and enemies. You can get away by moving in the opposite direction, but it is a little annoying sometimes.
-While collision detection is present, in some areas the main character is always fully visible, even when part of you should be hidden behind an obstacle -- so boxes will stop you when you walk into them from behind, but your character blocks out your view of most of the box anyway. Obviously this would have been fixed later.
-You can kill enemies, in the levels that have them (the later stages are less complete), and they will attack back and hurt you if you get in their way.
-You cannot die and become invincible if you take too much damage. You do have a "getting hit" animation, and initially can take some damage, but when you get down to about 30% health, your health is automatically refilled and you will not take any damage to your healthbar anymore (though Bishop will still go "ugh" and do the 'taking damage' animation, your healthbar will not decrease).
-However, enemies will not really follow you, they just go back and forth along their set paths.
-Distinguishing perspective can be tricky -- telling which enemies can hit you, and which you can hit, is iffy sometimes. Hopefully if it had been finished they would have made this work somehow... but this is the biggest challenge with the game, affecting both combat (as I say elsewhere) and platform jumping. Now if the programming had been finished so your sprite is properly hidden behind obstacles you are behind, etc, it would be a big help, but still, telling for instance whether you will fall off the side of that platform into the sewer slime or walk onto the narrow walkway in the middle can be challenging at times.
-You can attack in all four directions, but some things, like the "push block" move or whatever, can only be done left or right. When blocking you always appear to be facing left or right. Fighting also is a lot easier to discern when you're next to someone... but it is a 3d game, so it can't entirely rely on the horizontal plane. Looking at it, that's obviously the challenge the game had... how would you make this work well in an actual game? They weren't quite there yet I think.

Still, despite that, the game really is very impressive graphically. Just like with Virtua Hamster, this would have been a serious showcase for the 32X if it had ever been completed, standing among the system's best, most visually impressive, games. It's really too bad that, given that Sega actually released the 32X, they then ditched it so soon and sabotaged the system's chances of getting anything other than early, first-gen games that didn't come even close to showing off the system's full (3d) potential. Something like this comes closer I'm sure, though, so it is just fantastic to see. Fantastic work!

It's awesome that we're seeing things like X-Men, Virtua Hamster, and Soulstar X now, but it makes me really wish that we had things like that complete... :( (I know in the case of Virtua Hamster the developers claim to have a more complete version of the game or something... maybe someday... but for this one, and Soulstar X, there's probably no hope is there. :()

... If the full game was as good as the beta is promising, Virtua Hamster would be an amazing game. :) X-Men... maybe, maybe not, but it certainly could have been good.

[Dark Jaguar]

The 32X had Kolibri, best hummingbird based shooter out there.