Showing posts with label beta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beta. Show all posts

DeeDee Planet - Newer Beta Version Uncovered and Preserved

In 2021 we reported on the public release of an all but complete build of DeeDee Planet, the quirky and endearing Dreamcast game that was intended to be a spiritual successor to ChuChu Rocket!, which was sadly shelved just before going on sale. This release was made possible by a stalwart of the Dreamcast scene, Pcwzrd, who managed to source the beta from an unnamed developer, ripped the contents, and put it out into the world. What really put the icing on the cake though was the implementation of online play in 2022, thanks to one of the gurus of Dreamcast server revivals, Shuoma, thereby enabling dozens of folks to experience the game as it was meant to be (cursing your inexplicably skillful opponents as they rain missiles down upon you from their levitating sheep).

Well, here we are in 2023, and the DeeDee train still appears to have more track to traverse just yet. Today, BANANABREAK, a prolific preservationist with a lot of work already under their belt, has kindly released another DeeDee Planet beta (available to download here). This version was allegedly acquired from an ex-Sega UK employee who worked for the team in charge of Dreamarena, the online service that was available across Europe. Could this mean that a localised version was tentatively in the works? It would be a bit of stretch to claim so, but if anyone out there would like to produce a translated version complete with cover art in the majestic PAL-blue style, then we certainly wouldn't turn our noses up!

The GD-Rom containing the latest DeeDee Planet beta to be found and digitally preserved by BANANABREAK.

What we do know (or at least, assuming the scribblings on the GD-Rom are correct) is that this beta is around 10 weeks newer than the version that was previously available. To my uninformed eye, there are no obvious differences between the two builds. However, given that the purported reason for the game's abandonment by Sega was a problem with the game's server connection, it could well be the case that changes affecting this part of the code are in-fact there, hidden away behind the scenes.

Pcwzrd and Shuouma did run some tests with this new build. Pcwzrd had this to say about it:

As far as we can tell, nothing changed. Nothing obvious anyway. Shuouma says the game is still sending the same corrupted stats back to the server so [Sega] didn't fix that. Shuouma thought that they may have possibly tried to implement a fix for something but it didn't work. That might have been the point at which when they just gave up and cancelled the game.

Can any of our eagle eyed readers sniff out the differences between these builds? Are we going to see even later builds gracing the internet in years to come? As always, do let us know your thoughts in the comments.

P.S. As a little treat for anyone who is as enamored with this game as I am, I have recently scanned a promotional flyer that was produced for the game. A preview is available below, but a higher quality PDF is also to be found over at Sega Retro

The 18th of May release date touted here sadly wasn't to be, but over 20 years on from being scrapped DeeDee Planet's developers can rest easy in the knowledge that their work wasn't in vain.

DeeDee Planet: Beta of Cancelled Dreamcast game Released Online!

Do you like ChuChu Rocket!? Of course you do. Anyone who has ever picked up a Dreamcast controller enjoys Sonic Team's insane grid-based space mouse puzzler. It's a classic, and for some, was an introduction into online console gaming. But not everyone is aware that ChuChu was actually supposed to be the first in a series of Dreamcast network-enabled games. The second game, DeeDee Planet was actually completed by developer Dori Dock and ready to be released, but due to a bug in the online mode, was unfortunately cancelled at the last second. Ever since then, it has remained yet another intriguing mystery in the Dreamcast's (never-ending, it seems) legacy.

PC's photo of the GD-R. Nice Ultimate Collector's Guide in the background!

But thanks to the hard work of one of the Dreamcast scene's biggest stalwarts, and our good buddy, PCWzrd13, the final beta for the game has been found. PC spent a long time trying to find anyone who worked on DeeDee Planet, and after a long search, was able to contact an individual in Japan (who won't be named for legal reasons) involved with the game. This person intended to send PC a GD-R containing the beta a year ago, but those plans were delayed due to the pandemic. But we're now a year on, and PC finally has the disc in his possession. And yes, it's been dumped online for you all to enjoy!

Lost Dreamcast Game Agartha Found...And Released!

Agartha is a game that has always been little more than an enigma. It has, for the best part of two decades, represented one of the most intriguing and mysterious lost games that was destined to come to the Dreamcast. Many thought Agartha was little more than vapourware, the shots shown in magazines of the late 90s and early 2000s regarded as nothing more than a glimpse at some pre-rendered scenes with no playable component. And that's how the legend of Agartha remained...until late 2017 when it was found and a video of playable sequences was posted online by veteran Dreamcast collector and bonafide gaming detective Laurent.C.
Fast forward to January 2018 and we bring you the unbelievable news that not only has Agartha been confirmed as fully playable...but you can now download it and play if for yourself in a Dreamcast! Here's our video on the demo and what you can expect from it if you download and play, along with a whistle-stop history of Agartha:


Before you get too carried away, Agartha was only ever a demo and the small fragments of the game that do exist are little more than a proof of concept. But even still, the fact that after all this time something as incredible as this even exists is staggering. Agartha represents one of the great unsolved mysteries of Dreamcast lore, a game that looked incredible for the time, and could easily have been one of the most ambitious titles on the system. Sadly, Agartha was one of the multiple casualties of the Dreamcast's incredibly short lifespan and developer No Cliché pulled the plug pretty early on.
Happily though, we can now all experience the exclusive E3 2000 demo build of Agartha and we give huge thanks to Laurent.C for his endeavours. Another long lost Dreamcast game has come to the fore, and we can't help but wonder what else will finally come to GD-Rom drives in the near future, long after the curtain fell on development.
Download the Agartha demo here, and remember to give thanks to Laurent.C for his outstanding work - he was also the guy behind the public release of the official Dreamcast Mega Drive emulator that was only intended for internal Sega use. Bravo sir, bravo.

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments or joint the conversation in our Facebook group. Also, hit us up on Twitter here.

Update: There is now an ISO file available for those who are lucky enough to own a CF card modded Dreamcast (check out our recent review here). This was created by Jan, the man behind the modded Dreamcast. Download the file here and the desktop icon for DreamShell here.

Official Mega Drive Emulator For Dreamcast Discovered

Mega Drive/Genesis emulation is nothing new on the Dreamcast, and Sega even went as far as releasing an official emulator (of sorts) with the Sega Smash Pack compilation that was only launched in the US. Since the death of the Dreamcast, various emulators have sprung up, some of which were based on the very code found on the Smash Pack GD. It's a really cool story and well worth checking out if you have the time.

It appears that there was an alternative Mega Drive emulator being worked on as a joint venture between Sega Japan and Sega Europe, and - like most stories about vapourware - this has never been substantiated with hard facts. Mentions of PAL versions of Sega Smash Pack with a better and more varied library, twinned with superior emulation can be found in Dreamcast magazines of the era but nothing concrete has ever been seen. Until now, that is.
This is all thanks to a Dreamcast fan called Comby Laurent, who recently found a mysterious GD-Rom in a bunch of discs he acquired. He posted a short video and a few images on the Dreamcast Junkyard Facebook group and I recognised the Mega Drive emulator as the same one I had played when I visited an ex-Sega employee some time ago to record footage of the unreleased Take the Bullet and Colin McRae Rally 2.0. I did record some video of the emulator back then, but my MacBook went into meltdown about a week later and the footage was lost.

Take The Bullet Revealed

Take The Bullet is one of the more infamous cancelled games for the Dreamcast. Developed by Red Lemon Studios, it was an ambitious first person shooter in which you could also use the light gun to shoot onscreen enemies. This kind of thing had been done before (Resident Evil Survivor on the PlayStation is one such example), but nothing on the scale of Take The Bullet had been attempted.
The game was to feature a full on single player campaign, alongside a 4-player multiplayer split screen mode that also added bots into the mix. The solo game involved the player assuming the role of ex-marine and bodyguard Jack Travis, and it was up to you to protect Presidential candidate Kincaide through a varied series of missions (although evidence suggests they may have been mainly escort missions, Travis being a bodyguard and all).

I recently got to play a very early build of this mysterious game, and while I was unable to try it out with the light gun, I was able to capture footage from the first two missions.
While it is clearly very rough around the edges and has very little in the way of sound effects, voice acting or music, this early version of Take The Bullet was spread across several discs - one of which was the split-screen multiplayer death match (interestingly labelled as 'E3 Demo'). I managed to play this death match against an AI bot in single player but I recently had some pretty severe computer issues (basically a failed hard drive in my MacBook) and as such I lost all that footage.

Unknown Gundam GD-Rom Surfaces On eBay

Well this is interesting. A Katana development GD-Rom has shown up on eBay Germany, with 'Gundam' written on it. Is this a previously unknown PAL version of Gundam Side Story 0079, or something completely new and hitherto undocumented? Either way, The Dreamcast Junkyard fully intends to secure this disc and investigate it further. If it turns out to be something previously unseen, we will be releasing it to the Dreamcast community. We have reached out to the seller for further information, but the real mystery here is that it is a Katana GD-Rom not a regular Dreamcast one. The plot thickens.
Want to help us secure this and release it to the community? Any financial help in the form of  a doantion is welcomed! In other news, we are looking into the idea of launching a full Kickstarter project for a new hardback version of the Ultimate Collectors Guide, complete with artwork and full hardware section. Stay tuned!

Update: Unfortunately, we didn't win the auction. However, all is not lost. The winner of the disc has been in touch and assured us that this will be released to the community! Huzzah!

Colin McRae Rally 2.0 Revealed

Colin McRae Rally 2.0 for Dreamcast is a game that vanished from release schedules faster than Lord Lucan disappeared after his children's nanny was bludgeoned to death. As a massive fan of driving games, and rally games in particular, when it was canned I really did feel dejected. The PlayStation Colin McRae games are still some of my favourites in the genre (we don't talk about DiRT: Showdown) and the thought of being able to enjoy a graphically superior port with added gameplay modes excited me no end.
Alas, Codemasters decided that work on the game would be cancelled and with that the dream of a proper rally simulation on the Dreamcast died. Widely thought to be a 'lost' Dreamcast game, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 for Dreamcast has been the stuff of forum rumours ever since, but I am thrilled to announce I have had the pleasure of sampling the game...and I took footage to prove it. It's in no way complete (around 30%) and there's not a lot to it - just one track and some options (plus it requires a specific VMU to run) - but it is playable and apart from some slowdown is every bit as good as you would expect.

The Games That Never Were: Episode 4

YouTuber and friend of the Junkyard pcwzrd13 has come up with the goods yet again by posting episode 4 of the popular series The Games That Never Were - a look at some of the titles that were tantalisingly promised for our favourite beige, whirring and wheezing box...but for whatever reason were drop-kicked into the nearest bin. And then spat on by a tramp. Probably.

This latest instalment features such agonisingly-canned games as Castlevania Resurrection, D-Jump, Galleon and, Redline Arena. Before you ask - yes, that is an Oxford comma. Whether it's usage is warranted or correct here bothers me not one iota, however. I digress.

This video is particularly interesting as we plan to discuss some of the more promising cancelled Dreamcast games in episode two of DreamPod. Stay tuned for more information on that...but first, enjoy pcwzrd13's awesome (and thought-provoking) video:


As ever, please be sure to check out Dreamcastic Channel for the previous entries in the Games That Never Were series and expand your burgeoning knowledge of the alternative universe that is hinted at every time you are on the cusp of falling asleep. Lastly, it is (with gratitude) down to the video's auteur that I'm able to experience one of the games featured. Bet you can't guess what it is...

The Games That Never Were

We're big fans of the search for unreleased and leaked beta software here at the Junkyard, and in the past we've featured plenty of material focusing on the games that were rumoured yet never saw the light of day. There are a few games that we doubt we'll ever get to see running, let alone get the chance to play - Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is one - but as the recent discovery and release of Toejam & Earl 3 shows, sometimes miracles do happen.

It seems we're not the only ones with a fascination of the subject of unreleased games though, as YouTuber and friend of the DCJY pcwzrd13 has created a series of interesting videos detailing some of the lesser (and more well-known) games that were promised, but for whatever reason never made it to shop shelves. Here are episodes 1-3 for your enjoyment...

Toejam & Earl 3 Dreamcast beta discovered!


Second hand Dreamcast development kits have quite often led to some rather special discoveries of beta versions of both released and cancelled games, including not long ago the Alpha build of the Starfox styled Sega shooter Geist Force. Now a beta of Toejam & Earl III has been discovered!

Toejam & Earl III was announced for the Dreamcast at E3 2001, around that time when Sega was stopping Dreamcast development and moving into multi platform development. This meant a lot of Dreamcast projects got moved onto other consoles and one of those was this game, which found it's way on the Xbox a few years later. For all we knew the E3 trailer we were shown could have been running on early Xbox hardware, but now we know it was intended for Dreamcast after all.



The beta was found on a devkit purchased by ZakhooiTM who signed up to Assembler Games forums to show his discovery. It's not a complete build of the game of course, but judging from the video the ownr of the beta has uploaded (see above), it's in a perfectly playable state. The game also appears to be quite different to how it was on the Xbox: the graphics were clearly tuned up a bit on the move to more powerful hardware and they added more elements to the gameplay for the final version too. This beta is almost like a 3D remake of the original Mega Drive game, which is fine by me!

Other games that were supposedly planned for the Dreamcast first before being shifted to other consoles include Gunvalkyrie, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Super Monkey Ball and Jet Set Radio Future. Whether those were true is yet to be seen, but at this rate who knows? Maybe someone will find any of those games lurking on a devkit one day..

Zeit Geist

If you've looked at the comments for the previous post, there's a chance you've already copied and pasted the link to the following Youtube video. If you haven't, then get ready for a rather thorough analysis of the recently released (and unfinished) Geist Force. The Gagaman(n) did a post on the subject of this lost gem not too long ago, but I think the more exposure this newly released beta gets, the better. Geist Force is a game that really intrigued me when I saw it previewed in the games mags of the era - who wouldn't have wanted to see a Lylat Wars/Star Wing type game running on the brand spanking new Dreamcast hardware?

A reader by the name of DCeric has put together this rather cool video examining the various unfinished stages that make up Geist Force, and also looks at some of the debug levels that exist. Enjoy.

Retro Core gets their mitts on Geist Force


Retro Core (The video series from Segagaga Domain) has received it's copy of the much anticipated release of the Geist Force playable ported build, and shows us all of it's contents in this 22 minute video. As the length of the video suggests, this game is in a very early state and only has some basics to check out. The first level is more or less complete with enemies and a boss, the second is fine up until the boss when it glitches you back to the start of the level, and the rest of the levels are more or less just some scenery and an eventual smack into a invisible wall. Those expecting this to be a full or even close to beta game will be a bit disappointed, but it's still quite something to see this running at all on retail standard Dreamcasts.

Assemblergames.com has the Geist Force Beta!

Embedding has been disabled on the video so go watch it here. The video below is a trailer from before the game was canceled.


Does anyone remember hearing about a game called Geist Force back when the Dreamcast launched? No? Well there wasn't much coverage of it outside of a video showing it off a bit, and soon after it just vanished off the face of the earth. Well a Sega insider joined the forums of Assemblergames.com and sold a beta copy of the game from 1998, and now it is in the hands of those that can not only play it on dev hardware, but will be dumping and releasing it to the Internet as soon as they can! In the video you will see the opening cut scene and some gameplay which is very much like that of the Starfox/Lylat Wars series, but without the talking animals.Looks like quite the interesting game and looking forward to getting a shot at trying it out!

Now where's Dee Dee Planet? Now there's a game I'd love to see leaked seeing as it was near complete supposedly and a beta was spotted in a photo of Sega archive room. Someone get in there and nab it!

Beta Overload

Long time readers and visitors to the 'Yard may, quite possibly, remember a post I knocked up some time ago that introduced a site called X-Cult. If not, go here now.

Had a look? Good.

Now you're up to speed, I'll crack on. Whilst perusing the net, which is something I've gotten quite good at in recent decades, I found another interesting little site that sort of does the same as X-Cult - reveals details of cancelled games for a multitude of formats...including our beloved Dreamcast. Before you groan, listen up: Unseen64 features previously...er...unseen pictures and screens of a few forgotten gems that would have been a credit to the DC had they been released, and even grabs of a few games I've never actually heard of...


Take the Bullet


Quark


Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025


Spiral Nightmare Type X


Jump Runner


Akolyte


Boarder Zone


Innocent Tears
Ecco 2: Sentinels of the Universe

Dark Angel


Gorka Morka

Agartha

Of course, this little collection is just the tip of the iceberg - there's even more beta action at the actual site, and that includes some rather interesting shots of an early Metropolis Street Racer and a massive Shenmue archive. Granted, explanations of the titles shown are either non existent or written in Italian (which is fine if you can read Italian...which I can't) so you have to make assumptions about how some of the games may have played by sight alone. Still, very cool, if that's yer bag.