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View topic - Happy holidays! 4 SMS prototypes: Astro Warrior / Pit Pot, Dynamite Dux, Rampage, Summer Games

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Happy holidays! 4 SMS prototypes: Astro Warrior / Pit Pot, Dynamite Dux, Rampage, Summer Games
Post Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 10:47 am
Last edited by Bock on Tue Dec 28, 2021 10:53 am; edited 2 times in total
Happy holidays to all our friends in the SMS Power community :)

We've been digging and sorting materials and we have four prototypes today. And more coming soon!

An early print of Astro Warrior / Pit Pit for the Master System. Similar to the infamous "Red Hang On" card this seems to be an early print. This one is marked in German, has the small ship artwork in red, an offseted label, a lack of picture on the back (see attachments for more photos). Thanks to Ddevilfingers for their help obtaining this one!

The actual ROM data is unfortunately a mere change in the SMS Header zone, with only 2 different bytes, so this will play exactly the same as the final game.







Next we have everyone's favorite blue duckling. A prototype of Dynamite Dux for the Master System.



This is a relatively easy game to get through - comfort food - quite charming in its overall design, catchy tunes, sometimes feels like a happy-go-lucky version of Double Dragon. According to my favorite new metrics for evaluating meaningful contents of a dump, the zipped version of this is 122 KB vs 132 KB for the final version, which suggest a fair amount of missing contents.



A prototype of Rampage for the Master System.



I remember my parents one time leaving for the night when I was 10 years old, leaving us with two older caretakers who brought SMS cartridges and we played this with them that evening. The game lets you get through by brute-forcing a bit but it makes sense to pay attention and maneuver your creature to optimize its path and get rid of danger early. It's a nice game but lack of graphics variety makes it feel repetitive.

The legal screen from the final release is missing from this one which instead has extra copyright information visible on the title screen.



Finally, we have a very early prototype of Summer Games for the Master System. We already released a prototype of Summer Games in 2007, but this one comes much earlier. Different title screen logo, and most Events are broken at this point of development and there's no audio. This was a cartridge to playtest the game early on. (zipped 52 KB vs 70 KB final game.)



If you get to play those prototypes and find other differences please post them in the thread! Youtube playthrough or other analysis welcome :)

Enjoy !!!
Dynamite Dux Proto.jpg (422.22 KB)
Dynamite Dux Proto.jpg
Rampage Proto.jpg (429.06 KB)
Rampage Proto.jpg
Summer Games Proto.jpg (460.25 KB)
Summer Games Proto.jpg

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Post Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 10:48 am
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rampage-proto-sms.zip (115.79 KB)

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Post Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2021 8:05 pm
Nice releases! Love missing content!
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Post Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2021 2:40 am
As always, awesome work and thanks so much for everything you guys do!
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