Thursday, August 15, 2013

Celebrating 10 years of Lost Levels

I meant to mention this anniversary--of one of the few blogs/sites I've been following since I first discovered such things existed way back when--a couple of weeks ago when it actually happened, but I was still completely obsessed with creating (and publishing) cushion designs for Animal Crossing: New Leaf at the time and as a result forgot to do so.

So, I'm mentioning--and celebrating--it today. (With the "it" in question being the 10th anniversary of Frank Cifaldi's LostLevels.org.)



If you've never visited Lost Levels, I'd obviously highly recommend doing so now (right now, in fact)--especially if you like reading about old video games that never made it to market.

I'm pretty sure this post about Final Fantasy 64 is what first brought me to Cifaldi's site, by the way. Even if it wasn't, it's unquestionably my favorite of all of Lost Levels' posts, as I obsessed over that not-meant-to-be title far more than I'd like to admit as a teen, and the writer's insights into its existence (or lack thereof) thrill me even today.

10 comments:

Justin Difazzio said...

Oh god...now I'm going to be obsessed with this site!

michaelstearns said...

Still waiting for Yeah Yeah Beebiss to show up. :)



I sure remember this whole debacle! At the time it didn't seem strange (to me at least) that this ended up just being a fancy tech demo, but nowadays it's really hard for me to imagine having that degree of developer/console loyalty expectation people had back then, and based on reader mail and whatnot (pretty much all we had at the time!) it seemed like that was the bigger deal than the game itself. But it was certainly the case, I know many people bought SNES specifically because of Square, and I wasn't an exception either, I was really surprised when Treasure began developing for non-Sega platforms, and also when Capcom began supporting Sega as well. I guess that still exists to some extent, like peoples' outrage over Bayonetta switching to WiiU, and it would still be a shocker if a previously-exclusive title made a jump like that (like Infamous being on Xbox, for instance). Maybe it's just me who thinks that's weird today.

The demo itself is pretty interesting! Did you watch the clips? (The whole thing seems to be on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPO7c_XmesU) Can you imagine what the combat would have been like if they kept this pacing? People complained about the lengthy summons, every attack here takes quite a while to unfold! And Shadow's takedown of the golem is crazy, it looks cool but having to put in those custom animations for every enemy for every unique attack like that would never have been feasible. It's really cool to get to see an early experiment like this, it's kind of crazy that they actually showed it at all, seems like most developers do their best to hide the "experiments" during development.



Also I always thought it was funny that the golem looked more like something from DragonQuest than Final Fantasy. :)

thegaygamer.com said...

You've never been to it before, Justin? If so, enjoy! There's some awesome/interesting stuff there, I assure you :)

thegaygamer.com said...

Hello again, Michael! Oh, I agree about this kind of thing being from another era/time, basically. Even thinking about Capcom being loyal to just one (or two, in the case of the PC Engine) platforms seems strange these days, for instance.


As for the video of the FF64 demo: oh, yeah, I've seen it! Many times, in fact. And you're right, it's pretty insane in terms of animations and the time it takes for everything to unfold. Clearly this was just the folks at Square seeing what they could do in this new polygon-filled world.


Oh, and YES, that golem definitely looks like it was pulled from Dragon Quest--which is kind of interesting when you consider the company's future plans :)

Nightmare Bruce said...

Oh wow, I remember downloading the postage-stamp sized video for Final Fantasy 64 back in the 90's and watching it over and over. I also remember spending 10 hours trying to get the the 200mb (wow!!) demo for Quake II. Thanks for reminding me about Lost Levels! Games that could have been are so interesting.

thegaygamer.com said...

Ha ha! I have a feeling I did the same thing, Jeremy--spending hours downloading the FF64 video, I mean. Those were the days, eh? Also, you're welcome about the reminder :)

Zigfried said...

Lost Levels is a cool site indeed -- thanks for reminding me about them. Now to check out this Final Fantasy 64 thing...

michaelstearns said...

This was actually my first time seeing it. I've read several articles on Lost Levels but not that one, so it was old "news" but still a new video for me. Kinda exciting, even though I would have assumed that "it's gotta be on youtube," I just hadn't really given it any thought before. :)

thegaygamer.com said...

Ah, well, glad I could turn you onto it, Michael :)

thegaygamer.com said...

You're welcome, Zigfried! And, yes, check out the FF64 post...