Saturday, March 5, 2011

Hidden Stages Unearthed In Rockman 8 Beta

Immediately following the public release of the much sought after Rockman 8 beta, fans quickly began poking and prodding around its innards with hopes of discovering something, anything, that may be hiding among the iso. Sure enough, their efforts have not gone to waste: two more stages have been discovered.

With a little elbow grease, skeleton stages for Clown Man and Tengu Man have been forced out of hiding, revealing more unseen (and unheard) goodness. Both stages, though incomplete, tout drastically different layouts and feature a single piece of unused music:



You can download the beta (and the unused music) within the video's description.

On a related note: I've been hearing a lot of requests for the release of beta v2. I'm currently working on that, but I thought I'd give you all fair warning: it's not as significant as v1.

v2 is near final. The build consists of five and a half stages: introductory, Clown Man, Grenade Man, finalized Frost Man, and an incomplete Sword Man stage. Each stage is nearly identical to the final counterparts, but all lack certain graphical background details. All stages lack boss battles and all end with a dead end. The only way to return to the stage select is to reset the game.

So, yes, beta v2 doesn't contain anything hugely awesome like the unused swamp introductory stage. Still, it's worthy of a release just for the sake of completion. I'll be keeping you posted on that front.

16 comments:

  1. That charge shot sound sounds like Battle Network's.. <3

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  2. Meh.

    Sure, it's nice to see little things like this.


    Too bad it's not really that great and extremely boring.

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  3. It's so neat to have MM8 content, and for people to be looking at MM8 again. Makes me hope they'll make a non-retro MM game soon...

    These stages are so big and seem to have different levels in them, as if they put alternate designs of the same level in 1 same stage.

    Btw Protodude, your "unused swamp introductory stage" link doens't work.

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  4. Amir, you always have such a shitty attitude.

    Just don't comment if you have nothing to offer.

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  5. Wow. I can't wait for v1. Thanks.

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  6. @Amir:

    I don't think you understand how neat this is. You're looking at the blue prints of a stage -- the bare bones of what we've been playing all these years in MM8. This is something incredible; we're exploring a piece of Mega Man history that we, the consumer, isn't suppose to be seeing.

    It's like discovering a reel of unfinished footage from your favorite movie or story boards from a cartoon. This is an awesome find.

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  7. @Dhylec:

    The link works if you copy and paste the URL into the address bar of your browser.

    Regarding that swamp stage from the magazine scan, I doubt that was a real in-game screen. It was most likely a mock-up, similar to the white city stage from Mega Man X1, and the Dust Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

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  8. Did anybody else pay attention to Rock's running animation? His arms flap around like rubber!

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  9. @Anons:

    I know exactly what this is and how "great" it is.


    It's just not that much to look at.

    Hell, it's hilarious how the same people who basically call anything that's not MM2, MM9 or 10 automatically as "crap" because it's not 8bit or something like that, are now in utter awe over an unfinished version of MM8.



    Give it a few months, if they ever make MM11 and it ends up being non-8bit. You same people are going to bitch beyond recognition.


    It's not my fault the Megaman fanbase has become a sad state, on the same level as the Sonic and Final Fantasy fanbases. ;)

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  10. I don't know why, but I wasn't expecting this to have its own article here at the Rockman Corner. I really appreciate it! Then again, I'm sure you guys appreciate me covering this in the first place. Heh heh.

    Anyway, good news, everyone! I've added annotations to the video pointing out differences from the final and other things! :D

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  11. Too bad no one has found that swamp area, but it is interesting that the music was quite a bit different in the intro stage of this beta.

    It'll be interesting to see if anything else is hidden. And, even if Beta 2 isn't as "cool," perhaps it has some other goodie hiding within?

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  12. Very interesting stuff so far. Can't wait to mess around with some stuff hopefully tomorrow. I've been out of town, and just had my phone for reading up on the release and watching videos.

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  13. That's the first time i've seen that swamp picture. WTH! That looks great!

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  14. The unused music sounds like boss music in my opinion but in cute sound and sound is really matches the stages its like really for editing stage sounds. :)

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  15. Im feeling the next Megaman 11 is not gonna be 8bit my guess. Well 8bit, 16bit or 16bit+ grapic its ok for meh happy at least/hope they put good Megaman game.

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  16. More Megaman actions yes but they only release Megaman 8 for PS3 or 360 how about the Ninten console, I wish they could.

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