Thursday, April 2, 2020

Original "Unarmored" Command Mission X Model Discovered After 16 Years


Sit down, close your eyes and take yourself back to 2004. Recall, if you will, that the earliest screenshots for Mega Man X: Command Mission featured X wearing his original blue armor (albeit slightly stylized). This was a time before Capcom incorporated the now fan-favorite "Stealth Armor". If memory isn't your strong suit, it originally looked like this and this. In 2010, additional screenshots of this unused, unarmored state were discovered lurking inside the E3 2004 demo build, too.

Flash forward to today, I am pleased to report that a startling discover has been made among The Cutting Room Floor community. A one Chris Shade was poking around inside the retail GameCube version of the game when, to his surprise, he found a "demo" folder. Inside, Chris found model and texture data for X's unused armor. That's right: it's been hiding under our noses this whole time. Sixteen years, in fact.

Chris took the liberty of extracting the model, which you can download here. If you have the know-how, you can restructure it to look like the above image. And if you're a real wizard, you might be able to mod it *back in* to Command Mission. You could even put it in Grad Theft Auto V, I dunno. I leave that in your hands.

So yeah; this is a pretty neat discovery. It goes to show you that we're still learning new things about some of our favorite games after all these years!

21 comments:

  1. The "this" and "this" links don't take me anywhere, unfortunately (looks like they prevent such linking), and I don't see any "download here" link either. Very cool discovery though.

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    1. Send it to my email? I wanna see! Tgen I can show my sons... They're big X fans, kinda like their old man... ✌🏿😌

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    2. The Command Mission image link may be broken in the future. I recommend using this link instead:
      https://megaman.fandom.com/wiki/New_Armor

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  2. I'll never trust another one of your 'right under our noses' posts.

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  3. You didn't leave the download link

    For anyone looking for it,
    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Nhf-Ot5W7ruZvtH0pdoXUE5nECrPKgdw

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  4. "Take youself back to 2004..."
    Wait... I was a fetus in 2004.
    The most far I can go back is 2005

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    1. According to some ideologies you two were not fetuses, you two simply didn't exist at all in 04 and 05. You became you when you were 5 years old, you see.

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    2. Funnily, my earliest memory is a 4-5 years old (don't remember exaclty, been over 20 years) me awakening, quickly rising from bed and asking "who am I?", "where am I?", and "what am I doing here?". No kidding.

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  5. This makes me wonder if Command Mission didn't have a different art direction altogether.

    Look at Zero, who has no obvious differences at first glance yet has a differently styled body, with white trim on his feet, and his eyes being notably different. If he was in any way similar to X in design, Capcom might've just blanked out a ton of the details they'd drawn onto his body.

    Look at Massimo's eyes. Those aren't what you'd expect for an X series character.

    Even X's Stealth Armor model has this particular eye style.

    Look at everybody's eyes, they're not in a style that reflects Haruki Suetsugu's (SENSEI's) previous illustrations, like the final's box art does.

    The only one who doesn't is Axl, who I think was a late addition to the game altogether!

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  6. Now if someone were to finally crack the special figures passwords for the PAL version...

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  7. How funny! I actually bought a (used) copy of this and Mega Man X8, recently, so seeing this pop up, right now, is a fun coincidence~

    That said, I wouldn't mind someone injecting this into the actual game, again. Might be nifty.

    (Also… "fan favorite" armor…? [citation needed], friendo~)

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    1. Not a whole lot of people seem to dislike it. Obviously doesn't mean everyone likes it, but I think the overall positive approach the fandom has taken to the redesign definitely allows for the use of the term "fan favorite".

      I think it's a great redesign. Plenty of new stuff that makes X stand out more, but nothing that clashes with his personality or original look.

      Also, just so nobody gets the wrong impression, X's normal design is totally fine too. Both of the designs have their own merits.

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    2. X's appearance is one of the few things I like about Command Mission. It sort of grew on me over time.
      I always assumed it was just a new armor rather than a redesign. It's the only way it made sense to me. Especially since Zero and Axl are pretty much unchanged, with only a detail here or there different.

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  8. I really want to see this modded into Command Mission.

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  9. Never liked stealth armor. Would have preferred this one. Never liked Command Mission anyway, so I wouldn't have preferred anything. Yeah, this changes nothing to me lol. I love Vanilla X.

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  10. That is so cool!
    offtopic but could somebody give me a link to download all the battle voice lines from Megaman X Command Mission? i'm planning on doing a proyect with Zero's voice but i couldn't find any extracted voice lines anywhere.

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