yeah. let's start with the two big ones, they honestly probably should get their own threads. but i'd like to confirm if they fully work first.
hellboy: the science of evil dlc
did you know that guillermo del toro actually did manage to work on a game that was actually released? this hellboy game, based off his duo of films. featured several of the cast members reprising their roles, and was partially written by him.
of course, this being del toro. something had to have gone wrong in the process, and so the game launched with
four achievements that were completely impossible to unlock.
was it a bug? nope!
the plan was to release extra dlc for the game at some point. a set of extra chapters starring new (to the film timeline, he was already established in the comics.) character lobster johnson.
portrayed by beloved b-movie actor bruce campbell.
however, said dlc never made it out there. leaving those achievements seemingly lost forever....
that is, until the terarelease happened over
14 years later.
there's actually two packs that have been rediscovered. the more important "disposable army" pack featuring lobster, and a simpler "out of gas" bonus level that probably could have fit anywhere in the story.
i say "rediscovered" as the folder listing suggests that this was pulled from the infamous
partnernet developer network, presumably seen by countless developers and game journalists unaware of it's historical significance.
the only problem is that i'm still lacking an extra 360 (or even a copy of the game) to test it with, but a cursory look at it's files suggests the content was nearly finished. if not 100% complete prior to it's cancellation.
a pc port of gears of war 2?
those of you who were keeping track of game preservation news may have remembered
the long lost ps3 "port" of gears of wars 3, a simple effort from epic games to test the operability of unreal engine 3 on the system.
what you probably weren't aware of was that as part of that same testing regimen, a
pc port of 3 was also created. functionally fairly close to the ps3 build in terms of purpose, but with quite a bit more polish.
but with that in mind, the question becomes about how gears 2 was handled. the original game had an
officially released port, so could it have once theoretically been possible to play almost the entire series on there?
a random prototype build dated february 1st 2008 could have had the answers.
alongside the standard .xex files used to run the game on an xbox 360, it also included those two windows executables you see above. however, it requires some specific dependencies that currently can't be fully fulfilled.
the first one is simple enough, it's just a 32 bit copy of the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. which you can easily grab from microsoft themselves.
but the other is where the problem lies. those "wxmsw28u" dll files are an internal set of dlls used by the unreal engine 3 sdk. you
can extract a version of it from the publicly released sdk, but the issue is that the sdk version (the earliest one out there is dated
november 2009) happens to be
too new for this proto. merely causing it to fire out an error message on launch.
i suspect some reverse engineering work could be done to get it to accept the newer .dll file, but it's far beyond my technical skill level.
misc items
- a dump of a hard drive used to develop the notorious burger king xbox/360 games, containing various development assets.
- dlc for the poorly received rhythm game "Power Gig: Rise of the SixString" including a single unreleased song, megadeth's "tornado of souls".
- a build (predating it's release by 15 months) of the original version of malice, back when it was intended to be a major release that featured voice acting by the band "no doubt", really.
- an unreleased xbox 360 port of the psp/wii exclusive Dave Mirra BMX Challenge
- an early version of "the gunstringer" made back when it was supposed to be a simple xbla game like twisted pixel's other releases, rather than becoming a full retail title meant to push the kinect. (though i'm not 100% sure if this build uses gamepad controls, or if it was always meant to use the peripheral.)
- a bunch of unreleased dlc for the 2008 turok game, including several test maps.
- and a good chunk of repeats from previous releases, unfortunately.
