Video uploaded of alleged Castlevania Resurrection prototype

[aganar]

What do we think? Real? Hoax?

I had to dig up ye olde Castlevania dungeon to try to find some known screenshots for reference.

The fire-spitting totems do seem to pretty close match the image from this Next Generation preview:

[shelverton]

Looks legit, I think?

It bothers me that the person is playing with one hand and never pushes the attack button. If there even was an attack implemented in the prototype? I mean, there are enemies that can harm you, sooo....

I guess he’s holding the camera with the other hand which also bothers me. Don’t ever show off gameplay like that!

The same music is playing constantly regardless of area which is perhaps how these things work, but who knows.

At the end of the day I have no reason to believe it’s fake, the game never looked especially great to begin with. I’m not surprised it got canned.

[Deleted]

I've no reason to think this isn't genuine. The demonstration though is too limited to get a grasp of how far along this is, and the perspective doesn't give a great view of the assets.

I would hope the owner would dump the iso in order to preserve it. Since they haven't done that, I wonder if they're planning to sell it. An interesting find nonetheless.

[windfisch]

If this was fake, it'd be the most elaborate one I've ever seen.

Such a shame this never got finished, I would've loved to experience the evolution of the N64 titles. Even though those games (or rather that game in its two iterations) were kinda rough, I think the developers were generally on the right track. I still find them much more charming than the PS2 and PS3 era 3D Castlevanias.

[lurker]

I wish they had done more with the N64 era cast, especially Cornell.

[dsparil]

I'm a little surprised that Konami still hasn't released more Castlevania Anniversary Collection volumes considering the first one was roughly the first 8 games with a few caveats. Back when it was announced, I figured the N64 games would be in a hypothetical volume 3 which would be releasing soon if they had used a yearly schedule.

For this prototype, I don't think there's any reason to think that it isn't real if only because 3D Dreamcast homebrew tends to be much rougher looking. I suppose they could be faking that it's on a Dreamcast, but that seems like so much work and for what? There's been a whole boatload of abysmal reporting around this so it's hard to get any firm details. I've seen it described as being the demo from e3 1999 which makes zero sense since the disc is labelled 11' 5' 99. I guess that's technically ambiguous and could mean May 11 (e3 started May 13th that year), but it was being developed in the US so there's no reason to think it wasn't dated Nov. 5 1999. In the Castlevania Dungeon interview with the art director Greg Orduyan, he said it was very far into development with it was canceled in March '00. The one discrepancy is that four working levels seems a bit skimpy for a game that was supposedly nearing completion only a few months later, but maybe he was exaggerating how complete it was.

It definitely is a shame this never got released. Sonia Belmont is one of the most screwed over characters with her only game being rendered non-canonical and this one being canceled for business reasons; Orduyan said that Konami was reevaluating all their Dreamcast plans when CR was scrapped. I'm not actually convinced the game would have been good because the team's only other games was the Bottom of the 9th series. Maybe they were great baseball game developers, but I can't find any kind of action game experience on what was presumably the team.