obj_c_ropeSwing
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Lost and Found #12: Super Seal Party
Date: June 13th, 2009
Subject: obj_c_ropeSwing
Hello everyone, Dexter here, and welcome back to Lost and Found! The only blog series that documents small unused findings in video games, every week!
You may have noticed my long hiatus between posts, and for that I apologize. I have been busy with high school and finals and all that jazz. But now I am finally free from the American School System!! I have lots of free time now :3
Anyway, enough stalling, let's jump into this thing!
Introduction
I'm sure we all know the infamous Super Seal Party game. Releasing in 2006 as a launch title for the Wii, it was initially developed to be a platformer, but something shifted mid-development, and the game became a party game with gimmicky motion controls. XP... What a downgrade!! The game had a lot of promsie as well; Judging from pre-release screenshots that is. What a shame... Oh well, at least its kinda fun!!
Anyways, seeing as this shift in development seemed to happen so quickly, you'd expect there to be leftovers from it's days as a platformer, right? And you would be correct! SUPER correct! Because the amount of models, code, sound files left inside this thing is INSANE! So, I decided to pick the one object with the most functionality remaining: obj_c_ropeSwing.
(If you can't tell what it is [I don't blame u, this games art style is weird XDDD], it's one of those circus hanging swingy things. I think its call a Trapeze?)
Anyway, let me get one thing straight. This object is not unused. In fact, its used in the minigame "Seals Love To Do Circus Tricks", where its one of the objects you can trick off of.
Its interactions with other objects however, are totally unused. That's what we will be diving into today!
Unused Interactions
Seals Love To Do 2D Platforming
First of all, if you plop this object into the minigame "Seals Love To Do 2D Platforming", you are actually able to control the direction you can swing in! On top of that, you have to build up your swing by repeatedly swinging left to right, like other platformers. Since you never slow down in Seals Love To Do Circus Tricks, this behavior is totally unseen.
One bizzare thing about this object is that only the main character, Seal Ryan, works with it! Any other character will just clip through and probably die.
...except for one! Seal Wayne also works with it as well! Given how Seal Wayne was supposed to be the 2nd player character in the original platformer concept, this makes total sense!
Seal Wayne's unused swinging sprite for Seals Love To Do 2D Platforming
Seals Can Throw, Throw, Throw!!
In this olympic-styled minigame where you have to launch this ball... thingy... as far as possible, loading obj_c_ropeSwing into this game yields some... Fascinating results.
Basically, the programmers re-used obj_c_ropeSwings code to have your character spin around in a circle. Then, after you release the ball, a new character is spawned with its graphics replaced with the ball. Usually, the object used for the player character in this minigame is obj_pl_olympics. However, if you were to replace that object with obj_c_ropeSwing...
It works! The ball can literally swing on the trapeze!! XD. You can even control it, too! Fascinatingly, instead of having to swing the Wii Remote around, you only have to spin the Nunchuk's Control Stick, and that's because its object code for this game is actually from an earlier version of the minigame, before they made a separate, unique object for the player!
Now, pressing A to release just ends up crashing the game; Presumably because of the entity spawning code erroring out/being unfinished... Oops. You bwoke it.'
Pre-Release
Now that we've covered some unused interactions that the object has, let's look over some early sightings of the object! I dug through a bunch of old magazines and stuff to get all this! However, before we do that, we need to go over why the object is called obj_c_ropeSwing. Like, that's not a rope!! Its a trapeze! Well... that's cause it used to be a rope! The devs just changed up the graphics a little and called it a day.
Unused rope sprite, as well as unused sprites for swinging.
Also, the "c" in the file name means "common", which is used for objects that are used in multiple minigames. But ropeSwing only appears in one minigame! It seems like this object would've been a lot more common in the original platformer version of the game, which is obvious in early screenshots.
Conclusion
Although Super Seal Party didn't really turn out the way fans wanted it to, I don't think it actually turned out that bad. I still wish we got the platformer they were teasing all that time though... It looked so cool! And had lots of cool concepts!! But Yeah, unless a pre-release build leaks (wich I doubt will ever happen lololol), or someone makes some elaborate mod, it'll probably never see the light of day again. :(
And that's it for this weeks edition of Lost and Found! Like I said before, now that I am free from school, I will probably be alot more consistent with these blog posts! Woot woot!