I dumped & preserved an UNRELEASED Nintendo GameCube game

what is this it's a GameCube and our disc and NR reader for those not in the know the NR reader was a development system that could only read a proprietary development disk format and our readers can't play regular GameCube games and vice versa nearly no commercial PC Optical drives can read them either at least not without some hot swapping and tinkering but what's on this NR disk well this unlabeled gem is special because it contains a completely unreleased game pickles was a platform Adventure Title by Santa Cruz Studios this is the first bit of software from this game ever to be found it was discovered recently by Cake order who sent it to us to get dumped and preserved if you're curious he did a wonderful YouTube video breaking down the history and development of pickles that I recommend all of you watch links below for our purposes we'll be focusing on what's actually contained on the disk how it runs on an NR reader can we dump it it's glitches it's playability and of course per the footage how many monkeys we can stack on top of one another I was a bit nervous at first cake mentioned the game was very buggy and I was a bit worried it wouldn't run or dump the back is also scratched to Hell the original owners didn't heed the disc warning please avoid touching or dirtying the recording surface of the disc sometimes when you boot the system up it just immediately errors great start now there are two worlds each with six levels on an NR reader cake order got levels one two and six to work on world one and if I recall nearly nothing to work on World 2 . on my end level 1 won't seem to load at all it just freezes nothing here looks like it froze up again neither does level two as soon as I make my selection it just stops nope now this seems to be true for all of the levels except for level six finally level six world one boots up and we'll show more of the stage later knowing that it worked for cake order I tried about four more times to get level one to load and finally it did the same for level two unsure why and completely Unsure how so here we go this is the first level it is on a boardwalk it's Marina themed and many of these levels are in fact Marina or water themed you're going to notice here one of the first things that happens to me is I glitch through the boardwalk and I'm actually outside of the level itself a bit of a boundary break if you will again this normally wouldn't be part of the game but just kind of want to showcase to you my experience and more or less the order of that it actually occurs one thing you may also notice is that most of the sound effects and audio are coming in Via one channel now it's not my setup because the GameCube loading jingle is in Stereo as are some other sound effects but for some reason most of this is just one channel now eventually here I figure I should probably try to get back on the boardwalk takes a couple of tries uh you can see me almost kind of like almost kind of snapping two back to the ground if that makes sense I'm gonna go ahead and try one more time here and there we go snap to the boardwalk and I can showcase the level a little bit more normally now one of the features of this game is to stack different animals mostly monkeys but occasionally other animals on top of you as you ride around and I would assume this would allow you to reach different areas and also interact with different things you can also see here I'm picking up some fish there's gonna be some gems some fruit some other collectibles in future levels oddly though when I press the Z button here I get like this weird inverted camera angle you're gonna see it here in a second yeah there it is it's almost like upside down like you're looking at it from underneath I don't know maybe it's to check out the other level geometry that you wouldn't normally see as a player not exactly sure I also want to show off some of the more ridiculous and amazing animal designs here now there's no hit detection with the shark he's clearly trying to bite me my goodness just love how hard he's trying looks so amazing in level two world one we get a little bit more of what you would consider to be a level structure with lots of enemies that can actually hit you Collectibles monkeys to stack etc etc and the ability to fall off the little Boardwalk thing pretty easily as you can see here I get hit by the the rat and just lose a massive amount of fruit that I didn't know I had uh keep spinning and spinning get my little monkey bar back foreign this guy's pretty fun he was missing the tail flip animation uh which you will see here in a second and off I go this level doesn't really seem to go anywhere there's not like an end point you know I would think it would be the lighthouse over there but you can't like get to it you can't touch it all right it's time to dump this thing we have an rvt-r writer it's a Nintendo development drive that can read and write both Wii and GameCube development disks now despite my fears regarding scratches it dumped with zero errors now despite the lack of errors on world one levels one and two do not load on the Dolphin Emulator at least for me anyways perhaps someone can mess with this and tell me if maybe my settings are off or or go through the iso data and do some sort of optimization because the content seems to be here the audio and the visuals exist they just don't run world one level three actually works on Dolphin it did not work on an NR reader so that's a big win there we can actually play it you're going to see me kind of messing around with the lighting here there's actually a button on the controller that seemingly changes the lighting effects kind of removes some of the Reflection from the water or makes it darker not quite sure why or what it's doing there are also other debug features that you can turn on and off with your controller including taking a look at the points of articulation which kind of makes your monkey turn into a bit of a porcupine which is kind of amusing I should note here that this menu is almost useless you can pause the game and you can go back into it but the sound Ambience controls none of that actually works none of it's selectable yet alright now we're wandering over to the main area we have a ton of stuff going on we have a bulldog that's extremely aggro that will constantly try to attack you makes You spin around losing all your fruit all your fish all of this random stuff there's conveyor belt in the background and more breakable objects as well there are these barrels in the background you can jump on them and they explode with all of these gems now I'm not sure the different between the gems and the fruit and the fish I don't know if maybe they're just all in the same category of collectible things I don't really know I'm not even sure if the developers knew maybe they were just throwing things together and being like here here are some options don't quite know the conveyor belt here is very difficult to navigate all of these rats keep trying to attack me and you can't really gain enough speed to combat the effect of the conveyor belt these crates in the back are breakable and I do kind of like how the smoke cloud things are like kind of 2D I kind of like that I don't know if that was intentional maybe it's just a placeholder uh they put in for the time being but I do kind of like the way it looks going over to the other side of the stage you get more of the same breakable objects more rats more conveyor belts but there's no real place to go there's nothing really to accomplish here again just sort of a demo it's kind of an idea that the developers put together being like okay here are some Physics here are some characters here are some Collectibles what could we do with this eventually or at least that's the impression I'm getting level four world one we're gonna see some very angry cobras as soon as you spawn they are just on top of you one nice thing about this level is that begins a little bit more of the animal stacking as you can see there are these monkeys in the background that are on these floating balloons and you can collect them one by one it is kind of funny though because there's so much stuff to break open that you break open these jars or pots or whatever they are and the gems disappear before you can actually collect them all and your main character doesn't really move very fast [Music] thank you [Music] we have another similarly set up level here except instead of cobras we have this large sort of coin-shaped thing that's just spinning around trying to kill me trying to knock monkeys off my back oh and we get an elephant as well this is just pretty hilarious look at this let's go ahead and see that again just the sound effect here there's elephants spinning around and just flying off me [Music] you're gonna notice some bugs like I'm still playing the same level but then it goes to Black and then it sort of transitions back into the gameplay like it's almost like a wipe like the camera comes from the left or the camber comes from below or something like that very bizarre now level six we saw before on the NR reader but here it is again on dolphin again sort of a contained level get all the monkeys not really much to do once you have them though kind of a precarious situation now I thought because the clown in the back has sort of a ramp leading up to its mouth that maybe I could go up it but I can't seem to world two level one starts with a warning that I have to dismiss and it's just a lot of slow down and a blank empty space level two is the same thing but it runs a lot faster seemingly this is just sort of a play space for me to mess around with my debug features I don't really know level three we're gonna get a big glitched out space there seems to be something there it's just dolphin can't render it I don't know again maybe it's a settings thing I'm not sure what's going on here exactly but you're gonna get the same thing in level three and level four in world two seem to load something and then it goes to this it's very bizarre but yes for the next couple of levels here the last two we're gonna see things that we have kind of seen before they're gonna be very similar a little bit different glitchy in different ways but basically playing around with the same themes and basic mechanics you know maybe I get the elephant first and then I get a monkey or something to that effect but essentially it's more or less the same with just the developers adding little wrinkles and bits and pieces here and there and of course different I'm using glitches like for this one the floor seems to just be kind of not here so that's pickles at least pickles and a rudimentary demo stage this game changed quite a bit during its development and unfortunately it never really found its groove it had ideas but those ideas never really meshed into gameplay despite this it is a semi-playable experience now and it has been recovered cake order will be releasing the game today on hidden Palace and you can play it for yourself I hope you all enjoy the experience big thanks again to cake order for letting me dump the game and to you the viewer if you like content like this please make sure to subscribe hit that notification Bell join us on patreon all that good stuff that helps support the show and of course hope to see you all back for the next video take care that's real thanks again for watching everybody and wanted to let you all know you are invited to a live hard for games meet and greet at the Detroit retro video game show on November 4th details in the description below [Music]

Channel: Hard4Games

Views: 115,984

Keywords: hard4games, hard 4 games, h4g, hard for games, cake hoarder pickles, gamecube nr, nr reader, gamecube prototype, gamecube development, nintendo prototype, pickles gamecube, unreleased gamecube, unreleased pickles game, santa cruz studios

Id: UYSxSkDMk04

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023