Wii would like to play. This was the slogan
Nintendo chose to hype up their latest form of control, the Wii Motion Controller, or Wiimote,
a peripheral as intuitive to use as… well, a remote control. The ability for players to
control a game by making simple gestures meant the system was more accessible than any other
- reaching people who would usually consider themselves a non-gamer. The system’s software
also ranged dramatically from the casual to the hardcore - New Super Mario Bros. Wii,
WarioWare: Smooth Moves and Fortune Street were great for a light experience, while games
like Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition and Zelda: Twilight Princess were there for those looking
for something a bit deeper. And of course, we’ll be talking about these great
games and more in today’s video. Let’s start off with one of Nintendo’s more light
hearted releases, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which had a surprising amount of unused content.
Exploring the game’s data reveals evidence that suggests the game’s entire level structure
was once exceptionally different. Some of the levels featured in the final game are absent from
these early plans, but several other levels are referenced which never show up at all. The data
indicates that World 1 didn’t originally have a 6th level, and nor did World 2 - though World
2 did have a Ghost House in this early stage, which doesn’t exist in the final game. World 3
would have had two Ghost Houses, which is curious, as in the final game, World 3 is split up into
two sections, with the original ideas perhaps being to include a Ghost House in both sections.
The early version of World 4 had a 7th level, but no Ghost House or Airship. World 5
and 6 also included a 7th level each, but had world 6 lacking an Airship. World 7, again,
would have had a 7th level, but no Ghost House, and it may have had a cannon. World 8 had a
second tower, but this early version also had a complete lack of a World 9. As you can
see, this is quite a different structure to what we ultimately got, and many other
Wii titles have curiosities in their data. Unused data is always a treat to discover on
the disc of your favorite games, and sometimes it isn’t really what you’d expect to find. Fortune
Street was a curious release on the Wii, a board game featuring Mario characters that is distinctly
not Mario Party. Developed by Square Enix, this game wasn’t a Nintendo first party title,
though the big N did publish it. It’s important to establish these details, as an image for a Club
Penguin screen can be found on the game’s disc. This is baffling for two reasons; Fortune Street
has nothing to do with either Artoon or Disney, who developed and published the Club Penguin
game on the Wii respectively. And the image in question didn’t even end up being used in Club
Penguin: Game Day! on the Wii. It does, however, appear in the data of Club Penguin: Game Day!
but goes unused; and was likely used as an early placeholder title screen. The reason for the image
appearing on the disc of Fortune Street however, could possibly be a result of the
developers attempting to reuse the “Put on and tighten the wrist strap”
splash screen graphic from the game, but why they did this with a copy
of Club Penguin, we’ll never know…. WarioWare: Smooth Moves is another Wii title
with secrets within its data, but curiously, the asset in question doesn’t exactly go entirely
unused. WarioWare utilizes a lot of 2D elements in its gameplay, so to save on resources, sometimes
a micro-game’s graphics are all stored in a single image - a sprite sheet - and then the game
masks out portions it doesn’t want to show. One of the game’s micro-games is a recreation of
Punch-Out!! for the NES, but the main background image for this micro-game isn’t simply the
background from Punch-Out!!. If we take a look at the sprite sheet, just outside the confines
of the TV screen is a PC window of what appears to be an NES emulator — the devs seemingly took
a screenshot of Punch-Out being emulated rather than using Art from Nintendo’s own archives. Not
only that, but we can even see part of the desktop background behind this emulator window - and that
the emulator used to take this screenshot was VirtuaNES. An interesting revelation considering
Nintendo’s historically staunch disapproval of emulation… But more graphics go unseen in the
game, once again when it comes to an NES classic. In the US and PAL versions of Smooth Moves, the
“Super Nostalgic Entertainment System” micro-game involves the player having to successfully
insert a SNES cartridge into the system. In the Japanese version of Smooth Moves however,
the system is from the previous generation, taking on the appearance of the Famicom, Japan’s
equivalent of an NES. In this Japanese version, the game cartridges that the player may have
to insert can be Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Clu Clu Land, Devil World, Urban Champion,
or Tennis - and it is Tennis that leads to an interesting part of the micro-game’s textures.
In the micro-game’s graphics files is a background and set of sprites taken from Tennis for
the NES, suggesting that this micro-game would have shown the game booting up in
some way after the cartridge is successfully inserted - it’s possible that the developers
originally planned for the games to boot up after the player completes the stage, but may
have refrained after realizing the variety of games that needs to be animated for all of the
different cartridges shown in the final release. Games obviously go through a lot of
changes in the course of their creation, and Pokémon Battle Revolution is no exception. The
game was first demonstrated by Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata at a Nintendo marketing event in Japan in
2006. Here, a battle was showcased between Red and Leaf on the stage that would wind up becoming
the Neo Colosseum. The final game wound up looking substantially different from this demonstration,
with the game’s camera behaving in a very different fashion in the final release. In this
early version, the camera appeared smoother and more dynamic, panning from the first Pokemon to
the second after an attack was selected, then shifting to the trainer as they made the commands.
One other major difference is in an attack shown in this demonstration - Groudon performs a Hyper
Beam attack on Deoxys, rendering the Pokémon unconscious, while also leaving a huge imprint
in the ground where the attack was unleashed, as well as penetrating through the wall behind the
defeated Pokémon. Whether or not it was intended for these environmental effects to remain on the
stadium after the attack animation was completed is unknown, as no environmental damage occurs
with any of the moves in the final game’s release. This early version definitely showed a
lot more attention to the game’s visuals, and it’s likely these elements were removed as
a result of the massive workload that would have been necessary to add environmental damage for
each Pokémon & their attacks in the final game. The final release also has differences
between the various regional versions of the games - mostly in small elements to its
depiction of women. In the Japanese game, Rosie has white skin, but this was altered
and darkened when localized into English, along with Master Sashay. Master Sashay
also had some changes made to her clothing in the English release, giving her a pair
of purple shorts under her white miniskirt. And this isn’t the only game that went through a
lot of changes. The Wii version of Resident Evil 4 was considered the best version of the game by
many. But this game only achieved greatness by going through many different iterations during its
development. One early build, The "Hallucination" build of RE4, and to a lesser extent the character
of the Hook Man who was featured prominently in this version, was derived from a scene from
the 2000 American horror film Lost Souls. Specifically, the build references a scene where
the main character Maya Larkin washes her hands in a bathroom, then begins to hallucinate that
she’s in a derelict building being pursued by a crazed killer. Quite an obscure reference, but
the final version of the game arguably tops this. On a bulletin board in the room with security
monitors that's shut off when Leon sees Ashley, there's an image of a hamster-like monster. This
is actually taken from the cover art of Bloodwych, a 1989 RPG dungeon crawler, originally developed
for the Commodore 64 and eventually released on half a dozen 8-bit home computer systems. We have
no idea why this is referenced, and there’s no obvious connection. Maybe an artist at Capcom
liked Bloowych? Maybe one day we’ll find out. Mario Kart Wii is another game that has
some interesting secrets within its data. A fairly interesting yet simple bit of texture
can be seen within the game that demonstrates good resource management. The poles that appear around
the finish line of the N64 Sherbet Land track appear to have a gradient to their coloring, and
you’d assume this was its own original texture, but you'd be wrong. It’s actually an inventive
case of asset reuse, with the poles instead taking their texture from the letter "I" in the Mario
Kart banner which is mapped onto them, producing the gradient effect. Another texture in the
game is also something reused, but it’s unlikely many people would work this out, nor would they
even have seen it in the game in the first place. Funky Stadium appears as a battle course in the
game, a massive arena with an audience surrounding the track, inside a giant closed stadium. Because
this stadium is closed off, the player never sees the map outside of this building - but this
stage actually has a skybox which can’t be seen without the use of hacking utilities. This
unseen skybox shows a blue sky with a few clouds, with the majority of it originating from a texture
library, called Sozaijiten's SE048. Nintendo have often used the Sozaijiten texture collection in
their games, with clouds from SE037 being used in the background the Mario Party 8’s title screen,
though with the gradient removed and replaced with a flat color - and if you have the eyes of
a hawk who’s just finished their twelfth coffee, you may well have even noticed that this exact
same texture also appeared 6 years prior in the Chao Lobby of Sonic Adventure 2. But you probably
didn’t. And nobody can really blame you for that. Now let’s take things in a different direction
-- a far more “The Legend of Zelda'' direction. In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the
Kikwi race are clearly based on that of the New Zealand Kiwi, perhaps most obviously
in the similarities of their names. However each Kikwi has a unique name too - with
these names also having an interesting origin, with each one of the furry creatures being named
after a different strain of tea. Erla is named after Earl Grey tea. Lopsa gets their name
from the Chinese black tea Lapsang souchong. Machi is named after the green tea derived matcha
tea. Oolo's name comes from oolong tea. Yerbal is named after the herbal yerba mate tea. And Bucha's
name comes from kombucha, which is technically a fermented tea. Bucha's name may also be
a play on Buchou, a Japanese word which generally translates to "Chief" or "Director"
- the role which he takes on in the group. And let’s continue this Zelda direction with a far
more beloved Zelda game, Twilight Princess. This launch title for the system wasn’t
originally developed with the Wii in mind, but with the Wii on the horizon, it just made
sense to release it for both GameCube and the Wii… And to accommodate right-handed players,
Nintendo just simply mirrored the entire game so that Link would wield his sword in his right hand
-- but you already knew that. Today we’re talking about a few other, and far less known facts. After
the player frees the cuccos in Kakariko Village, if Link talks to the white cucco while in his wolf
form, it will imply that its previous master had mistreated it, so it ran away to Kakariko to
escape. And if Link then takes the gray cucco to where the Goron is keeping watch, and talks to
it as a wolf, it will state that the other cuccos flew in from Lake Hylia. This seems to imply
that Fyer and Falbi were the previous owners who mistreated their cuccos, possibly by forcing the
cuccos to partake in the Flight-by-Fowl mini-game, the main attraction of their Watertop Land of
Fantastication. Speaking of Falbi and Fyer, the two of them were originally planned
to have a much closer relationship, with the original intention to be that Falbi was
a woman - either taking the role of Fyer’s wife, or at the least, his lover. Another one of
Twilight Princess’s unique characters was Zant, whose helmet was originally modeled after a
bamboo shoot. While the character initially seems rather dark in nature, he shows a different
side to his personality directly before the very moment in which the player has to battle him.
According to developer commentary on the game, this change was to make the character seem
more rounded, rather than just coming across as generically dark and evil, but also to add a
more humorous aspect to the boss fight against him - Zelda is a Nintendo game after all, and
they gotta keep it at least a little bit light. I should also mention that our 10-year
anniversary live stream is coming up this saturday which is the 28th of May. We will
have a number of special guests -- some pretty, some really special guests actually -- there
will be a number of prize giveaways including a very nice gaming pc all of the proceeds
from the stream will go to charity, so be sure to tune in at 4pm BST that's
11am EST, and you're gonna have to Google it if you live in a different time zone
from that because yeah on the 28th of may 2022 this saturday come and check it out it's
gonna be a good time. It'll be me, Dazz, Shane hanging out playing some video games, special
guests... I don't know what else to say. Should have written it down. Come check it out over on
twitch -- twitch.tv slash did you know gaming. Did you also know that there's hidden
data within Ocarina of time that says 'i love you'? Or that Rare have outright
stated that one of Diddy Kong Racing's playable characters is a convicted criminal? For tons more
N64 game facts, check out the video on screen.
