Well, I figured I’d make a thread for this, so it doesn’t get lost amidst the other thread. While I haven’t begun to scan all of the magaazine stuff yet, I figured I would upload this interesting image of an early shot of Panzer Dragoon Saga box art. I don’t know if it’s been posted before, and I apologize for the quality, as I accidentally moved it a little, but you can still see it, as well as an interesting shot of it, pretty well.
If it’s been posted before I at least haven’t seen it myself; it’s interesting… that box art looks like another Sega of America job, similar to the US Zwei box art (which I thought was a hoax when I first found an image of it, heh). I wonder if they ever planned to use it for the box itself, or if it was just quickly done for the mock-up while they waited for some high-quality renders to come over from Japan…
The radar in that screenshot isn’t as mysterious as it might look, though - I expect this image I scanned for the site a while back will show you why.
I’m curious, do any of those mags have coverage from E3 1997? The Saga demo there seems to have had some quirky differences from the finished game, but UK mags only turned out a handful of images of it; it’d be nice to see more…
(BTW, I’ll try and scan some old stuff myself this week too; I have a pile of old Sega mags and a scanner and free time, at least.)
Indeed, I had figured that the radar wasn’t a big issue, but I thought the box art was interesting. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure if any of these EGMs have E3 coverage yet. I used to have the entire 1997 and 1998 years of EGM, but some are currently missing. I can tell you, though, that there are a few interesting shots not long after the game was announced with a different and unfinished screen at the bottom. If I have the chance tonight, I’ll scan some more, but we’ll have to see.
If anyone’s interested, I also have magazines from when the Nintendo 64 was called the Ultra 64, as well as a lot of other Saturn games and such. I even have one that goes as far back to 1995. These are all EGMs, mind you. I do believe I have a few GamePro or some such magazines that are from 1992 or 1993.
Edit: To answer your question (or attempt to) about the box art, it seems to me that this is a picture of the “finished” box (that is to say, it tries to look like the commercial version you’d see on the shelves), but I doubt it. I believe the copyright on the brochure is 1997 (I see no references to any year past that at the bottom of the image, or on the actual copy), so it can be assumed that this was some months before the game was entirely finished and ready to go. It’s possible that they just made a mock up cover for promotional purposes. The box doesn’t look “natural” enough to be an actual case, I suppose. Plus, it doesn’t have the usual logo brands you see on the bottom of the front image (see the bottom of the above case and the bottom of the Warcraft case to the right). So my guess is that it was just a promo thing.
Okay, here’s another scan, and probably the most “bizarre” of them all. It shows a considerably different game display. This is from around July 1997.
As you can see, it has two bars for SHOT and LASER. From the looks of it, these two would charge separately or something (indicated by the first screen shot where the bars are at different levels). There’s a BP amount, but there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding BERSERK meter to the other two.
Anyway, feel free to come up with your own ideas and observations. I’ll scan more stuff later, but I’m not sure how much different they’ll be.
I do have some information about E3 in 1997 (a report from someone), but no known screenshots. I’ll look in a little while. I figured you guys would find that one most interesting, though.
I’m curious, do any of those mags have coverage from E3 1997? The Saga demo there seems to have had some quirky differences from the finished game, but UK mags only turned out a handful of images of it; it’d be nice to see more… <<
I was at the show and video tapped much of Saga, I can take a look at it, but it didn’t seem that different …
Ah, looks like I was mistaken about that - a while back I downloaded some Azel footage labelled “E3 1997” from a Japanese site, and it shows the rolling demo that the screenshots in WintryDeath’s second scan must have come from. It evidently isn’t from E3 after all, as it looks (and sounds) like it’ll be from a Japanese event of some kind.
I was curious because the footage shows the early version of the battle system that’s in those shots, where there’s separate charging gauges for the gun and dragon’s lasers, which would affect gameplay quite a bit. It also shows an early draft of the FMV where Edge meets the dragon, which looks quite different to what appears in the finished game. The in-game / exploration stuff seems more or less finalised though, except level architecture isn’t 100% finished.
The site I got the footage from seems to have disappeared long ago, but I guess I could give it to Solo to host if anyone wanted to see it…
If that’s a “Duh yes I’d like too see it”, I’ll be sure to send it Solo’s way when I’ve got a minute; I warn you it’s slightly shabby quality and about 10MB, though.
