The Very Early Beta!


Very Early Beta / Pre-release: Scans + Comments

On the back of the European Comix Zone box are some screenshots of the game in action. But they all seem different to the final release, and even earlier than the April 1995 Beta doing the rounds on the Internet. See below for box scans and my comments:

Scan 1: The "COMIX ZONE!!!" title is definitely NOT in the April 1995 Beta, and uses a totally different font. The speech bubble is different too: it's got a thick black outline and it's another different font. And why is Sketch saying "Mortus?" - presumably he was just having some kind of argument before he teleported him into his own comic book. In the final, after getting up, he just says "Ouch!", for some weird reason...

Scan 2a (left): This area in Level 2 had different enemies in the Final. In the Beta there are just two Styx enemies to fight.
Scan 2b (right): Another shot showing the Styx enemies and Sketch using his "Power Blast" weapon. If you look carefully at the right-hand Styx, he seems to be standing over a hole - this being the one where Flying Creatures emerge in the Final. This scene is in the April Beta. Also, the Styx swearing uses the different speech bubble & font as seen in this screenshot:

Scan 3: Ignoring the bottom half of this scan (the result of the top of another screenshot being overlayed at the bottom for some reason), we can see the early icon for the bomb in the Item Bar. My only comment here being that it looks like the classic black, spherical, cartoony-type bomb. This bomb type is seen in the April Beta, too. Was changed in the Final for several sticks of dynamite strapped together.

Scan 4: Well, I can safely say that this scene is in the April Beta and Final releases, so there's nothing weird here for me to report. Except, of course, for the different font used in that Strigil's speech bubble :-)

Very Early Beta: Where Is It Now?

It's probably out there somewhere. This version is most likely to be a pre-release version, however (similar to the EU Vectorman box, which has shots of the pre-release, so it may well be the same case with Comix Zone).

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