Ecco 2 Prototype

The 3D stages are mostly complete in the Ecco 2 Beta, however, many of the obstacle and enemy sprites for these stages are not. There's also some peculiar Debug info in some of the stages.

In Level -5, a seaweed level, push START to pause the game and ...

... this menu shows up! If you look carefully, you can make out "DISTANCE FROM START", which seems to be, well, the distance from the start of the level. No surprise there! This can not be changed. The other two, however, you can change on the fly. Push UP and DOWN to change the difficulty level (0-3), and LEFT and RIGHT to change the TIME DECREMENT. However, I don't know what TIME DECREMENT does yet. DISTANCE can not be changed, unfortunately.

This debug feature was meant for programming use, when the developers needed to check on certain variables while in the 3D Stages, or change said variables to jump through and debug quicker. Needless to say, this was removed before the final game was released. 3D Stages are incredibly long so this must have been a godsend in testing. (NOTE: This menu usually shows up as random tiles instead of proper text, but the values can still be changed.)

Here is a view of the placeholder seaweed underwater. It still forms the same basic shape, but isn't green and, well, looks nothing like seaweed should. The palette is completely corrupt. In the final version, they're still just called the "LINES" 3D Stages in the debug menu, not Seaweed, even though it's what they became.

Here's a view from above the water. Note how the scrambled sprites correspond with the position of the seaweed underwater. These are the pieces of flowerlike vegetation that are attached to the seaweed on the surface in the final version, as shown in the second image above. Also note the scrambled chunks of what look like letters around the water surface. This is apparently caused by the proper tiles not having been loaded into VRAM before the level began.

Level -3, shown above, has some peculiar features. When Ecco charges, red bubbles fly out instead of clear ones, and you can see the scrambled sprite here again in the place of the sharks, for which the sprites had not been made or implemented.

Quick Bits o' Info

The Rings-- They Do Nothing! - The rings didn't seem to be meant for travel at this point at all! The rings fly off into the upper left of the screen, as though they were going to be added to the ring counter (which wasn't implemented yet), instead of the screen flashing and Ecco travelling forward in the process. All the enemies stay onscreen and the background doesn't change, indicating that Ecco didn't go anywhere.
There is no ring meter- there is one in the upper left in the final version. The rings do fly into it though, indicating something was going to go there.
Ecco has an Air Meter. He does not in the final.
Ecco can't take damage in the 3D stages. In the final he can.
Backgrounds are different from the final version in distance from shore. Ecco doesn't gradually move toward the land.
The clouds move at a different speed and in a different direction than in the final version.

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