Ecco 2 Prototype


	Below is a list of all the enemies found in the Ecco 2 alpha version. Almost none of them are able to damage you, but we have some very interesting specimens here ..
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Vortex Queen

Interestingly enough, even though Ecco' sprite is not complete, the Vortex Queen's is! You can fight her, and she will stick out her tongue to grab you. Her tongues a tongue made of balls, and is not prehensile and snakelike as in the final game. It really doesn't look right, but she's able to grab you with it, which shows quite a bit of work was put into her code by this point. Below are screenshots of the queen attached to the hive.

This is the Queen eating. She sucks in water and, in the final version, little ball-like things, presumably some sort of food for her. In this build, there's no sprite for that, so there's some other seemingly random sprites thrown in as food, including jellyfish and a purple sprite that appears to be a sharrk of some sort. Except it's far too small to be one.

When hit by sonar, she does show pain, and pukes up these peculiar stars. (She does this after eating, as well. In the final version she spits out some balls that look a bit like wadded up paper.

Crabs on Strings

These snakelike enemies come in numerous varieties, but all have placeholder crabs as heads. They are more annoying than any game enemy you could possibly imagine. They swing around their string of barbs to damage you (though they can't hurt you). Their AI is incredible- they never lose track of you and are utterly relentless. They can fly out of the water- because they're actually prototype examples of the 'Magic Arm' Vortex snakes! The crab sprite was only used as a placeholder by the high-level programmer. Here's some images of them:

Mobile Crabs

And here's one dying (note the steam/foam spewing when it dies):

Now let's compare that to the "Magic Arm" snake-like creature in the final version.

It has the same spike/tail sprites as the brown Crab on a String, just in a different color palette. It dies the same way, too! Obviously the crab-on-a-string was never removed from the game as intially thought, it just became something entirely different.

TetherCrabs

This type of crab is chained to the wall but is still plenty vicious (even if it can't hurt you). They made it to the final version in the Epilogue levels toward the end of the game as Vortex/Earth creature hybrids according to Ed Annunziata.

Crab Snakes

Only found in Level 8, these snakelike creatures are composed of Crab placeholder art for lack of anything better at the time this build was compiled. Their only goal is to swim to the 4 corners of the level they are found in. They do not attack Ecco, they just swim along on their predetermined path. They'll keep swimming, even out of the water and out of the level.

They can be destroyed by attacking the 'lead crab' (the head, the first crab in the direction it is going. It explodes into steam/foam, just like the brown snake creatures in the Vortex hive levels.

Could this have been the AI test for the snakelike enemy graphic found in the final Ecco 2 ROM image? Compare the probable shape and movement (near identical to a Vortex snake) to the Crab Snake above. (These sprites were located by Sebastian).

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