Hidden beta levels found in Zelda: The Wind Waker
I’ve been replaying Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker recently, so I’m particularly in a mood for Zelda stuff. You know how it is when you replay an old favourite: you go on Wikipedia to read background information and trivia about it, you want to talk about it, and generally feel like the game is flowing through your veins. Or perhaps that’s just me.
Anyway, I was surprised to just see an item pop into my feed reader concerning the discovery of a set of beta levels in Wind Waker that were hidden by the developers but left on the disk for people to eventually find. You can imagine what went through my head at this point: What kind of levels? Proper levels? Have they got enemies? Unused enemies? Story elements that weren’t revealed in the normal game? Would we finally get to revisit more of Hyrule’s lands rather than just the restricted part that the developers cruelly made sure we stuck to? (You know that hurt.) The possibilities are endless.
Sadly the levels aren’t quite what I was expecting. Although some of them do indeed contain enemies and they’ve certainly got all the functional elements of a real level such as puzzles and combat, the majority of them are filled with chequered placeholder textures and don’t really resemble much at all. Still, they’re levels, and they’re hidden — that alone makes them very cool. There’s also a particularly interesting room full of NPCs stood around doing nothing, poorly screengrabbed above.
If you have access to a GameCube Action Replay then you can head over to the page of codes to navigate the dozen or so levels for yourself. If not, videos of them all are available on YouTube here and here.
Hee beta levels are weird things. Well, they’re not, but my reaction to them is. I get all excited, but then I play it and… meh. The only truly great one is in Ecco 2, because it’s got so much stuff that wasn’t in the game.
I actually remember when Mario 64 was new and my friend spent his life savings buying an N64. We’d play Mario every single day after school, congratulating each other on our skill after winning a difficult star. And I remember wishing that we could discover some ‘Mario 64 2′ that had accidentally been left on the cart :~