Around 5 years ago I stumbled into this guy selling an N64 prototype on ebay and I guess I won that ebay auction by looking at the old mails. Anyway he mailed me back saying he had more prototypes if I was interested and ummm yeah sure I was interested, or FUCK YEAH i was interested :-)

He told me that they all had come from Acclaim which recently had gone bankrupt. One of the prototypes he mentioned was one that said "Star Soldier PAL" on the front, but we all know that Acclaim had nothing to do with that game and that it wasn't released in Europe, right? yeah so I asked him a little about the cart, but didn't really know how it ended up among some Acclaim junk.

It could be that Acclaim maybe at some point was interested in publishing the game in Europe? though one would think that Electrobrain might've wanted to do that considering they handled the American release. I of course wanted that prototype badly, even though the game was released both in Japan and America, there was still something cool about owning an unreleased PAL version. The price was £60.

I bought a few other protos for as little as £45 which is just crazy low compared to prototype prices today, but back then the N64 was uncool to collect for some very strange reason.

The box also included a prototype of Spiderman, which was released by Activision, I didn't pick that one up though.... sadly :-)

So I've had this prototype sitting in a box for years and I believe the time has come to make a small comparison to the US version even though the PAL one seems 100% complete, except it's missing an Acclaim splash screen, had they decided to release it.

FINAL	PROTOTYPE

The really cool thing about the PAL prototype is that it's running in full screen and doesn't just have those stupid black borders like most other games. I did a small speed comparison to the final NTSC version and the PAL version still is slower though.

Well one would think that they just edited the existing US/Japanese version to run on PAL, since they're essemtially the same, they're both in english. The only difference is that the US version contains the Electrobrain splash intro screen. The Electrobrain screen is also present in the European version but what's strange is that the text on the titlescreen was changed, "2 minutes mode" became "short trial mode" and so on.

This however has been the only noticeable difference I've found.

Well except for the fact that the US and Euro versions doesn't load the demo mode in the same order. In the video above you can see what I mean, the demo starts off at different stages. I've even tried rebooting several times but they seem to always start off at the shown ones.

That's all you're getting folks, I don't think there's much more to this prototype other than being an unreleased PAL version with a little bit of mystery attached to it.... what was it doing at Acclaim?!