PSO --»BETA«-- Wanna Have it?

You also gotta wonder what Sega was thinking in some of these photos;
http://www.phantasy-star.net/pso/psoscreens-1.html

The second page, by the way, is nothing terribly special. Just some people in the Forest and Caves (although something about the Caves' textures seem a bit off to me). The people in the Forest are fighting a Hildebear in what appears to be the second room based on the way they are positioned, so there are some fairly obvious reasons Sega removed that.

Anyways, here are the pics from the first page for those who don't want to bother going there anyways.


Seems a lot more detailed off in the distance. Maybe the Dreamcast couldn't hande it? XD But, if you look closely, you can see some of the billboards. The one near to the top right corner in a bright magenta color looks to read something like, "Collapse Harvest"? Anyone want to elaborate? The other two, a little left off of the middle, read D/F and A.B.C. Now, A.B.C. was likely Sega's laziness (>_>), but wonder what D/F stands for? Maybe Dark Falz invaded Pioneer 2 before we knew it? Anyways, I really like this Pioneer 2, seems a lot more like a city because of all of the buildings (and another platform and road underneath if you look close enough!), instead of our middle-of-nowhere esque Pioneer 2 now. Now we're just kinda floating in the middle of nowhere with the occasional space craft flying around. This just seemed more...vivacious, you know? That was what I liked about Cylez City from PSU, too. It actually felt like a city.

You get a better shot of that bright pink banner. Quality is so low you can't really read it though. You can also see the D/F banner. Nothing special, but it looks like Sega wanted the bubbles to look more cartoony. That obviously didn't work out because four of those could easily take up a large portion of the screen (heck, four of them already take up a big space on the screen now). What interests me is that building just starting on the left. It looks like you can access it, but what was it for?

Looks more like a war camp than a Forest. Look at all the spikes and flags! XD That, however, is a recognizable area of the current Forest, unlike the next one, which I'll touch on later. Looks like Sega was happy with Forest one and removed some of the decor. Makes you curious to what it was about, though. Maybe it was a camp left by Rico, or anyone for that matter? The story would have to be a bit different, but I think that would actually be kinda neat. Automatically leave a monomate there or something.

This is interesting. It doesn't appear to be am area from the current Forest, due to the very long road. Now, this is probably grasping, but the name of this is file is forest2, while the first one is forest1. Now, we know that area is from Forest 1, but what about this one? Was this the old Forest 2? Also, look at the path. It's dirt (with more spikes). Looks again like someone had been there before. Perhaps the "camp" theory isn't so far off...?

Meh. That's my take. Now I've gotta wait for Ives to randomly jump in and competely disprove all of my assumptions.

There's no way to "disprove" any assumptions; betas are betas. Since we don't have them, who knows what they were like or why Sega changed them. I would definitely agree that Pioneer 2 was toned down to reduce slowdown. Sega reduced the draw distance in Ver.2 because Ver.1 had too much and it caused problems. You can see the blood stains from anywhere in the room in Ver.1, for instance. The main problem with those old speech bubbles is they have no name caption on them, so you must rely totally on colour coding to know who's saying what.

(first post >.<)
just WHO is selling this? I will pay 250/300 dollars for this in a heartbeat.
no joke.
and I would DEFINATELY not share it with anyone. *wink wink*

furrypaws wrote:

What interests me is that building just starting on the left. It looks like you can access it, but what was it for?

Given where the people are sitting, I'd say that it's probably the teleporter to the Principal. Nice coloration. The reason we wouldn't be able to see those bilboards in the current Pioneer 2 is because there's a large set of signs with arrows on them in that same area (well, at least version 3+). If the PC torrent finishes downloading soon, I'll post a screenshot of where I think it is.