Hey guys! People liked the Castlevania 4 beta footage I found interesting, so I thought I'd share some other stuff I found I thought was cool. I'm not sure if this has been shown before, but it may have? Either way it's cool!
 
So I was digging around in my extra manuals and stuff, and found this poster:


It appears to hold some nice pictures of an early Ninja Gaiden 2 beta in action!
 
Many differences in stage 4-2!

Things to notice:
-Waterfall skulls are different.
-Background is somewhat different.
-Platforms are different, and are also different sizes.
-Power ups are missing in the prototype.
-Different enemy placement.
-Unknown enemy in the bottom right corner?
-Extra digit in the prototype's score. Final has 6 digits, prototype has 7 digits. (LocalH)
-Extra space on the left and right sides around the current power up icon. (LocalH)
-Timer is MUCH shorter. Could this possibly be because the levels themselves were shorter?
-Hasn't taken damage. Notice where he's standing. How did he get to that platform without getting hit? Invincibility?
  
 
 
 
 
 
More differences in stage 5-2:

Things to notice:
-Small rocks in the water in the background are different and in different places.
-Mountains in the background are different, and are different colors. Not 100% on the colors since the cameras used could have messed with it, although the color of the proto mountains matches the lifebar colors. This isn't true in the final, so I assume the mountains are actually a different color also.
-Enemy placement is different and has different enemies.
-Beta enemy on the bottom left wall! This was probably an early version of the little red wall blobs. Looks much harder since it shoots 3 ways!
-Again the power ups are missing.
-Extra digit in the prototype's score. Final has 6 digits, prototype has 7 digits. (LocalH)
-Extra space on the left and right sides around the current power up icon. (LocalH)
-Timer is much shorter again.
-Hasn't taken damage. Again how did he get where he is without taking damage!? Invincibility??? 

 
 
 
Here's the rest of the poster ad:






Hope you guys find this as cool as I did! Also I know Shane will love this!

Very cool.

Very cool indeed! There's a Tecmo poster with a screenshot of Ninja Gaiden only they didn't title the game Ninja Gaiden, I believe it was simply Ninja or something.

Very cool. I love this kind of stuff. Thanks.

Nice!

Awesome! Thanks for the share. I love Ninja Gaiden!

Id love to play that proto. Looks like there would be several noticable differences.

hrm - i'll have to give my ninja gaiden 2 proto a play and see if it is like this.

Cool, can't wait to hear!

That'd be awesome if it did but yours is the "Sample ##" prototype with the date January 18, 1990 at the bottom. There's a dumped ROM of one of the "Sample ##" carts and I don't recall those differences.

I could be wrong though which would be pretty cool.  

Something tells me this early of a prototype of this game might come in a Famicom cart. (Assuming the data would even exist anymore.)

Yeah that's my assumption as well. The really big differences will almost certainly be during the Famicom stages since each NG was released in Japan first. I really hope Famicom protos are still out there but if not at least there are pictures.

Score is not low. Prototype version has 7 digit score counter, and extra space around the current item.

Edit: Double posted for some reason, please delete

Oh good catch on the extra space and extra digit! I didn't notice somehow!
 
Also I'm going to have more cool Ninja Gaiden prototype madness coming our way soon.

That's really rad - thanks for sharing that! =)

Thanks for sharing

Thanks for sharing that's really cool!

If this has already been posted before, then i apologize, but theres been beta footage of ninja gaiden I, floating around for a lil while now. different music in certain parts, different colors for the ninjas in the intro.It comes from Chris Covells tapes that he put up on youtube.  fast forward to 35 seconds.

Whoa, cool find! I have not seen that before!

Pretty neat, never seen that one before. Wish I could read Japanese to see if there were any text differences.

Oh Ninja Gaiden prototypes where are you?!