Beta Anubis Tower - Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy
9"Wow, two uploads in one day? Are you sure this isn't just a video left unlisted for nearly a year because you're lazy?" :)
Anyway, here we take a look at the very early versions of Heliopolis (briefly), Great Wall Entrance I/Wall Section I, the cut Dark Area 1 and Anubis Tower.
Off the bat, Heliopolis as a map was connected as a whole and not separated by loading zones or other things. One could traverse from Khonsu's boat to the other side of the map without much in your way. We'll take a better look at this old version of Heliopolis when I get around to it, but you can see this version in the game's trailer and behind the scenes FMV bundled with the game (honestly those FMVs are so full of cut content, you can make a drinking game out of it).
Anyway, the Great Wall is functionally mirrored to the final, with Anubis Tower being located where GWEIII (and connection to Uruk) is located. While in the final, Anubis Tower and Wall Section I are consolidated into one collective map; it is separated by a small, Urukite style Dark Area. This was entirely removed from the game, along with Anubis Tower's exterior, leading to some oddities with dialogue. The texture sets are from the earlier design motif which goes for a grittier, more realistic theme which totally contrasts the bright, saturated styling of the final texture sets. Going through Wall Section I is nearly identical as the final, albeit that conventional gameplay elements (glyph keys, burnable boxes, etc.) don't exist yet, and as such have rudimentary features standing in. Breakable barrels were cut, along with their explosive counterparts. These contain Blue Diamonds here, and are used to actuate the elevator that takes you to the upper floor. There's no floor puzzle nor blowpipe targets, though the room where you acquire the blowpipe exists but is devoid of anything. The monkeybar/flamethrower chamber was slightly reworked, while the stairwell chamber was a mere room.
After all the levers are flipped, you can traverse the bridge and head into the cut Dark Area 1. This area has two secret areas, and some barrels that contain a large amount of scarabs and Ankh pieces. Ka Ankhs were simply obelisks and are active. The first secret area requires slamming on a switch, but I couldn't get it to work. It'll drop you into a chamber that contains three barrels, with two of them containing scarabs. The second secret area requires a Slim Burble to break the rock which hides a barrel, but the map disallows releasing monsters (which might be a mistake on my part). One of the dev walkthrough documents mentions an Ankh Piece can be found in this barrel, but currently it contains around four red scarabs instead. A working slam button reveals a magic bridge on a ridge which takes you to Anubis' Tower. The entrance snakes to a chamber that is parallel to the geometry of the final version of the Tower, but design and layout is much different. Gone is the curiously placed lava pit in favour of an island with shallow water and scaffolding (See note below). Anubis is stuck in his talking animation and softlocks when interactive with while using the normal SphinxText.xls spreadsheet, and I wasn't able to get him to play ball unless I were to start messing with the script/tweaking text files and that's not something I really wanna do.
His initial fetch quest tells you to catch three Skeletal Armadillos, and the game does spawn "Skeletal" Armadillos, he accepts Fire Armadillos just fine as that's what spawns outside. For some reason, the triggers for spawning the regular Armadillos spawns Fire versions instead. I can't tell if this is a bug or intended behaviour of the retail game. Regular versions do exist, as they have models and even appear in GWEIII in a preview copy of the PS2 version. This is just idle speculation, and I haven't actually checked, but perhaps when this redundant version was axed, they just overwrote the normal 'dillo's attacks with the Fire version as a quick fix to replace the normal ones.
Since I forgot to show his text for when you use all 20 beetles, here it is:
HT_Hel_DarkArea1_Anubis_LizardMission_NoBeetles
What? You have used 20 Capture Beetles and still haven't managed to capture 3 Skeletal Armadillos? Here take some more but don't waste them this time, my generosity has limits.
A note on this lava-less Anubis Tower; text files from later on in development mention Anubis challenging Sphinx to walk forward over a gap, rather than lava:
HT_Hel_DarkArea1_Anubis_Presentation1b
Are you scared of heights? Come in Sphinx... come closer to me... don't be intimidate [sic] by this gap
It's unknown why this was later reworked into a lava pit, or why "Set's Ethereal Canals" would run through Anubis' tower at all. Whoops.
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