[ Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds ]
 
April Fools Retrospective and Missing Content Restored

For April 1st this year, Divine Shadow was kind enough to let me post not one, but two of his epic April Fools jokes from the early 21st century.

Some of you may remember the first - Doll Reaver - Legacy of Turelzevir. This was a fairly involved production on the part of Divine Shadow that had its own website at the time (although it is no longer available at its original address). This presentation includes not only all of the original content, but some special bonuses such as the full-resolution trailer videos.

The second is a bit of a "lost world" all its own - Anacrothe's Adventures was an even more ambitious project from the early 21st century which would have resulted in a fully-playable fan game. As it is, Divine Shadow graciously provided the fourth (and final) playable beta to give everyone an idea of what direction it would have taken. Most of the regular visitors to Nosgothic Realm were in on the secret at the time, but I had no idea until a few months ago.

I've finally reposted Andrew Fradley's excellent article Creating The Defiance PC Trainer, which describes some of his hacking work to create that piece of software. That article was one of a handful that got lost in the shuffle when I rebuilt the site in 2007, and I apologize for taking so long to get it back online.

Along those same lines, I've added back the pages about two demo versions of Soul Reaver that were also misplaced during the redesign: The Quest for Melchiah and The Fire Glyph Demos.

Finally, I've posted the 1.02 patch for the English version of Soul Reaver 2 (see Soul Reaver 2 PC Patch version 1.02). I've gotten numerous emails indicating that Square Enix no longer makes it available, and it fixes numerous common issues with that game.

 
A Deleted Pirate Ship in Blood Omen

Some of you may have read Rusminin's post at the Eidos forums or Divine Shadow's post at the NeoGAF forums about a surprising discovery - an area deleted from Blood Omen which can still be reached by using a walk-through-walls cheat. I've created an article about this ship - the HMCS Bitter - with quite a few screenshots, maps, and a saved game file that PC gamers can use to access it themselves if they don't want to use the Blood Omen Trainer for some reason.

This is not an April Fools joke. Rusminin's post was originally made back in February, but I didn't see it until Divine Shadow tipped me off. I deliberately waited until well after April 1st to post this, which also gave me time to investigate Blood Omen in depth to see if there were any remaining buried secrets. Unfortunately there do not appear to be, but the results of my investigation are available in the Map Survey article. There is also a new build of Soul Spiral available which recognizes most of the filenames in Blood Omen (and incorporates an experimental hex editor feature that Andrew Fradley sent me several years ago). A version which correctly recognizes all filenames for that game should be forthcoming.

The Russian fans who discovered the Bitter did so while doing research for their ambitious project to recreate Blood Omen in 3D. If you haven't seen their work-in-progress Blood Omnicide) yet, it is most definitely worth a look.

 
Soul Spiral 1.4

I've added a new build of Soul Spiral that recognizes nearly all of the filenames in Blood Omen and corrects some minor bugs. Thanks to Andrey Grachev for providing me with some of the filename information.

The filename list is complete enough now that I've been able to verify that there is no map 66 in the game, so the Map Survey article has been updated accordingly.

 
Blood Omen Decompressor and Umah Concept Art

Umah Bloodomen from the Eidos forums was kind enough to negotiate the release of Daniel Cabuco's previously-undisclosed concept art for Umah in Defiance. Thank you Umah and Daniel!

The Blood Omnicide team asked me if I could help decipher the compression method used on the image tile and map files used in Blood Omen, and after a bit of reverse-engineering work I succeeded. The result is the Blood Omen Decompressor, whose main use at the moment is to convert the GRPnnnnn.CTM files into regular TIM images.

 
 
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