How's this for a slice of fried gold? Resident Evil 1.5 has been released. Back before Resident Evil 2 became Resident Evil 2, there existed a version of the game that was largely completely but ultimately scrapped.
That scrapped version was obtained by a "team of hackers" that were working to put the finishing touches on it and release it to the public. Though still incomplete (thanks to someone else obtaining the work the primary group had finished and threatening to sell it) what is there is largely playable.
With that said, feel free to experience the Resident Evil 2 that never was. You can download Resident Evil 1.5 here and read the team's full announcement of the situation.
If you would like a look at some Resident Evil 1.5 footage taken from back in 2006, simply check out the user video below. Progress on the project looks like it will continue in spite of this forced early release. So, if you want to wait until it's more feature complete, nobody will think less of you.
That scrapped version was obtained by a "team of hackers" that were working to put the finishing touches on it and release it to the public. Though still incomplete (thanks to someone else obtaining the work the primary group had finished and threatening to sell it) what is there is largely playable.
This here is an ISO of our work in progress build of the Resident Evil 1.5 restoration project. It is not representative of the current state of development of the non-profit restoration fan-project. For updates on that, please see the bottom of the file for suggested locations to monitor things or visit the YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/MrBZork
The build you now have downloaded is a bit of an unstable mess. The instability mainly comes from a tiny experiment we were running on this very build and the build itself had the joke name "Magic Zombie Door". It's an old build and in no way representative of the current state of missing room implementation, restoration of broken elements, or addition of new content.
Many of the features you see in the build, as explained in our making of videos, comes from injecting pieces of C code that adds features and functionality that was broken, missing, or otherwise needed. There's a terrible bug we internally called "Air Jesus" present in this build, a legacy issue from the vanilla build, where inspecting objects will often cause ... undesirable results. This bug has since been fixed, but is currently present in this build. While, technically, the load feature works, the save feature's brokenness makes it pretty useless. These are also features that're fixed and will be working in the final release. There are also many stability issues that causes the game to crash or otherwise misbehave, most of these have since been fixed too. So unless there's a very Konami Code-esque approach to how you trigger a randomized and reproducable bug, please don't lose your breath attempting to report bugs to us.
The build you now have downloaded is a bit of an unstable mess. The instability mainly comes from a tiny experiment we were running on this very build and the build itself had the joke name "Magic Zombie Door". It's an old build and in no way representative of the current state of missing room implementation, restoration of broken elements, or addition of new content.
Many of the features you see in the build, as explained in our making of videos, comes from injecting pieces of C code that adds features and functionality that was broken, missing, or otherwise needed. There's a terrible bug we internally called "Air Jesus" present in this build, a legacy issue from the vanilla build, where inspecting objects will often cause ... undesirable results. This bug has since been fixed, but is currently present in this build. While, technically, the load feature works, the save feature's brokenness makes it pretty useless. These are also features that're fixed and will be working in the final release. There are also many stability issues that causes the game to crash or otherwise misbehave, most of these have since been fixed too. So unless there's a very Konami Code-esque approach to how you trigger a randomized and reproducable bug, please don't lose your breath attempting to report bugs to us.
With that said, feel free to experience the Resident Evil 2 that never was. You can download Resident Evil 1.5 here and read the team's full announcement of the situation.
If you would like a look at some Resident Evil 1.5 footage taken from back in 2006, simply check out the user video below. Progress on the project looks like it will continue in spite of this forced early release. So, if you want to wait until it's more feature complete, nobody will think less of you.