Underground is a cancelled action / open world game that was in development by Volition for the Playstation 2 / Xbox. The game was set in england and players would have took control of a thief, free to explore the city and to decide what and how to steal. Undergound was in development for about a year, but after the release of GTA 3, Volition though that their project’s quality was not up to the expectation that gamers had from an open world game and decided to stop working on it.
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The awesome people at Rare Ware Central have shared a Banjo Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge Debug and a Diddy Kong Pilot (that was later released as Banjo Pilot). You can download these 2 unseen games at Rare Ware Central beta page! It’s always nice to see Rare beta games publicly preserved, as they are one of the teams with the most interesting beta / cancelled games.
Mega Man Battle Network 5, known as Battle Network Rockman EXE 5 in Japan, is a Strategy RPG developed by Capcom Production Studio 2 for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. MBN5 for the DS features a 3D Megaman on the bottom screen. For most of the game, it sits there idly. However, by manipulating a command in the game, MegaRockReborn found all animations for all models. This reveals several unused animations which suggest perhaps the game were more animate or would have been fully rendered in 3D.
Here are GIFs of the unused animations.
Using the same trick in MBN5, the unused character models found in Megaman Star Force can replace the models i this game to actually show up. Evidently the model format is the same one Megaman Battle Network 5 DS can read. Animations are different but the first frame can still be seen and here are the character models in their natural state. The emulator isn’t perfect but the models are lacking completeness in contrast to the actual models used in the game.
Check MegaRockReborn’s blog for more info!
Dragonflight: Chronicles of Pern is an action adventure based on the Dragonriders of Pern book series by Anne McCaffrey, that was in development in 1998 / 1999 by Grolier Interactive for PC and Playstation. Initially the game was going to have a style similar to Diablo, but after a couple of years of development, Dragonflight became an action game with a 3rd person view camera. In june 2000, Grolier Interactive stopped releasing videogames when they were bought by Scholastic.
Grolier Interactive’s game could have been doomed, but it seems that Ubisoft bought their assets, cancelled the Playstation version and moved the Dragonflight to Dreamcast and PC. In 2001, they finally released this project as Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern.
An old interview with Grolier Interactive can still be read at RPG Vault:
Can you provide some details on development progress that has been made over this time?
Oliver Sykes: What people may remember from the previous incarnation of the game is a very isometric viewpoint, a bit like Diablo. One of the major changes in the game is the camera system. We can now script the camera to act very cinematically. It can track with the player, spin round him, drop from above to below. Any number of camera shots can linked to describe a location and the characters in it as well as adding a great deal of fluidity.
Could you explain the level of depth and interaction we can expect from NPCs? What kind of a conversation system is there?
Oliver Sykes: The conversation system is fairly linear in most places. This choice was employed as we have such a vast number of characters to converse with, the conversation choices would have gave our scripters headaches. However, at key moments during the game you can make choices and these choices will effect the outcome of events. One choice could give you bonuses and unlock new locations and characters, whereas another may lead you down an entirely different path with different consequences.
Thanks to Celine for the scans!
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Written by Jonathan Smith (known programmer for his Spectrum works) when he was first hired at Rage Software, the game was a shoot ’em up scheduled for Super Nintendo around 1993. Sadly Cluster Buster never found a publisher. Here is what Joffa Smith recalled about the project in an interview with World of Spectrum:
With new offices in Bootle, I started work on an original game called Cluster Buster on the SNES. This was an eight-way scrolling defender style shoot’em up, with huge exploding planets and moons. Unfortunately no-one was interested in publishing it (Sonic the Hedgehog was all the rage) so it was abandoned.
Scan from Nintendo Magazine System issue 10.
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