Microsoft

Scooty Racers [PS2 XBOX – Cancelled]

Scooty Racers is a cancelled racing game that was in development for the Xbox and Playstation 2. Rapallo (Italy) based publisher and developer Trecision announced in 2001 that it was working on this arcade racer for next generation consoles. In the game, players race agile scooters through large free-roaming environments depicted using a cel-shaded graphical style. For the project Ivan Del Duca from Milestone ( known software house specialized in racing games ) and Rick Gush from Westwood were hired by the italian company. In the later stages the game was adapted to the Popeye license and renamed Popeye: Hush Rush for the Spinach however all the efforts were wasted when Cryo, the french publisher, closed doors in 2002.

Trecision got back the full rights over the game however, the closure of Cryo hit Trecision heavily, as the shareholders decided not to sustain the company anymore. Trecision filed for voluntary liquidation in July 2003.

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Sonic Extreme [XBOX – Prototype / Pitch]

Sonic Extreme is a pitch / early proto created by Vision Scape Interactive, that was recently discovered by ProtonX (from the Assembler Forum) on a development unit for the original Xbox console. The project features Sonic skateboarding around in an area reminiscent of Heroes‘s Seaside Hill. Additionally, there appears to be a battle mode with Sonic and Shadow built in the same split-screen style as Sonic Adventure 2: Battle / Mario Kart. Probably Vision Scape Interactive tried to pitch this project to SEGA, but without luck.

Vision Scape Interactive were also working on other cancelled games:

  • Tech Dude- Extreme Sports Game
  • Tiltronica- Action Party Game
  • Speed Metal- Car Combat/RPG
  • Revelations – Adventure/RPG

Article by Mariosegafreak

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Portal 2 [Beta & Unused Content]

Portal 2 is a first-person-shooter-type-puzzle game. Developed for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC and released by Valve sometime in April 2011. Some beta information were shared thanks to interviews and by fans of the game, but sadly no screenshots are currently available.

At some point during the development, the player would have been allowed to use a type of gel that could give the ability to walk on walls. The gel was cut due to the fact it could have cause motion sickness.

Quoting the article from www.escapistmagazine.com:

Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw has revealed that Valve originally planned to include a gel that let you walk on walls in Portal 2, but dropped it after it made people queasy.

Wolpaw said that the gel had added a nice gameplay twist, but that it was incredibly disorientating. He added that nausea was a constant concern when developing first person games, so the decision was made to drop the gel. He added that Valve was so concerned about the possibility of Portal 2 making people nauseous in general – a very real threat in a game that has so many rapid changes in position and perspective – that it adjusted the frame rate and movement to try and minimize the effects. Wolpaw said that this action on Valve’s part should help even people who normally do suffer from FPS motion sickness to enjoy the game

Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi … als-Writer

Another piece of information comes from an interview with Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton about portal 2’s early story scripts.  Originally portal 2 was to be a prequel rather than a sequel and Cave Johnson was amuch more important character in the game originally. GLaDOS wasn’t in the early scripts of the game.

Quoting the article from www.escapistmagazine.com:

Portal 2 writers Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton revealed in a recent interview that the game nearly included nothing that we knew and loved from the original Portal, because none of it existed yet.

Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Pinkerton said that Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science featured in Portal 2, was once a much more important character in the game. “At one point two years ago some Cave Johnson dialogue got leaked – so I can now tell you, two years ago Cave was the bad guy in Portal 2 and GLaDOS wasn’t in the game,” he said. “It was a prequel. We liked the character enough that we snuck him into this.”

Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi … -a-Prequel

Also, as linked to us by Robert Seddon, kotaku published a story about a removed competitive multiplayer more:

“Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer,” Valve’s Erik “Old Man Murray” Wolpaw told 1UP.

“We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running — the best way to describe it is sort of Speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analogy. And it quickly became apparent that while it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path.”

As noticed by user caseyfam, wheatley has a different voice in the E3 demo. It was also noticed that wheatley says something different in comparison to the final, same context, just different wording.

From Shacknews we can read some more beta differences:

a rare look at the game’s canned competitive multiplayer mode. “While it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that,” Wolpaw explained. “It quickly just devolves into pure chaos.”

The original concept for Portal 2 featured a different main character, but the concept behind how the game would start was largely the same. Here, the player is waking up in a gorgeous environment designed to look like paradise–but it quickly falls apart in The Truman Show-fashion, revealing that the player has been trapped in a relaxation chamber for an unknown period of time.

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E3 Beta Demo:

E3: Hey, hey lady! Over here. Aw good, you’re back. I thought maybe you’d tried to escape without me. Pop a portal over there. Oh thanks. Now they told me, I’m never never ever to disengage myself from this rail or I’ll die. But, we’re out of options here, so get ready to catch me on the off chance that I’m not dead the moment I pop off these things. On 3 ready? 1,2,3…

Final: Hey, Oi oi! I’m up here! Oh brilliant. You did find a portal gun! Aw, you know what? It just goes to show: people with brain damage are the real heroes in the end aren’t they? At the end of the day. Brave. Pop a portal on that wall behind me there and I’ll meet you on the other side of the room. Okay, listen, let me lay something on you here. It’s pretty heavy. They told me NEVER NEVER EVER to disengage myself from my Management Rail, or I would die. But we’re out of options here. So get ready to catch me, alright, on the off change that I’m not dead the moment I pop off this thing. On 3 ready? 1,2,3…

Finally we have a cut character from Portal 2. The characters name is MEL (as seen to the right of this paragraph). Mel can be found in games files and she was originally meant to be used/controlled by the PC in co-op. Instead the co-op mode featured two robots (ATLAS & P-Body) and the human test subjects were cut from the co-op mode entirely. The player can only control the human test subject, Chell, in the single player campaign.

Source of the image and info: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Mel

Update: May 23, 2011:

Thanks to user Eris, it has been discovered that within the games files there is unused dialog of GLaDOS. The video below mentions garfield the comic book cat and how GLaDOS tweaked it to help make the robots more “human” (which was the co-op plot before it was changed to just finding humans). You can view the unused dialog in the video below:

The other video of GLaDOS unused dialog mainly consists of garbled messages, gibberish really. You can video the below:

Additionally, there are several functional prop items that didn’t make the final cut but remained in the code, including a set of collapsible furniture and several light-up indicators.

As pointed out by: bari, In one of the video, as posted on VALVe’S youtube channel, there were going to be a diversity vent. The vent would suck objects up into tubes. The diversity tubes were cut from the game. You can watch the diversity vent in action in the video below:

In addition, unused dialogue for Caroline can be found in the game’s files. Some of the lines were removed; Ellen McLain cried while recording them, and J.K. Simmons refused to record his lines because it “seemed too much like rape to him.” You can view the video below:

Thanks to Eris & bari for their additions to this article.

 

The Big Comfy Couch [XBOX – Cancelled]

Today’s article will be very short, as it is about an unreleased game for the Xbox that, for whatever reason, doesn’t appear to have been documented at all. Considering its subject, this isn’t entirely surprising. Maybe the developers decided it was better that no traces of this game were ever made public!

The game is called The Big Comfy Couch, and was based on the Canadian childrens’ TV show of the same name. The show, featuring Loonette the Clown and her doll, Molly, is all about teaching ethical, and educational, lessons. The two characters solve a different everyday issue in each episode, on their Big Comfy Couch.

Although almost no information can be found on this game (even other main games journalism sites don’t have it listed), we can assume that it would have followed a similar plot to the TV show, tasking children with the solving of various dilemmas. Here at Unseen 64, we have been lucky enough to have three pre-release screenshots of the game shared with us by one of the developers of the game, and these provide some insight into the game’s interface and style. They show that it was a 3D platformer game, with a vibrant game environment and a few different meters visible to the player. One of these was, presumably, health, as one of the screenshots shows a fight between Loonette and several over-sized dustbunnies (perhaps trying to intimidate the key demographic into cleaning up after themselves?).

The picture of the original title screen shows that multiple systems could be linked up, perhaps allowing co-operative or competitive multiplayer modes. With goals like “Pop all the balloons and pinatas!” (visible in one of the screenshots), one can imagine what a blast that could have been.

It is unknown how close this game was to completion, although “not very” is the assumption, due to the lack of information on the game.

Check The Lost Media Wiki’s research topic for more details!

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Kinect Trainer [Xbox 360 – Cancelled]

In 2009, British software studio Rare Ltd. started to work on fitness software for Microsoft’s Kinect accessory in co-operation with Nike. The title was allegedly cancelled in mid-2010 because of various fitness titles from third party publishers for the very same platform. As with every game from Rare Ltd, the software had different design directions throughout its development, including a style with rather realistic characters and Avatar-styled ‘protagonists’.

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