Nintendo

Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS Debug Cartridge

monokoma
06-07-2011
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Sometime ago a Nintendo DS debug cartridge was sold on eBay and a couple of weeks ago the rom of that cart was shared and preserved online (NINTENDO DS NTR DEBUG) thanks to NintendyFan from the GBAtemp Form. There is some interesting stuff that we can see in this DS debug cart, such as weird icons, models of Nintendo characters and music from Mario Kart 64 (?!?). We are not sure why they chose such kind of strange images and sounds to test the Nintendo DS hardware, but it could be possible that hidden in the rom’s code there could be even more unusual / beta files, just like in that old SNES debug / hardware test cart. Does anyone want to try to find them?

In order to get to the menu, you have to hold Start + Select when launching the ROM.

Here’s the description from the eBay auction:

Up for grabs is a Debug Mode / Dev cartridge for the Original Nintendo DS and DS Lite Models of handhelds. I have never seen anything quite like this before on the market. We received a few of these, totally smashed and broken up, however we were able to recover this cart and get it to load up. It was tested on each model of DSi including the 3DS, but would error out. This is because the cart is specific to testing on the original DS software on the older handhelds. This is an official Nintendo cart that was apparently supposed to be decommissioned before being tossed out, but whoever attempted to break this one didn’t do a thorough enough job.

As you can see from the photos and video, the date on the program is August 18th, 2004; which is 3 months before the handheld was released anywhere in the world! The Product ID on the back of the cart reads: NTR-005

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Nintendo, Wii

The Calling [Wii – Beta]

yota
19-06-2011
1 Comment

The Calling is a survival horror developed by Hudson Entertainment that was released for Wii in 2009. In the screens and the videos below, we can see how different were the HUDs, the cellphone and the first two locations of the game in the beta. Interestingly, the early builds depicted in these videos were probably created for internal testing and never meant to be shown to the public: they were leaked before the official presentation.

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Nintendo, Wii

Knight Wars [Wii – Cancelled]

monokoma
14-06-2011
1 Comment

Knight Wars is a cancelled real time strategy / action game for the Wii, that was in development in 2006/2007 by Kuju London (nowadays known as Headstrong Games). Except for being planned as a medieval version of the Battalion Wars games, there is not much known about the project, only that it was cancelled in 2007 when Nintendo decided to shift their resources to mass market-accessible titles such as Wii Fit or even the cancelled Wii Crush. As we can read in an old Gamespot article:

Our spies at Kuju’s HQ also tell us that another game based around the WARS series is also in development for the Wii called Knight Wars. Based in middle-aged England, players control tens of thousands of troops including units such as horses, magicians and Knights! ‘Its like Battalion Wars but with some great sword-swinging Wii action and riding around doing tasks for King Arthur!’ we were told!’

As you can read on the wayback machine there were 2 also unnamed Juku projects, one published by Ubisoft Entertainment S.A., and the other by Vivendi Universal Games.

Thanks to Rukku for the contribution!

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Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo

GP Advance [GBA – Cancelled]

Celine
10-06-2011
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GP Advance was a Formula 1 game built by Prograph Research around their 3d engine called DR Advance in 2003. As you can see from the video the italian developer coded an impressive engine capable of features more inline with a PS1 than a GBA (Over 2.296 texture mapped polygons on screen at 20fps , more than 45.920 polygons per second, with 100% screen coverage). Sadly the promising DR Advance was never fully utilized in a commercial product.

Here what Massimiliano Calamai, Prograph Research developer at the time,  recalls about the project:

GP Advance was born thanks to an idea developed by staff through an engine coded by Stefano Dragovina, exceptional low-level programmer.
The really interesting aspect of the game and in particular technology was really the power of Engine, in practice Stefano had coded at very low level only the processor as if it really does not care to be part of a Game Boy Advance … so much that while we were running our engine, we could stick on what we wanted in 2D!
The game was in very good progress, the video we proposed is actually taken out of gameplay in real time (in the office we had fun beating the record between us on the Sepang circuit).

Our idea was to generate interest in the engine and in case propose a formula-like without a license.

Unfortunately, though the interest was high, the profit margin offered was too low, as the GBA market become saturated very quickly and third-party products usually sold very few copies. So much so that EA, very interested in the project was reducing the number of their productions releasing titles ever more small and low quality.
Once the demo program was complete, after several months of negotiations with potential publishers, we had to give up the idea of completing the project, giving priority to other products under contract. Really a pity!

Watch for yourself how good the game looked: