Beta + Cancelled Others Video Games - Page 118 of 173

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is a RTS developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released on July 2010 for PC and MAC. As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was announced on May 2007 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea, but the development began in 2003, shortly after Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was released. According to Rob Pardo and Chris Sigaty, development for StarCraft II was put on hold for a year in 2005 due to the assistance needed for World of Warcraft. On February 2010, StarCraft 2 began closed beta testing, that was expected to last for 3–5 months.

Thanks to the beta, players were able to experience various changes during the development of the game, as posted by ABetaname and Zero7 in our U64 Forum.

Stuff from earlier builds such as cut units were found as leftovers in the beta.

soul hunters aren’t in now
phase cannons aren’t in now
tempests were changed back to carriers
no twilight archons, I believe anyway, I think they’re still normal archons though there is a twilight academy so maybe it’s an evolution/transformation

There has been a lot of other changes over the years that we can find from the Alpha version of the game. Such as the Thor.

“The Thor also originally required an SCV to construct, as opposed to being internally built from a structure. The idea behind this is the Thor was too large to be created from a Factory.” It also had a different (obviously place holder) voice actor. Basically over the years the Thor kept getting smaller and smaller.

It seems that Blizzard planned on having the Corsair from Starcraft Broodwar in StarCraft 2. However only the voice clips exist of him, hidden in the game’s code.

Various beta voice clips of some units were on the old StarCraft 2 website can be listened below, thanks to Starcraft2units‘ Youtube Channel.

More videos that explain some interesting beta changes can be found in PsyStarcraft‘s Youtube Channel:

Leaked, M2 / 3DO, Others

IMSA Racing [M2 – Cancelled]

monokoma

07-09-2010

3 Comments

IMSA World Championship is a cancelled racing game that was in development by Studio 3DO for the unreleased 3DO / Panasonic / Matsushita M2 console. When 3DO sold their M2 hardware to Panasonic, IMSA was slowly postponed and then canned. The game had a great graphic engine for its time and it was one of the best “tech demos” to show the power of the M2. This project could have been lost forever, but on July 26th 2010 NikeX has released a playable beta version of IMSA Racing in the 3DO Zero Forums.

In the 3DOZ Forum we can also read more info about the game from one of its developers:

A while later, I started working on IMSA World Championship racing, which was 3DO’s main internally developed M2 game. The director of the game was Ed Rotberg, an industry veteran who was responsible for such classic arcade games as Battlezone and Star Wars Arcade. The lead programmer was Chuck Sommerville, who wrote the original Snakebyte (you know, that game where you drive a snake around and try not to crash into your own tail) as well as the cult favorite Chip’s Challenge. […]
The physics and driving engine for IMSA were licensed from the company that made the arcade game Hard Drivin’. The graphics engine was something called “Mercury” that an external developer had written and then sold back to 3DO, at which point it became our official graphics engine which we encouraged other developers to use. […]

Also, NikeX wrote a review of the IMSA beta, that you can read in here.

It’s 1996, IMSA game is shown to the people. No pixels, but texture correction. Something you don’t see on Playstation 1 or Sega Saturn. And, in this quality, not on N64. In fact, you’ve never seen so solid, vivid-plastic car models, when the camera comes close: The tires are round and they turn in the correct direction. Constant 30 frames per second, even with 10 cars on the track. My jaw tumbled when I saw the realtime presentation of the cars, tires, gears or rear spoilers. Great illuminating effects, readable words on car and parts. Even in the race itself. In 1996, 97 you would have thought: Am I watching a FMV?

Huge props to NikeX for sharing this lost game with the community! Thanks to Celine for the magazine scans!

Images:

Videos:

Others, PC / MAC

Star Trek Elite Force 2 [PC – Beta]

monokoma

06-09-2010

No Comments

Star Trek: Elite Force 2 is a FPS developed by Ritual Entertainment and published in 2003 by Activision for PC. As we can read in wikipedia, towards the end of March 2002, rumors were reported that a sequel to Elite Force was in development. The game was the last Star Trek title to be developed under Activision’s supervision, following a dispute with Star Trek licensing holder Viacom.

In the gallery below you can see the first screenshots released for Star Trek: Elite Force 2, with an early engine and incomplete graphic (as a place holder HUD). Check the video below to compare it with the beta screens: if you notice more differences, please let us know!

Thanks to discworld for the contribution!

Images:

Video (from the final version):

Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Terminus [Saturn, Playstation, PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

31-07-2010

6 Comments

Terminus is a cancelled action adventure / shooter game that was in development by Scavenger Inc for the Sega Saturn, Playstation and PC in 1996. As they wrote in their press release, the project was meant “to give Tomb Raider a run for it’s money” but sadly it was already too late, as the company ran out of money and Terminus had to be canned.

The few screenshots preserved in the gallery below show a great graphic engine for its time, that used NURBS / voxel-like system, as we can read in an article from Gamasutra (wrote by a former Scavenger developer):

[…] Soon thereafter we were asked to develop our own game. That provided me with the incentive to figure out how to represent characters in a game better. We knew we wanted at least ten or more characters on the screen simultaneously, but all the low-resolution polygonal characters we had seen just didn’t cut it. So I decided to keep pursuing a solution based on what I had been working on for X-Men (32X), hoping that I’d come up with something that would eventually yield better results.
At first I flirted with a voxel-like solution, and developed a character system which was shown at E3 in 1996 in a game called Terminus. This system allowed a player to see characters from any angle rotating around one axis, which solved a basic problem inherent to sprite-based systems. Still, you couldn’t see the character from any angle, and while everybody liked the look of the “sprite from any angle” solution, many people wanted to get a closer look at the characters’ faces. This caused the whole voxel idea to fall apart.

In 1997 / 1998, Scavenger went bankrupt and all their unfinished projects vanished with them. The team behind Terminus (internally known as Team Fetus) was then hired at Shiny Entertainment and their game was resurrected somehow, evolving into Messiah.

Thanks a lot to Mike Damien for its help in preserving some info and concept arts from this lost project!

Thanks to Celine for the contributions! Scans from GameFan 4-2 and EDGE 34

Images:

Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Hell’s Deep [PS2 PC – Cancelled]

monokoma

30-07-2010

No Comments

Hell’s Deep is a cancelled action adventure that was in development in 2002 by Qube Software for the Playstation 2 and PC. The project was meant to be an ambitious sandbox game, similar to GTA3, but set in a big medieval city, during a dark and menacing time. As the main focus of Qube has always been the development of 3D software for 3D middleware and not games, they probably found some problems during the development and Hell’s Deep was soon cancelled. Only few artworks and some 3D models are archived in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.

Thanks to Sewia for the contribution!

Images: